The babysitter says Phoebe is doing great and is eager to play. It’s not the exact same playtime he gets with me, but Phoebe is apparently doing cup tossing/shredding with his new friend and he looks healthy.

I wanted to explain one aspect of Phoebe’s life that can be pretty scary. When he grows new feathers, they look like tubes of varying sizes. They’re called “blood feathers” because they are filled with blood in the part that’s still morphing into a feather.

During grooming, Phoebe will peel back the film on the tube and reveal the feathery portion as it grows in. Eventually, there will be no more tube and he’ll just have a feather. If he were a normal bird, his feathers would regrow occasionally and gradually. But because he has a feather plucking compulsion, he gets blood feathers more frequently.

The danger is that if a blood feather breaks, he could bleed out very quickly and die if it doesn’t clot quickly. Combined with his anxiety and being quick to spook, it’s a major problem if Phoebe jumps off of my shoulder or a perch — or if he even slips off. Sometimes it doesn’t even take a big fall. He could jump six inches and still break a blood feather if he hits it the wrong way on a surface.

And because Phoebe doesn’t have sufficient flight feathers to catch his fall, he drops like a rock.

While it’s never good if he falls, Phoebe has been pretty resilient. Typically, if a blood feather hits a surface, it’s extremely minor and I’ll see a speck of blood on his feather or a single drop that immediately clots. Occasionally, there will be a lot of drops and I’ll have to decide quickly whether he needs to go to the emergency room.

Early on, when he was still adjusting to his new home and there were a lot more things that startled him, I had to take him a couple of times to the emergency vet. It was very traumatizing, because I had to quickly get him into his travel cage, drive him while he was still bleeding, and hand him over to the doctor who would pull the blood feather and any shrapnel out of him. I’m sure it was painful and stressful for him.

Whenever he’s growing in new feathers, especially on his tail, I try to keep him from falling and landing on those. But I can’t keep him 100% safe, even in his own cage. I told the babysitter that the best way to handle a sudden bleed is to call a backup who can help get Phoebe out the door and to the vet’s office because it will be extremely stressful for everyone involved if there’s an active, unclotted bleed.

Keep your fingers crossed that no harm will come to those blood feathers.