Welcome fellow cockatiel lover!

Keeping your cockatiel clean & well-groomed is not only good for their appearance, but essential to their overall health.

Although wild cockatiels are fully independent groomers…

Pet cockatiels need our help.

Which is why this article details 7 ways you can keep your cockatiel clean and groomed.

But first, let’s discuss exactly why cockatiels need regular grooming.

Why Do Cockatiels Need Grooming?

“Why can’t my cockatiel just groom itself?”

This is a totally normal question considering that wild cockatiels groom and clean themselves without human help.

But our pet cockatiels don’t have independent access to cleaning “tools” like their wild counterparts do.

We need to provide these things to them and maintain certain parts of their body.

Without regular grooming, cockatiels will become dirty and their overall body condition will deteriorate until it begins affecting their health.

As mentioned above, grooming is essential to your cockatiel’s health.

“But how can we groom our cockatiels?”

7 Simple Ways To Keep Your Cockatiel Groomed

Here are 7 easy & effective ways to groom your cockatiel and keep them clean:

1. Bathe them regularly

2. Set a cage cleaning schedule

3. Trim their lovely nails

4. Keep their beak in good shape

5. Maintain their feather condition

6. Keep the air as clean as possible

7. Scratch those pin feathers!

Let’s cover each one of these methods in further detail…

1. Bathe Your Cockatiel Regularly 🛀

Ideally, your cockatiel should be bathing daily or every second day.

Bathing helps to remove any grime or dirt from your cockatiels feathers and also makes preening more effective. When a cockatiel is wet, it’s easier for them to preen and maintain their feathers independently.

It also helps to reduce the amount of dust on your cockatiels body, which is good for everyone!

There are 2 main ways you can bathe a cockatiel:

1. Using a spray bottle

2. Offering a shallow bowl with water

However, birds normally have a bathing preference, so you’ll need to experiment to see how your tiel’ prefers to bathe.

2. Set A Cage Cleaning Schedule

A clean cage is a clean cockatiel.

Without regular cage cleaning, your cockatiel is prone to getting sick from the germs that will inevitably build up inside the cage. Not only that, but the dust, crumbs, and general debris from the unclean cage will find themselves onto your cockatiels plumage.

Simply wiping down the cage with wet wipes is not good enough.

Bird cages need to go through a full disinfecting process to be 100% hygienic for your cockatiel.

Here’s an outline of the 7-step process I use to clean my cockatiel’s cage:

1. Remove everything from the cage (including your bird)

2. Spot-clean the cage and remove any visible solid waste

3. Create your homemade bird-safe disinfectant (Water + apple cider vinegar mix)

4. Thoroughly scrub the entire cage

5. Rinse the cage off with water

6. Let the cage dry in the direct sunlight

7. Return items back to the cage

How often you need to clean the cage depends on many factors, including:

• The size of the cage

• How many birds live in the cage

• And how often they’re in the cage

For example, I only need to clean my cockatiels cage once every two weeks because it’s a fairly spacious cage and he spends most of the day outside of it.

In other words, my cage doesn’t get dirty too quickly.

You might need to do a weekly cage clean or some can even get away with doing it once a month.

Read The Complete Guide To Safely Cleaning Your Cockatiel’s Cage

3. Trim Their Nails 💅🏻

When our cockatiel’s nails get too long, it’s up to us to trim them down.

Without regular nail trimming, your cockatiel’s nails will become overgrown and eventually cause mobility issues for them. For example, their nails could get so long that they prevent their toes from touching flat surfaces.

Long nails are also more likely to get caught in fabrics and clothing.

Once you notice that the nails are getting long, you have 2 options:

1. Take your bird to the vet for a nail trim (small fee)

2. Try cutting the nails by yourself

The 1st option is easiest and is what I recommend if you’re not too confident in doing this job yourself.

But if you’re feeling brave and believe you can cut your cockatiel’s nails carefully, you can try doing it yourself.

Be aware that this requires you to grab and hold your cockatiel while you cut their nails.

It’d be better to have a second pair of hands to help with this.

Read My Full Guide To Cutting Cockatiel Nails Before Choosing To Do It Yourself.

4. Keep Their Beak In Good Shape

Yes, there are things you can do to keep your cockatiel’s beak in good shape.

Most of us bird owners accidentally maintain their beaks as it’s as simple as providing a few high-quality shredding toys. For example, when I first adopted Arthur, I knew toys were important, but I didn’t know they were helping to keep him groomed.

Chewing on tough items is absolutely essential to your cockatiel’s beak health.

Without proper shredding outlets, the beak can become overgrown, just like their nails.

In the wild, parrots naturally file their beak by chewing on the following:

• Branches

• Tree hollows

• Tough seed husks

As pets, cockatiels maintain their beak by chewing on perches and toys.

Check Out Some Of The Highest-Quality Cockatiel Toys To Help Keep Their Beak In Shape.

5. Maintain Their Feather Condition

The quality of your cockatiel’s feathers represents how well they are groomed.

While there are exceptions here; if you see a parrot with poor feather condition, their carers likely aren’t keeping them well groomed.

And it’s very easy to accidentally negelect a cockatiel’s feather condition…

Even when trying to do the best for them.

Here are some things you can do to ensure your cockatiel’s plumage remains beautiful:

• Take them outside regularly – Sunlight is GREAT for feathers!

• Bathe them

• Scratch their pin feathers

• Provide enough calcium – Calcium builds up feathers

Your cockatiel can maintain their own feathers as long as you provide them means to develop healthy feathers and discard old feathers.

6. Keep The Air In Your Home As Clean As Possible

Cockatiels are highly sensitive to toxic fumes, odours, and scents in the atmosphere.

Not only can polluted air make them dirty, but breathing it in will make your cockatiel extremely sick. For these reasons, it’s vital to keep the air in your home as clean as possible.

Many everyday items and tools release toxic odours into the atmosphere, some of which include:

• Strong disinfectant spray

• Deodorant, hair spray, perfume, and other aerosol sprays

• Non-stick cookware fume (DEADLY)

• Smoke from cigarettes or marijuana

You should only ever use these things outside and away from your bird.

Cigarette smoke is especially good at slowly travelling through the house, even when smoked on the other side of the house.

While this is less related to grooming, it’s still vital to know these things for your cockatiel’s health.

See The Full List Of Household Dangers & Hazards For Pet Birds

7. Scratch Those Pin Feathers!

If you have more than 1 cockatiel, you don’t need to worry about the pin feathers.

A pair of cockatiels will help each other out by preening the pin feathers on their head and crest, even if they’re not mates.

Wild cockatiels will preen the pin feathers of fellow flock members.

But if you have just 1 cockatiel, it’s your job to scratch those pin feathers.

Since cockatiels can’t reach the feathers around their head and neck, they need the help of their flock members.

Developing feathers won’t be able to release themselves properly without regular preening.

Just a few gentle scratches of loose pin feathers around the head daily should suffice!

General Tips For Keeping Your Cockatiel Healthy

We just covered the 7 ways to keep your cockatiel clean and well groomed.

Before ending this article and letting you return to your bird, I want to briefly give some general tips for keeping a cockatiel healthy.

The 3 most important ways to keep a cockatiel healthy are:

1. Ensure everything they use is clean & germ-free

2. Feed a nutritionally balanced diet

3. Keep them physically active

Ensure Everything They Use Is Clean

While we already covered how important cage cleaning is, there are other things in your bird’s home that you must keep clean, such as:

• Perches

• Toys

• Food & water dishes

Cockatiels, being parrots, naturally lick and put everything in their mouths.

For this reason, everything in their home must be clean and free from germs.

Neglecting the cleanliness of perches and toys is disturbingly common, but it has some nasty consequences.

If you allow germs to build up on your bird’s items, they’ll get sick.

Feed A Nutritionally Balanced Diet

Arguably the most important part of cockatiel care is feeding a healthy diet.

In case you don’t know what you should be feeding to your cockatiel, I’ll give you an outline of my vet-approved diet plan:

• High-quality pellets (40%)

• Budgie seed mix (30%)

• A variety of vegetables (20%)

• Fresh fruit (5%)

• Treats (5%)

Those percentages are how much those foods should make up of the overall diet.

For example, vegetables should make up 20% of your cockatiel’s overall diet while fresh fruit and treats make up 5% each.

If you follow this vet-approved diet plan, your cockatiel will be well-nourished.

Read The Full Guide To Feeding A Healthy Cockatiel Diet (Includes Diet Chart)

Encouraging Plenty Of Physical Exercises

Physical exercise is absolutely essential to the health of your cockatiel.

Just like when we humans don’t exercise, cockatiels can become obese, which leads to a range of other health problems.

Flight is by far the best way for cockatiels to exercise!

This shouldn’t be too surprising considering that cockatiels are birds.

But some other less effective ways of encouraging exercise include:

• Foraging

• Shredding tough objects

• Climbing around

• Hopping

• Walking & running

As long as you encourage some form of exercise every single day, your cockatiel will remain physically fit.

Conclusion | Short Summary

Here’s a quick recap of the 7 ways to groom a cockatiel:

1. Bathe them often
2. Disinfect & clean the cage regularly
3. File their nails when needed
4. Keep their beak in good form
5. Maintain their feather condition
6. Keep the atmosphere as clean as possible
7. Scratch their pin feathers

If you do these 7 things when needed, your cockatiel will be clean and groomed, which benefits their overall health and well-being.

We also covered three tips to keeping cockatiels healthy, which were:

• Keep everything in their environment clean (perches, toys, feeding dishes, cage, etc.)

• Feed a nutritionally balanced diet

• Encourage physical exercise

Hopefully, you learnt something from this article.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your cockatiel grooming!