Her name is Nutmeg. She is a female Spice finch. Although she spends time with the other Spice finches in the Finsterium (to her left in this photo is another Spice finch), and with Oolong and Ovaltine, she also spends a bit of time alone, mostly on this white concrete perch or on the pink concrete perch. She was the first of the Spice finches to seem comfortable when I watched her. There's a patch of silver/white at the base of her beak, on the right side. She has the most feather damage of all my Spice finches, and I think most of this damage will be permanent. You see, she plucks her own back. You can see some of that in this big photo.

Feather plucking is a complex behavior among birds. Parents will pluck their older babies to get them to leave the nest. Birds will pluck their mates for nesting material. Sometimes the birds pluck each other when they fight. There are medical reasons for birds to pluck themselves (lice, disease, bad nutrition), and psychological ones. Sometimes birds start by plucking a feather for physical reasons and then it turns into a bad habit, spreading to feathers everywhere. Sometimes, you know, the birds just go crazy.

I don't think Nutmeg is crazy. I know her breeder, and figure her early life was relatively free of situations that typically cause birds to pluck obsessively. Besides, several of the birds I got this time from the breeder have feather damage — perhaps they all learned the behavior from each other. In Nutmeg's case, there was probably some odd, unexpected event that triggered the first pluck, and then she just kept going. No matter.

Nutmeg is the seed of a yellow fruit about the size of a small peach. The fruit splits in half to reveal the aril, a lacy red covering. The aril is removed and sold as mace, next comes a pit that is dried and opened up to reveal the seed, which is sold as nutmeg. This means that a pile of fruit big enough to make one hundred pounds of nutmeg produces a single pound of mace. When the Dutch controlled the Moluccas (the Spice Islands), one colonial administrator sent orders that the colonists should plant fewer nutmeg trees and more mace trees, since mace was more profitable. In response, all the colonists plucked their own feathers.