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Basic Feather Differences of Powder Vs. Oil Based Preening - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Hi, my name is Katie and I work with a golden cockatoo in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Today I am going to talk to you a little bit about the difference between oil-based and dander-based birds, and I have three of my feathered companions here to help me. This is Louise. Louise is an African grey parrot. She is about 26 years old. Louise is an example of a powder-based bird. What that means is that her dander is a very fine, light powder. Now I am going to show you what I mean when I say a light powder. I am going to hold Louise against my shirt and rub her for a minute, and I have a lot of what looks like baby powder on my black shirt. How this works is that this bird repels water. Okay! All birds will repel water, but an African gray will repel even more. They have a preening gland that is located in the back of their bodies here, and what happens is, as they go to clean themselves, they will go to their preening gland. With this type of bird, you will get powder. Now I am going to go to Dewey, and Dewey is— I am going to trust these guys together. Let's see what happens. You come up. This is Dewey and Eddie and they are both oil-based birds. Now with these birds, they all have dander, but this is an oil-based dander. They also have the preening gland. They have the preening gland at the back of the body. When they go to clean, they go to the preening gland, they activate the gland, they get preening oil inside their beak, they go and they clean their feathers, and that is how they get clean. The difference between the two birds, for you as a pet owner, one is health. If you are a person with asthma, with respiratory problems, with any issues of major allergies, you may want to stay away from an African gray, a cockatoo, a cockatiel. Those are your primary dander-based birds. Your oil-based birds do not bother people with allergies nearly as much, but you do need to still keep up on spraying them with water, spraying them with different cleaning products for birds. There are shampoos and conditioners for dander-based birds, shampoos and conditioners for oil-based birds. You want to do that a minimum of once a month, and then spray them down on a weekly basis with either water or a product called Rain that has aloe vera that helps with conditioning the skin and feathers as well. So that is your differences, and if you keep up on that, you will have nice, healthy, beautiful-colored birds.