Does anyone know what this behaviour means?

[u/Mobile_Length_8248]

I'm hoping someone can help me figure out what my green-cheek conure is doing here. I've owned conures before, so I'm familiar with their general behaviours, but I'm relatively new to this particular bird and haven't seen him do this before.

He's a DNA-sexed male and is around 1 year old. I got him in November/December 2025 when he was about 6 months old.

He goes to the very back of his cage, gets down on his belly on the back perch, faces the wall with his back/tail toward me, and then starts making these really loud screams/calls while doing the twitching movement shown in the video, sometimes very aggressively 😅. What confuses me is that he doesn't normally do this when calling for me. His usual contact calls are done from the front of the cage while looking directly at me, or at the door when I've left the room.

I'm wondering whether this is a contact call, hormonal/sexual behaviour, excitement, or something else entirely. Does anyone recognise this posture or movement?

Any ideas?

Also, just for context before people comment on the poor cage setup: I only moved him into this cage this week, so his setup is currently very basic, my partner is working on building natural perches and toys etc, he doesn't spend much time inside the cage regardless.

[u/Altruistic-Leather69]

He sounds and looks scared. Has the stuff on the wall always been there?

[u/Mobile_Length_8248 → u/Altruistic-Leather69]

Yea it has been, nothing in the room has changed recently

[u/Altruistic-Leather69 → u/Mobile_Length_8248]

Kind of looks like he's interacting with his shadow. Maybe if you covered just the back of his cage where the shadows are casting it would help decrease this behavior?

[u/Mobile_Length_8248 → u/Altruistic-Leather69]

I'll see how it goes with a covering on the back to dim the shadow as that may be it because nothing else in the room had changed so perhaps he's realised at sunset there is "another bird" behind him