When organisms, such as songbirds, are faced with an active pathogen infection, there can be pronounced energetic tradeoffs. These tradeoffs may affect several systems within an organism, including behavioral maintenance of external structures. In songbirds, behavioral feather maintenance (preening) is critically important to their survival and fitness. Mycoplasma gallisepticum (MG) is a common pathogen of house finches, a songbird species, where it causes the disease mycoplasmal conjunctivitis. To date, no studies have examined how preening behavior changes with MG infection and how these differences in preening may affect feather quality. To test this, 32 wild-caught, captive house finches were given one of three treatments: a high (10⁴) dose of MG (n=11), a mid (10³) dose of MG (n=11), or a sham control treatment of sterile media (n=10). Behavioral videos were recorded both during pre-infection and at peak-infection to determine the proportion of time spent preening and time spent inactive. One month post-inoculation, a secondary flight feather was clipped and examined under a microscope to score the amount of feather degradation on a 1-4 scale. We found that birds infected with MG, regardless of dose, preened significantly less often and were significantly less active than sham controls. However, there were no differences in feather quality scores between control and infected individuals, which may partly be due to the controlled environment the birds experienced while in captivity. Our data suggests that infection strongly affects the behavior of house finches by decreasing their overall activity, including behaviors critical to survival such as preening.