Play the video below to see what Dave’s been training his birds to do for the Circus!


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Enjoy!

Chet

Blue Fronted Amazon Parrot

If you have parrots and potted plants in your house, you have probably watched in awe at the speed with which your feathered backhoe can empty the contents of the plant pot onto your carpet.  You likely have a ground foraging species like the cockatoo, cockatiel, budgie or african grey to name a few.  Digging is a natural behavior for a ground forager and if he’s found his way into your secret garden, you will  have to pretty clever in your attempts to keep him away from it.  Me, I gave away the plants.  I miss them.

I was thinking about new foraging opportunities for my birds the other day, and my former plants popped into my mind. It occurred to me that since I do have ground foragers, maybe I should give them some ground to forage in.  Why not a box of dirt?  Maybe some rocks and twigs.  Maybe some some plastic and acrylic toy parts that might be amusing to unearth.  Maybe place some flat rocks on the top for them to overturn.

There’s no law that says foraging has be about food, although that is their motivation when they forage in the wild. It’s all about an enriching activity that keeps them occupied and provoked. For a bird that loves to dig, why not digging for the fun of digging?  There are no food rewards in your houseplants, just the pleasure of kicking dirt around your living room and enjoying the look of horror on your face.

Congo African Grey Parrot

So you’re thinking: “But dirt is …dirty.  Isn’t that bad for my bird?”  This is where you have to be smart.  Before you take your shovel out to the front yard, think about the fertilizer you might be using on your lawn.  This is bad for your bird.  If you live in a city where pollutants or chemicals might have fallen onto or saturated the ground, this is also not a good source of dirt. Local parks may be treated with pesticides (not to mention that city officials would probably be opposed to you digging holes on their soccer field).

I, myself, would find a nice rural woodland to take the dirt from.  To be sure that there is no mold or fungus in the dirt you can put it into baking pans and bake it at 200 degrees for a couple of hours, rocks and all.  If you are comfortable with the quality of the dirt, don’t bother – and a few bugs in there are okay, in fact, they are a fun, yummy source of protein!  If the dirt is crawling with bugs, you’ve probably dug up a colony and should look elsewhere. Let me add quickly that I heard of a parrot that was rushed to the vet after “foraging” in a fire ant mound.  They may all have that wild wisdom, but they didn’t all graduate at the top their class.

For the container, a wooden or cardboard box would be perfect, perhaps a new kitty litter type box, if your parrot doesn’t chew through plastic.  You will want to be sure it is at least five inches deep for your larger parrots because they will be digging and tossing the dirt behind them with their feet, like a dog in the petunia garden.  From a distance of ten feet, I have been hit in the face with a wood chip that Linus, my umbrella cockatoo, launched from the couch while making a nest there one day. This could get messy, and you might want to put the box on the bottom of the cage with the seed guards in place.

If dirt makes you squeamish, how about making a box of foraging stuff, like plastic and wood toy parts, paper or muffin cups, shredder peices, balls of newspaper, popsicle sticks and  foot toys?  Something in a big, flat box that they can climb into and rummage around in.

This is a work in progress for me here.  I still have yet to collect the dirt, but I have been scouting the neighborhood for just the right rocks and stones.  I already know my cockatoos are going to have a blast playing in their box of dirt.  If you decide to give this idea a try, or have another version of ground foraging idea, I would love to see them.  You can post a comment below with a link to your picture.  I think your ideas would make a great future post!

Since we had already taught our budgie to jump through a ring, we wanted to take this a step forward and teach him to go through a toilet paper tube as well. The first difference between the ring and toilet paper tube was that toilet paper tube is more confining so the budgie was adamant of going through it at first. This was no problem however, because Duke had received all the requisite training to learn this trick and we had him go through the tube willingly by the end of the training session.

Prerequisites:

-Clicker conditioning

-Target training

-Jump through a ring training

So before training your parrot, you will want to make sure that it is proficient at the above skills. If not, you may want to go back and practice those a few times before proceeding to teach this trick. While it is not required that your bird knows how to go through a ring, it will make it easier that it knows how to go through something round as a tube is just a deeper version of a ring.

What you will need:

-Target Stick

-Clicker

-Treats

-Toilet Paper Tube

-Tape

If you are training any bird larger than a budgie, you can substitute the toilet paper tube with a wider diameter tube such as PVC. I used a 3″ piece of PVC for my Senegal Parrot because I could not find a suitably sized tube. You can also try an oatmeal can with the ends cut off or a wide roll from paper.

For your first training session you will want to tape the tube down to a surface so that your hands are free to control the bird, target, click, and reward. You may even want a second person to assist you because there are so many tasks required at first. In the video you will see that the clicker, target stick, and treat should all be placed in the same hand in order to liberate the other hand to hold the bird. If you are not used to targeting your bird in this way, you should refer to the blog post about Single Handedly Target Training Your Bird which teaches you how to do it.

Once you’ve prepared the toilet paper tube and taped it to the table, put your bird down in that area and let it familiarize itself with the tube a short while. You may get lucky and the bird just goes through it out of curiosity in which case you can click and reward. Most likely this will not be the case. Start desensitizing (aka getting your bird used to) your bird to the tube by targeting it near and to the tube. Once the bird is ok with being near the tube, you can target it to the entrance of the tube. After this point, place the bird at the entrance to the tube but insert the target stick from the other end of the tube. Stick it through the tube to come out on the end near your bird. As the bird starts walking to nip the target stick slowly start pulling it back and into the tube. Hopefully the bird will follow it all the way or part way through the tube. For this you should certainly click and reward. If the bird follows the target stick to the entrance of the tube but refuses to go in (as was the case at first with my bird), you are going to have to force it through the tube a few times for it to realize that it actually isn’t scary and that it will earn it lots of rewards.

Hold your bird in your hand at the entrance of the tube and stick its head in part way. Keep your hand behind it so that it has no chance to recede out the rear end of the tube. With your target stick (also clicker and treat) hand, show the target stick at the exit of the tube. Even without the stick, odds are the bird will just come through the tube toward freedom on the other end once it realizes there is no backing out. When it comes out the exit end, click and give lots of reward. You may have to repeat this a few times but pretty soon you will see that the bird is coming through the tube more readily. If this is the case, you can try to relax the hand you force it in with so it can choose to back out or come through the tube. If it backs out, don’t reward and try again. This will teach it that only coming through the tube earns a treat. After this stage, just place the bird at the entrance of the tube and show target stick on the other side. If the bird chooses to go around the tube for the target stick do not reward and try to place it closer to the entrance next time or block the way around the tube with your hands. If the bird is still showing improvement, you may be able to stop targeting through as it knows to come through the tube. Now in your next few training sessions you can start to place the bird farther away from the tube entrance and let it make the choice of running through the tube and not around. If it is not going through the tube, return to an earlier stage. If it is still making progress, try putting your bird at the side of the tube and let it figure out to come around the tube to the entrance side.

An extra tip for you. Don’t point the tube the same direction every training session and don’t have the bird alawys go through the tube the same direction (except the first few times as to not confuse it). If it gets too used to running right to left all the time or something like that, it may get confused if you turn the tube. So after you no longer have to stick the bird in the tube, use your free hand to hold the tube (instead of taping it) and aim the tube in different directions for every run.

Once your bird has mastered the toilet paper tube, you can try moving up to a paper towel tube instead.

Here is a video of my Senegal performing the same trick (not as exciting):

Here is how to hold target stick, clicker, and treat in one hand

Be sure to practice this grip before working with your bird. Last thing you want to do is frustrate your bird because you can’t figure out how to hold everything at the same time and click. This could confuse the bird and hurt your training efforts. It is not difficult to do but it may take a couple minutes to get used to holding things this way.

Try to hold the stick in such a way that the treat is hidden or farther out of the way. You are not using the treat to lure the bird but targeting with the stick. You should practice this a few times on a training perch or table before moving onto the next steps.

Now you should be ready to target using just one hand. This frees your second hand to hold the bird or prop. To target a new, shy, or scared bird onto your hand (that has been target trained away from hands already), place your hand on the perch so that they connect together. Hold the target stick to point over your hand in a way that it is only accessible from your hand and not the training perch. The bird should walk across the perch, onto your hand and to the stick. If it is not doing this, you are should try holding the target stick closer or go back and practice targeting some more.

For targeting an aggressive bird out of its cage, you can basically use the same technique. In the following video, you can see Kathleen targeting Kili my Senegal Parrot (who can get territorial and bite strangers approaching the cage) out of the cage without getting bit.

You can also use this technique for targeting your bird onto a stranger’s hand from your hand. Hold the target stick over the stranger’s hand and bring your hand, on which the bird is sitting, up to the stranger’s hand. The bird will be so focused on the target stick, that it will overcome the fear or aggression it has toward the stranger. One time I had a stranger (to the bird that is) over and he wanted to try to pick my Senegal Parrot off of her climbing tree. The moment he put his hand on her tree she came running right over. However, this was not to step up peacefully but to bite in retaliation for violating her territory. I told him to try again but this time I held my target stick right over his hand. This time the bird came right over and went on his hand without the slightest hint of aggression. To him, it looked as though I waved a magic wand over the bird and magically it obeyed. What I was really doing was cuing my bird to do her “target trick” which made her forget her aggressive motives.

When you hear about a parrot rescue, you immediately think the worst;  a group of parrots out there have been so abused, so neglected, that an organization has been called in to remove them from their home to safety. You expect to find parrots in poor health from untreated disease, rusted caged filled with mounds of poop in a filthy house. This is not always the case, and it wasn’t when I was asked to assist in the rescue of of 9 parrots in San Antonio.

We pulled up to a beautiful home, in a beautiful neighborhood.  Inside was a bird owner’s paradise.  They had built a bird room as addition to their house and it was filled with spotless King’s cages that were filled with toys, many lovingly hand made by the owners.  Each parrot had at least one perch, the larger ones had two.  We left with boxes and boxes of toys and toy parts.  The parrots themselves (4 cockatoos: umbrella, moluccan, goffins and lesser sulphur crested, 2 indian ringnecks, 2 lovebirds, and a hilarious caique that was prone to fits of laughter) were all in impeccable health and clearly doted upon.  They were wanting for nothing.

So you are no doubt wondering why we were “rescuing” these parrots.  In a nutshell, the owners, through no choice of their own, had to return to their country of Israel.  It was not what they wanted, but it had to be.  They had to sell their gorgeous house and find new homes for the parrots.  It was a heartbreaking situation and so hard to watch.  In a more typical rescue situation, you can’t wait to remove the tormented animals from their hell, but we were all feeling really horrible about this.  The owners were so very helpful and strong throughout the whole ordeal.

Seven of us spent the next several hours disassembling all of the cages and playstands and loading them into the truck.  It was surprising how very long it took to do that.   Finally all the birds were loaded into the van and the job was done.

I don’t know which is more heartwrenching, taking these parrots from a loving home, or removing abused parrot from a disasterous one.  These parrots fell into just the right hands, and will wind up in another very good situation.  I wish all parrots were this lucky.

I’ve said it before, and will probably say it again: parrots don’t give unconditional love.  A dog will rest his head on your lap and say: “It’s okay that you forgot to feed me before you left this morning.  My tummy is full now.  You’re the greatest.”  A parrot will turn his back to you and give you the cold shoulder for a week for the same infraction.  Trust is a hard-won commodity.  It sure is in this house.  It only takes one incident to break apart all that you’ve established.  While there are several way to accomplish this, here are three sure-fire bets:

1-Hit or punish your bird.  First, let me state the obvious: if you hit your bird, not only do run the risk of injuring him, but violence attracts violence.  Remember that he is born equipped with weaponry on his face, and he’s not afraid to use it.  Secondly, it is a huge breach of trust when you assault someone and it carries the message that if you don’t see things my way I will harm you.  You will have earned that missing finger.

Punishing a bird is pointless because the message is never clear to him.  It is almost always the case that by the time you’ve figured out what the punishment will be and administered it,  the bird no longer will relate it to the crime.  From the bird’s perspective you are just being mean.  A time out, when you stop and disconnect from the bird by turning your back or walking away for several seconds, does work because it is immediate and easily associated with the behavior.  It has a low impact and does not teach your bird that you mean to harm or bully him.  Instead, your bird will quickly learn that when he does something unacceptable, he will lose your attention.

2-Force him to do something he doesn’t want to do.  Applying force to your parrot is counterproductive.  Sure, you may get what you want at that moment, but the long term loss of trust is not worth it.   We have all had times when we have had to whisk our birds away from a dangerous situation, like just when the beak is about to close down on the electrical cord.  I am not referring to these situations.  Somehow our parrots are able to discern that we are not doing this out of anger or frustration, but out of concern for their well being.  We might get bitten, but it is out of their shock at the abruptness of our behavior rather than anger.  These transgressions, if handled correctly, seem to be forgiven.

Here’s an example:  Theo, my goffins cockatoo, needs a nail trim.  Bad.  Her nickname has become Needle-toes.  She doesn’t like her toes being touched and I am working with her on that so that I might eventually be able to trim her nails myself.  I have a vet appointment  for my cat next week at which time they will do her nails, but I don’t know if I can make it that long.  She is usually on my shoulder when I am on the computer, which is often.  I have scratches all over my right shoulder which have scabbed over.  Being the wonderful friend that she is, she preens the scabs and it’s an ongoing cycle.  If I were to towel her and force a nail trim on her, my shoulder would get some needed relief, but  I would lose my little buddy for sure.  Since she has come to live with me, I have given her the time to adapt slowly to all of the changes in her life.  She has come to know that I will not be pushy with her.  If I were to aggressively hold her down and force her to do what I wanted, she would no longer give me the benefit of the doubt when I asked her to do something she was skeptical about.  All of our hard work would be lost.  Needle-toes and I are working on the toe phobia.

3-Lie to your bird.  Your parrot loves to go bye-bye in the car.  He will drop everything and come running to you at the mere mention of the possibility of a ride.  You are late to work and can’t get him to step up so you can secure him in his cage.  I know, you think,  if I tell him we are going for a ride he’ll cooperate.  Then I’ll hurry him to his cage and lock the door before he knows what hit him.  You can expect that in the future you will receive no such cooperation from him. You might want to allow an extra 20 minutes or so to get him into his cage tomorrow.  And good luck with that.  A parrot never forgets.

Something that we often forget is that parrots understand what we are saying.  They may not repeat the words back to us, or they may only understand vaguely from our tone of voice, but they understand.  I had a conversation the other day with a friend and fellow cockatoo owner on this subject.  He told me that if his bird sees a hawk outside the window, and she gets unnerved and aggitated as they all do when they see a preditor, he doesn’t say “it’s okay” to her to soothe her.  Instead, he says “uh oh, danger!” and takes her away from the window.  He pointed out that he can tell her that it’s okay all he wants, but she knows that it is not okay at all and that there is a very real danger present.  She trusts him all the more for his honesty and calling it like it is.  Now when she sees a rabbit outside the window and becomes upset, he can say it’s okay to her and mean it.  She understands.  Just food for thought…