I taught my Senegal Parrot Kili to do the bat trick right out of parrot magic. It was fairly easy to teach it to her because she was already very hand tame. Getting her head down out of the fetal position was a bit more work but nothing unmanageable. Just like the play dead trick, the bigger challenge and most time consuming part was to get her to put her head down. Teaching the basics of the trick does not take more than a few days but then getting the bird to stay still and keep head down during trick is what takes months of perfection.

I even went so far as to teach my parrot to do the inverted fetch that you can see at the end of the video. This took zero training because the bird is so smart that it totally figured out to fetch her ball and drop it in the bin (from the bat position) the first time I tried it. She made the connection and it is just super cool to realize the bird is so smart.

We even taught our budgie to do the bat trick. I told my girlfriend that I didn’t think a budgie could do it but she liked the trick a lot and wanted to try anyway. Unlike the Kili, Duke the budgie wasn’t very hand tame and definitely did not like being held upside down. When we started teaching the trick, Duke would bite and try to get out of our hands. Although it took a few weeks to train the trick, by the end of training, he was a far tamer bird and would tolerate being held in just about any angle and way. Hands on trick training is also a great way to tame your bird to hands and make it less bitey. If a budgie can be taught this trick, I cannot imagine any parrot being unable to do it.

Parrots, like human beings and other animals, do not like to be forced to do anything that is against their will. Often times, coming up to the cage and sticking your hand in disturbs the parrot’s environment and leads to biting. If the parrot is perfectly content and safe in the parrot without human attention, then it is unlikely to want or appreciate it.

The training diet is an important component of eliminating biting behavior because it gives the trainer something to motivate the parrot. As I have discussed in previous articles, the training diet does not have to be limited to food. You can use coming out of the cage, toys, attention, and vocalizations in addition to food as motivations not to bite.

The most important thing is to NEVER reward biting behavior. Generally the reason parrots bite is to block unwanted contact. The parrot is trying to train you by using negative reinforcement for the approaching behavior. If you back away, yell, scream, or leave the parrot alone, you will be REWARDING the biting behavior and increase the likelihood of the parrot learning to bite in similar situations again in the future.

Since we cannot use punishment to eliminate biting (because punishment will just lead to more fight/flight mentality and more biting), that only leaves us with the opportunity to use positive reinforcement instead. The only way to teach a bird not to bite is to reward it for doing ANYTHING other than biting. This can mean doing a trick, sitting quietly on a perch, vocalizing, or even stepping on your hand. Teaching your bird to do a trick when it is angry is a great way to distract it from the reason it wanted to bite and turn it into a positive situation.

Targeting onto finger is the ultimate step before regressing involvement of target stick

The reason I think targeting is the best tool for teaching parrots to step up is because it lets them make all the decisions and do all of the learning. The parrot is faced with a voluntary choice, follow target stick onto hand and get treat or just walk away from it and get nothing. This lets the parrot feel like it is choosing to step onto you rather than the classic “poke parrot with a stick until it steps on it style training.” Since you are not forcing the parrot to do anything, the parrot has virtually no motivation to bite you. Worst case scenario, it doesn’t choose to walk over to step up.

5) Don’t expect instant results – If your bird is biting, it probably learned to use biting to achieve something it wants. You cannot expect to undue months or years of learning to bite overnight. You have to be consistent, focused, and keep trying. If you start projecting human like thoughts on the bird (“it hates me,” “it’s doing it to spite me”), you will only disappoint yourself and not achieve results. This process can take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years. The only way you will get results is if you keep trying until your bird gets to the right point. The only way I can guarantee you will not earn results is by giving up.

At first it may be difficult for a new parrot owner to differentiate between fear, aggression, and other signs the parrot may be showing. As you become more experienced with your bird, you will start to be able to predict what the bird’s behavior will be. For a parrot that always bites, it is actually pretty obvious that when you come near it, it will bite. The difficulty sooner comes with a parrot that is generally good but bites on occasion. That is the situation where you will have to learn to read your parrot and try to avoid those disturbances that make it bite. For the always biting parrot, you are going to have to teach it a new lifestyle through training diet, clicker conditioning, target training, and a lot of patience. Follow these steps, and you won’t have to deal with situations like this:

) Target Training

This is the section you have probably been waiting for. Here is where I show and teach you exactly how to teach your bird to step up as an alternative to biting. So you are getting two in one. A bird that is less likely to bite and a bird that willingly steps onto your hand. The fact is, by teaching the bird to step up, you are eliminating the major cause of biting which is fear of hands.

Although this video features a Senegal Parrot, I guarantee that the exact same techniques and principles apply to all parrots. Perhaps the scale may vary between a parakeet and a macaw but the concept is exactly the same. This works great for senegals, cockatiels, budgies, parakeets, conures, parrotlets, lovebirds, african greys, cockatoos, amazons, eclectus, monk parakeets (quaker parrots), and macaws.

Target bird you are afraid to handle through cage bars

The first thing is to get your bird used to the target stick and the concept of touching it to get a treat. Since this article is more about using targeting to train a bird to step onto your hand, I will not devote as much time to explaining how to initially teach targeting. I will assume you know it as this point but if not, you can learn all about it from these two articles:

Target Training Budgie (but the concept is the same for any bird)

Single Handedly Target Training (very important skill you will need to apply here as well)

Once your bird is reliable at targeting (whether in or out of cage), you will be ready to move onto the next step. But seriously, your bird should be willing to make multiple steps and go anywhere in its cage to be able to touch it. One piece of advice to people whose bird bites the stick too hard or aggressively is to click about a quarter second before the beak touches or squeezes too hard on the stick. The bird will pay more attention to the click and ensuing treat and won’t destroy the stick or learn to bite hard.

The next stage is to get a perch you can hold in your hand to target the bird onto. I recommend literally using one of the perches that used to be in the cage because the bird will be used to it and not fearful. The bird will already know it is something safe to step on. I do not recommend using a different kind of stick, machined dowel, or anything else because the bird may be scared or aggressive toward it. Never use the target stick as something to step on or the bird will get very confused. This stage is quite simple and upon reaching success, you will be able to transport your bird about the house safely.

Target onto perch by holding parallel and using target

Hold the perch parallel to the place your bird is standing at a close distance and slightly higher than your bird’s feet. With your other hand, you will have to hold the clicker, treat, and target stick. Point the tip of the target stick in front of your bird but far away enough that it must step onto the handheld perch to reach it. As soon as it has stepped up and touched the target, reward. Do not let the bird off the perch until it has completely eaten the reward. You want the bird to associate eating treats on the handheld perch. If this is the first time you are doing this, do not get ahead of yourself and take the bird away from the cage yet. Let the bird off of the perch by either targeting it back onto the cage branch or holding the handheld perch slightly behind and below the bird’s normal perch and it will step back itself. This will need to be practiced until the bird is comfortable to be targeted onto the perch and to be removed from the cage and brought elsewhere.

Now that you know how to safely take the bird out of the cage, you should have enough confidence to bring it to another room and begin the real training on a remote (out of cage sight) training perch. The bird has to be trained away from its cage to avoid territorial issues and wanting to go back. Practice targeting in the training area and targeting onto the handheld perch. When you have built reliability and confidence in this technique, you will be ready to move onto targeting onto your arm. Do not hinder on the perch stage for too long beyond when your bird is good at it because it can hurt your success training to step on hand if it is too used to perches only.

Training the bird to step onto your hand will be similar to stepping onto a perch. I recommend you use the perch to take it out of the cage to the training area rather than sticking your hand into the birds cage because that is asking for a bite. From the training perch, start by practicing some targeting the bird already knows. You may want to try different perches to get the bird used to going wherever, even targeting on the floor or table. When the bird is warmed up and targeting practically anywhere, you can sucker it into stepping onto you arm without realizing by using your arm as the perch. Hold your arm parallel to the perch it stands on and target onto your arm with the tip of the stick. This is a good beginning because your arm is stronger, less personal (bad attitude to hands maybe?), and less harmful if bird changes mind and decides to bite. If the bird doesn’t bite, your training is going very well and continue practicing this. If the bird does bite, you may be moving too fast and need to work on targeting some more or try to use a better training diet to motivate.

I also recommend that you let your bird make multiple steps toward your hand and target stick. Don’t immediately shove all of this in front of it because it may bite. Instead, start a few steps away and let it chose to come over at its discretion.

Target onto flat hand to introduce step up with less risk of bite

Next, you can try targeting onto your flat hand. By not exposing your fingers, you are giving the bird less to think about, less to bite, and less concern. After this you can try to target onto your finger. You can keep your finger curled up at first so that the bird can’t bite the tip where it is more sensitive. I usually like to keep my thumb curled under and all my extra fingers out of the way so my bird isn’t tempted to nibble on them for fun. If you are successfully targeting your bird onto your finger and reaching consistency without bites, you are nearly finished. Begin saying “step up” every time your bird is stepping onto your finger reaching for the target stick. This will later become the cue to step.

Finally, if you are really confident that your bird is stepping up and not biting when you use the target stick, you can start to lose it. First practice targeting it on. Then hold the target stick further back that the bird sees it but cannot touch it. Say step up and click as soon as the bird is on your hand, even though it did not touch the stick. Soon you will be able to just say step up and not use the target stick. Continue clicking and giving treats for stepping up though. The bird will realize that the stick doesn’t even matter for the “step up” trick and that just stepping on is enough to get a treat. If your bird is not stepping or you start a step up session cold turkey and it forgot what to do, you can flash it a glimpse of the target stick but without actually targeting it and it may help remind it what to do. Of course if that fails, you can return to targeting.

When you are reliably getting the bird to step up from the training perch, you can begin targeting it out of the cage onto your hand. You will basically want to repeat all the stages of target training you did on the training perch again at the cage. The bird may have a different concept of strangers approaching the cage. While it learned to trust you in the training area, does not mean it will tolerate you putting your hands on its cage. That is why you should repractice the handheld perch, arm step, hand step, and finally finger step by the cage. Luckily by now the bird knows these concepts and what to do and you are merely teaching it that it is ok to do this at the cage as well.

If you want other people to be able to handle your bird, you should let them run through all of these stages themselves. After one person can do it, it will take much less effort (perhaps just one or two times) for the bird to accept targeting and step ups from a stranger as well because it knows that treats are coming wherever the target stick is.

In the next and final post of this 3 part series on solving parrot biting problems, I will discuss some strategies and discipline required to teach what you learned in this section to your parrot. It is as important to have a motivated trainer and motivated parrot as it is to follow these techniques.

Territorial parrot bites approaching strangers.

Kili, my Senegal Parrot, can be described as cute, lovable, and cuddly by some (that would be me). But my girlfriend would sooner describe the parrot as a ferocious, atrocious, little beast. With hormones raging, an ongoing molt, and the troubles of bird life, Kili gets very territorial and aggressive toward people other than myself. She can be describes as a “one person bird” as Senegal Parrots often are.

This is the classic tale of a biting parrot. In many cases the parrot bites everyone including the owner. I suppose I am lucky that my bird is so bonded to me, but then again I’ve been working with her and teaching her tricks since she was a baby. Nonetheless, these techniques work for anyone and any bird. This is because they are based on the rudimentary elements of behavioral psychology and are aimed to work at the most basic level.

Here is my 5 step process to go from a biting bird to a bird that will step onto your hand without biting:

1) Forgive and forget - From this moment on, if you want to give it your parrot an honest shot at making this work, you cannot blame your parrot ever. You have to accept responsibility and also realize that you are on a higher level than your parrot. You have to be the adult and be a role model for your bird. You can never assume that because your bird bit last time that it will bite this time. You have to give it a fresh chance every time. If you keep assuming your bird will bite, your behavior will send the same signal to your bird that caused it to bite all the time before. This does not mean you have to take bites all the time, we will discuss some ways to avoid the actual flesh tearing bites, but you will have to pretend to ignore the aggression.

Lingering on bites or past experiences ruins training progress.

2) Training Diet - If your bird is not on a training diet and is biting you, that explains a lot. In some cases, a proper food diet change alone can improve bird behavior. Get your parrot on a pellet diet and moderate the amount of food it gets. Only give food to your parrot as a reward for correct behavior. Never give your bird a reward for biting. Never give your bird a non-food reward for biting. There is so much info available about training diet so I will not go through all the details. Instead, read this article about food based training diet, and then you can read this series abut non-food training diets (ways you can get your bird do stuff even when it isn’t hungry). So if your bird is not already on one, don’t make any excuses and put it on a training diet because you will not succeed in getting your bird to stop biting if it has no reason to.

Pellets are a good basis for training diet. Save seed/nut treats exclusively for training.

3) Clicker Conditioning – This is actually the fun and easy part. Clicker conditioning is simply to make your bird used to eating treats out of your hand and associating the sound of a click from a clicker. You can buy these in most pet stores (check dog training) or online. When your bird is hungry (before meal time), sit next to your bird’s cage (assuming you can’t take it out, if you can then take it somewhere else), have clicker in hand and bird’s favorite treats ready. Your bird should be calm and focused. If the bird is trying to attack you through the bars or run away, you are going to need to do power pause first. Ideally you should be at the side of the cage the bird is and it should neither attack or run away. It should just sit and watch you. From this point all you have to do is click the clicker and immediately give a treat to your bird. You should repeat this until your bird doesn’t want anymore treats and do this for a couple of sessions to be sure your bird has really picked up on this process. Even if you do a little more of this than you need to, it’s ok because the bird is building a positive association with you and the clicker. Can’t beat being nice and giving treats for no reason.

In the following post, I will get into the actual training involved in teaching the parrot to step up without biting. Be sure to check back and read this because it will be a walk through of the training process involved. In that post, I will show a video of how my girlfriend got bit by my parrot and then step by step the process we used to resolve the biting.

Since my personal experience ranges in the small to medium birds, this article is really intended for owners of budgies, cockatiels, lovebirds, conures, senegals, quakers, and mini macaws. While I am sure the same overall techniques apply to larger birds, the actual details of it may be slightly different. However, what I write here applies the same for all birds that can fit in your hand. I am going to write about how to do it by yourself but if you can have a second person help you do it, it would be so much easier.

If your bird is very hand tame and allows you to grab, hold, and cuddle with it, then you can follow the procedures I lay out directly. If your bird is aggressive, timid, or just not that tame, you have two choices. Either you can focus a lot of effort on getting it to this level of tameness (which I highly recommend regardless) by training it and teaching tricks. Otherwise you can use a towel by doing the same technique that I describe but with the towel between your skin and the bird’s beak to avoid getting bit.

Warning, doing it my way can get you bit. You need to be careful and respect your bird. I prefer to do this bare handed on my bird because it involves trust both ways and the bird does have the freedom to give me feedback if something is really wrong. I try to be gentle and not let the situation turn to biting and if the bird does bite I ignore the bite to avoid teaching biting. However, knowing that the bird is biting tells me that I am either doing it too long or too hard which teaches me how to go about it better in the future. So I really trust my bird and my bird trusts me. I don’t push it too hard or file her too long and she doesn’t bite me (even though she is in the position to). She doesn’t bite me too hard or any more than necessary so it doesn’t bother me too much if she does and I just ignore it (but take a mental note what to avoid next time). So if you are terrified of your bird or really afraid of getting a little bite, don’t do this. Use a towel or let a bird expert do it for you.

This is the grip to use to file nails solo.

So what you will do (assuming you are right handed, probably reverse this if left) is hold the bird in your left hand and file with your right hand. Grab the bird with you left hand with your thumb curled around its neck. The rest of your fingers will be on the birds back and lay the bird in your hand so it is laying on your fingers. The thumb goes under the beak as high up as possible. Under your bird’s beak is the safest place for your finger to be because it is harder to bite so close.

All Psittaciformes have zygodactyl feet which means that two toes face forward and two face back. However, for the purpose of filing the nails the feat could just as well be anisodactyl (typical bird feet with 3 toes forward and 1 back) because the fourth digit evolved to swing back from the forward position. So even though the long toe faces rearward, you can actually hold it forward because that is the original position from which the rear facing joint evolved. The hallux (small rear facing toe) cannot be moved and is very hard to reach when filing. The nail is so small and outgrown by the others that I often don’t file it at all and just wait till the next time the nails get cut. It is nearly impossible to hold and file it because it is so small and not end up filing bird’s skin or your own.

Hold bird on back and grip toe with thumb and forefinger

So I hold the bird’s 3 large toes one at a time between my thumb and forefinger. I hold at the tip of the nail and try to hold as much of it in my hand as possible and leave just the tip exposed to file. If you hold too far back, the file will just drag your bird’s entire nail or even toe back and forth without progress. I use a sturdy coarse nail file and quickly make some large deliberate strokes back and forth on each nail. I will go for as long as the bird lets me but usually only enough to blunt the  tip of each nail. If you really want to file the hallux you will probably need a smaller file and to be careful. The grip I use to file the bigger toes does not work so well for the hallux and the foot is in the way. That toenail, even when sharp is usually no bother because it is shorter than the rest.

Some other things to remember. A challenge while filing the nails is to keep the other toes out of the way. The bird may like to bite the file or rip it away from you. You may end up filing yourself a bit in the process because it is hard to grip so close. I take the hit because I don’t want to hurt my bird, rubbing my skin a little doesn’t bother me so much.

No matter how much my bird bites or squirms, I do not stop until I am finished. The more I’ve done it, the more enduring my bird has become so it is a good thing that I do not give in. She usually does not give my any trouble for the first foot I file but only by the second. If I had more time, I am sure I could file one foot per session without any trouble at all. After I finish filing I usually give my bird a treat but she usually doesn’t care about it. She just wants to relax or cuddle. So I will pet her and put her on my shoulder as a reward for being brave. The positive ending is essential if you want your bird to let you file again in the future.

It is obviously important not to let your parrot’s nails get overgrown. If they are too long, the have a higher likelihood of getting broken and are sharper which would cause anyone holding the bird discomfort. Some people freefly their parrots or have them in particularly natural environments so they don’t cut the nails but I would say they are the exception to the rule.

Given that your parrot lives in a cage at home, it is understandable that it is not exposed to the natural claw cutting things it would encounter in the wild. Naturally the nails keep growing to compensate for the rate at which they are used. At home they are not used, so they become overgrown. Since we live in unnatural environments and use tools/helping devices for different things we have to cut our own nails and our companion parrot’s.

There are basically three ways to keep a parrot’s nails trimmed:

1) Cut them with a nail clipper

2) File them with a nail file

3) Provide filing perches

I use all three of these and highly recommend that you use all of these methods. I would like to describe the benefits of each of these.

The advantage to cutting the nails is that it is relatively quick and leaves a clean cut. The end of the nails is very blunt and it takes a longer time for the nails to grow back from this stage. The downside is that it is a dangerous/stressful process. If cut incorrectly, the bird can bleed to death so it is important that you have a vet or bird expert do this.

To prolong the benefit of the cut nails, I file my bird’s nails every few weeks. By doing this, I can stretch visits to the vet or bird store from once every two to once every three months. I would have to file the parrot’s nails every other day if I wanted to avoid having to get them cut altogether but it is difficult to find the time to do that. So instead, I just blunt out the tips every so often. By holding my bird for nail filing every so often, it makes her more used to the process and better behaved at the store when she gets trimmed.

The disadvantage to nail filing is that it is a lot of work for a little benefit. One filing session takes as long as one nail cutting session because each toenail has to be individually worked on. But unlike the cut, the amount of nail scaled back is barely noticeable. The other problem with filing is that even if the nails are kept short, they end up getting sharper and sharper. A cut every now and then helps to keep the nails blunt and not cut your hands when your bird is on them.

Finally, I provide my parrot with natural branches with bark and filing perches to keep the nails trimmed. Unfortunately, this does not seem to help that much. It does help me prolong the duration between visits to four months because filing and perches take about a month off out of every four but it is not enough by itself. Also the filing perches seem to make my bird’s nails sharper while keeping them shorter. This forces me to have to file them by hand every so often to dull the points. However, because filing only takes a little bit off at a time, it doesn’t take long for the nails to get sharp again.

Even if I cut the nails myself, I still find benefit in taking the parrot by the bird store every quarter. At the bird store I bought Kili from, the women that runs it is quite expert in birds. It is reassuring to me to have an outside expert take a look at my bird for a quick assessment. Vet checks are very expensive and in my experiences, general veterinarians aren’t very proficient with birds. An exclusively bird veterinarian is very hard to come by. But by bringing the parrot by the store every so often, I can have an unbiased glance over health inspection, nail trimming, and beak trim all in one.

So what I recommend is to have your bird’s nails cut but to use filing perches and manually file them in order to prolong the duration between required cuts. Following these steps will help ensure your own comfort and bird’s safety.