Babying Your Bird

Ever since having another bird owner from a completely different background come stay with us for a month at our house with our own flock, it has been learning experience after learning experience and TONS of questions have surfaced.

One topic that came up between Patty and Dave was babying your bird too much. Now, I want to preface this post with the fact that it’s super hard to even begin to compare our birds (all raised by us from babies) and Patty’s birds who have all been adopted and/or rehomed into her care. So my point is not to compare birds to birds but to state what the possibilities are in everyone’s situations.

My personal take on this topic is not to baby your bird much at all. I feel that it holds the possible result of holding your bird back from true potential. I also feel in most cases it’s not necessary. And although I don’t have human children of my own, I believe that parrots should be treated much like them in the raising process. Just like you put your kid on slides and swings and throw them up in the air and catch them – I think all this can be done in a “bird way” to your parrot to make it just as fun for the bird and to make sure the bird is growing as much as a human child is.

Most people feel it’s cruel to scare your bird, but if it can be made into a playful game like it can be with human kids… then what truly is the harm? My birds play this game with me all the time, even my cat plays this game! My cat gets a kick out of scaring me! And today I scared Patty in the kitchen twice and I thought it was hilarious. She saw the humor in it a little while later…

Obviously, if your birds aren’t used to that sort of thing then they won’t find it funny at all. But you should try to work your way up to it and this can be done with all sorts of desensitization. Once your bird is used to all sorts of things, you can start to pick it up a notch.

There is no real definition of babying your bird, but to me it means making things super easy for them and sheltering them from things that YOU think might be scary for them rather than what THEY actually think or react to. Worrying is one thing, but acting on that worry all the time is completely different.

Anytime our birds react negatively to something, we try to turn the reaction around right then and there. If they don’t like an object, person, place or thing we work through it immediately before letting it turn into a down right phobia.

This can be done with any type of reward (positive reinforcement) and a combination of leaving the object and working back to it slowly (negative reinforcement). If it’s a person, let that person give all the rewards to the bird (treats). If it’s an object, put treats all around it or take it away and introduce it back slowly and further away… then reward for calm behavior like in the Power Pause.

Everything my birds have initially been scared of has turned into the best and most fun game they like to play now. For example, I used to let my birds hang out while unpacking all of my groceries from the grocery store but the plastic bags would spook them all the time! So I started taking the bags and flapping them open like you would with a trash bag and yelling, “Yipe! Yipe! Yipe! Wooo!” and having a great time! My cockatoos’ crests would fly up and they would “yipe” along with me realizing those were sounds of fun and excitement. I was trying to tell them in cockatoo language that the bags were actually really fun and they were missing out by being scaredy cats. They got the memo and now whenever anyone pulls out a trash bag they start bouncing up and down yipe-ing before the person knows what’s happening. I’ve often forgot what I was doing and wondered why they were so happy until I realize I was changing the trash bag…

Some amounts of babying are good but if it’s keeping your bird from experiences it needs to grow in personality and characteristics, I don’t believe in sheltering it.

If it doesn’t handle social situations well – socialize it! If it doesn’t like new things and is very phobic of objects – desensitize it! Don’t just never have people over, or hide all the scary objects or get rid of them because your bird can’t learn to accept them. Would you let a child do that? Can you imagine a human child phobic of purple slippers for the rest of its life? When you house an animal with the same mental capacity of a child, you need to treat it similar to one and think about what results that situation will have later on.