I’m BAAACK… and I paid for it
Friday, April 18th, 2008It’s amazing how much momentum you loose when you take a week of of training an African Grey rescue like Bean.
Unfortunately I didn’t have a choice, as my travels took me to sunny southern California for business… oh well. So after spending a week and a half building up my Grey’s confidence to be strong enough to target over my hand, and up the side of his cage… I spent the last few days since i got back from California just getting him back to where he was when I left.
I have been trying very hard to get bean to target onto my hand… but his phobias are keeping him from being willing to do so… even after 3 days.

I’ve got him to put weight on my hand with one foot, and that was a fun experience. It involved really trying to make the training fun for him. He goes into an ‘OVER EXITED’ mode where his phobias seem to vanish after several minutes of training. He looses focus during this time, but he soaks up the attention as well. Figuring out how to make these happen more often might be key for him.
I’m also noticing that I have to watch my temperament and not push for too much progress in each training session — an African Grey can burn out on training if it’s too much work, and not enough play.
Which brings me to another problem I’m running into…
I can get Bean, with a 95% success rate to reach far across my hand to target an object. (this is HUGE since he’s afraid of the hand) But it’s causing problems as he’d really rather reach than step up onto the hand. So I’m thinking about retraining a targeting behavior, but this time train it to Bean’s foot, so he’s trained to target objects by touching them with his foot. This will require a separate object for him to target so as not to confuse him, but might be much more helpful in getting him to overcome his fear of the hand.
I plan on starting some training today where I get him to touch objects with his foot… but it might take a few days, or up to a week to train, depending on how scared of the object he is… and will probably have to resort to finding the least possible scary object to target — maybe even stickers placed on his perches, as wooden dowels seem to scare him right now, and he’s not willing to step up onto them.
Training this type of behavior is sort of an incompatible replacement behavior as it makes it impossible for him to resort to reaching for an object, because we take his beak OUT of the situation.
If that doesn’t work than I’m going to have to resort to possibly teaching some natural behaviors on cue, like wing flapping, or head bobbing etc. This often gets birds to start to enjoy training a LOT more, and can lead to easier progress when behavior training is resumed.
That’s the update for now.
Cheers!
Chet Womach


