It is frequently said that a parrot has the emotional capacity of a two year old and the problem solving capabilities of a 5 or 6 year old.  I have drawn the comparison between my parrots and children many times.   It’s hard not to do when they play with toys, throw tantrums, and look to you for their care and comfort.  There are many similarities, but I think there is a place when the line should be drawn.

Like your children, a parrot requires boundaries and limitations.  It is the thing that establishes rules and sets the stage for understanding what is or is not acceptable.  It helps your parrot to feel comfortable and know, without doubt, where he stands.  It’s what allows us to coexist.  Of course, like children, he will always challenge your authority.  Like your children, good nutrition, hygene and opportunities to explore and learn are essential.  And like children, trust is the key to building a solid foundation.

Unlike your children, it is difficult to communicate to your parrot.  While it may be hard to get through to our children, we at least know that they understand the words coming out of our mouths, even when they are ignored.  You cannot expect similar levels of logic and reasoning from a parrot.  They are wild things, undomesticated, though tamed (sometimes), and your parrot possesses a wild instinct that a human child isn’t born with.  You would likely rush your child to the therapist the first time you caught him gnawing on a 2X4.  To truly understand your parrot, you must first understand that it isn’t like you.

A parrot’s mind doesn’t work like that of a human.  Everything that they do serves them in some way. Their agenda might involve food (survival), rights to the highest perch (survival) or convincing a human to tend to its needs (survival).  I think you can see where I’m going with this.  A bird doesn’t place any importance on values, morals or ethics.  Its only directive is survival.  Realizing this will help you better understand the things that he does.

Don’t get me wrong, in trying to assure their own survival, they are often steps ahead of we humans.  They know how we are going to respond to their behavior long before we have even figured out that we object to it. They are quite capable of scheming and deception, and are known to have a sense of humor, so there are some fun and games thrown in to the mix just for grins.

It is unreasonable for us to expect that a bird, or any animal, might be able to fill the shoes of a human child.  And given that they are the wonderful companions that they are, it isn’t necessary that they do.  Care for them, comfort them and offer them your love, but remember that they are birds, wild things, not small, feathered children.

Food Diet vs. Social Diets

In the previous two posts, I discussed the types of non food diets that can be used on your bird. Now that you are aware of other ways to ration something your bird wants, you can turn that into a reward and controlling its hand out. In turn, you can use those rewards to motivate your bird to do certain behaviors that you desire.

I would like to outline the difference between food diet and social diets in their practical application and use. The fact is, a food diet is the most concrete, easy to control, and predictable diet that is guaranteed to motivate your bird to learn. This is why the BirdTricks system emphasizes this rationing of food. The food training diet is very effective and will help you get 90% out of your birds motivation.

But what about the other 10%? If you really want to get 100% out of your bird, if you want more than just a bird who will wave/play dead, if you want a well behaved, well vocalized, happy, loving companion for life, you should use the social diets previously outlined. The reduction in daily attention that the bird receives will just make the interaction that it does that much more enjoyable. The limit of number of toys will make new toys all the more exciting. The withholding of petting until a favorable behavior is performed will make the bird learn acceptable behavior.

For every diet (food, social, petting, etc), there is an X amount that your bird needs to satisfy its hunger. This may be (hypothetically) 10 grams of food, 3 hours of attention, and 2x 20 second petting sessions. Any more than this may be bonus or may just be fattening and unnecessary. So for food, you would ration out 1 out of 10 grams to feed exclusively during trick training. For social attention, you would ration 3 out of 24 hours to spend out of the cage with you. Finally you would pet it twice that day when it is sitting quietly on its perch and not flying off.

Sometimes you can emphasize a particularly desired behavior by giving a bigger helping (of whatever diet you are using for that). For instance, I will let my bird stay out of the cage longer when there is company around because she is learning how to behave around strangers and to reward her for being good with other people. This will help the bird remember that other people are good, she gets to spend more time out. My bird has been prone to one-person-bird challenges but by giving her greater petting, attention, etc around other people, she is beginning to look forward to social outings more. As you may have read, I give my bird greater than usual attention when I take it driving or out on trips as a reward for the stress of being in the carrier and traveling. It would not even be possible to reward my bird with a food reward for doing this because she will often be scared and not eat or just eat a normal meal. That extra motivation for being good while traveling comes from all the bonus attention I give to her.

You can only use a particular motivator for as much as the bird wants. You can only feed a bird till it’s full, pet a bird till it’s satisfied, or keep it out of the cage until it’s tired. This is a great reason to use a variety of motivators and diets for your bird because when one runs out, you may still be able to influence your bird by using another. You can also use different types of motivators for different behaviors. A lot of these social motivators are very long term while click/treat is direct. These are both good for their individual purposes. A click/treat is excellent and pin pointing the exact way to hold the foot while teaching the wave trick. On the other hand, there is no real click for sitting on the perch quietly. This is where all of these toys, attention, and petting come in. While you may be able to do 50 repetitions of a particular trick using a food reward, you might only be able to do one or two rewards per day for sitting quietly. But if you do this over a long stretch of time, your bird will realize that actually being calm and quiet earns it attention more reliably than screaming and being a nuisance. In this case, food would not be such a good reward because the bird would not be receiving food for all times it is relaxed and also the bird may still be receiving food when it is rambunctious. But if you are limiting attention, talking, and petting to only a relaxed bird, it will soon catch on. Don’t give your bird food for not doing anything (being calm) because that will hurt your ability to get the bird to do something (a trick). Teaching it to be calm for food will extinguish its desire to try new behaviors that may lead to a trick for food. So reserve those non-food rewards for those calm behaviors and food for teaching tricks.

By rationing and rewarding your bird with everything it wants (and not only food), you can build a much stronger relationship. Not only will your bird learn better behavior but it will also be thrilled because it is receiving all this stuff from you and it knows exactly what to do in order to get it. If you pet the bird randomly, it doesn’t know how to ask. If you pet it when it is calm and well behaved and bends its head over to you, and you pet it, the bird will know what to do.

This all may sound very regimental but really it is quite simple. Give your bird what it wants only if it is giving you what you want. In turn your bird will only give you what you want if you give it what it wants. The bird wants food, you ask it to do a trick, it does trick, you give it a seed. If the bird does the trick wrong, you do not give it the seed. Apply the same thing to something like petting/attention. If the bird is sitting calm/quiet/relaxed you can talk to it, give it attention, pet it. If the bird is running around and screaming, you ignore it. So just remember, never to give the bird anything that it wants if it is going to be used to reinforce undesirable behavior but to hold it off until the bird is doing what you want.

Conclusion

A real “training diet” should actually be rationing everything that your bird enjoys and not just food. This way you always have something that the bird will try hard to earn from you. Whether that is food, attention, being left alone, time out of the cage, time in the cage, toys, vocalization, petting, training, or just playing together, you have full control over how much of that your bird can get. If you leave your bird always wanting more, you have the power to influence your avian friend about proper and improper behavior. If you give your bird too much, your bird will feel like it doesn’t have to listen to you. If you don’t give enough, your bird will be lonely, upset, and neglected. Finding the proper balance is key to a healthy owner to bird relationship. And it is this balance that will be the subject of the next article in this series about the healthy balance for birds.

Non-Food Parrot Diet

Kili gets a balance of attention and independent play

I have previously written about setting up a food based training diet for your bird. While the food diet is probably the easiest and most effective for trick training, there are other kinds of diets (or rationing) that you can put your bird on to help with behavior. Basically you can ration anything that your bird wants (except maybe water & safety). By rationing something the bird desires, you can save some of that to grant as reward to the bird for behavior you seek to achieve. These behaviors may be tricks but food seems to work better for tricks because it is a concrete reward. Petting, attention, and showers are subjective rewards and hard to gauge. The rewards I talk about in this article are better suited for rewarding good non-trick behavior.

Social Diet

If you have a bird that is bonded to you and enjoys being with you, you can ration the amount of time it can spend with you per day. If you keep the bird out with you all day, then you cannot possibly reward it any more for desirable actions. So spending all day with the bird would be like keeping food in its cage all day. It will not perform behavior that you want in return for attention.

When I am working, I am not home most of the day and the bird is happy to see me and come out in the evenings. Even when I am home all day and have time to spend with my bird, I never spend the entire day with the bird out. Pretty quickly the bird would catch on to this and feel more independent of me and not really try to behave well to retain the privilege of staying out. There are behaviors she could do that would result in her getting put away so hopefully this limited time with me discourages her from doing them.

The above was for someone who’s bird as tame and wants to spend time with them. People with a new bird or a bird that does not seem to like them may find the opposite approach to be better. Keep the bird out a lot to get used to people and reward it for good behavior by putting it away into the cage and giving it a break. The fact is, you have to figure out what your bird wants (in or out of cage) and then ration that so it will behave more to your liking and make the most of its time out of the cage.

Another component of the “social diet” is that even when my bird is out of the cage, I don’t give her my attention for the full time. Part of the time she is out I will play with, talk to, and train the bird. But the other part of the time I will ignore her and go on the computer while she plays with the toys on her climbing tree.

Toy Diet

I ration my bird’s toys but not in the sense of keeping her without toys. Simply I keep a limited quantity of toys in her cage but rotate them out frequently. I never put more than 3 toys in her cage at once and usually keep it at 2. By rationing toys like this, she is always excited about a new toy. This keeps her busy but at the same time she wants to come out of the cage. A bird living with 10 toys (besides maybe being crammed) may enjoy all those toys so much that it won’t want to come out. Also, I keep the best toys on the climbing tree and not in the cage. This way my bird is always looking forward to coming out and playing with these toys. Usually these toys make more of a mess when the bird chews them up and they can be a little more dangerous, so I can keep an eye out when she plays with them.

Kili plays with her favorite toys on climbing tree

Vocal Diet

Although it’s a lot of fun hearing my bird talk, if my bird tried to vocalize all the time I’d be left with a giant headache. That is why I talk to my bird only part of the day. I know that movies, loud talking, and playing bird clips makes my bird more vocal so I do my best to balance loud times with silent ones as well. This way my bird can sit quietly part of the day but also has times to let loose and work off that vocal energy.

I have a 16 year old cockatiel, is too late to teach him how to talk?

- Pres

It’s never too late to teach any animal, anything. Even to speak!

Now, some prefer talking more than others. Some just need the right environment. For instance, my cockatoo Bandit is a naturally talkative bird. He talks all the time and is always learning new words. My other cockatoo, Bondi, is a great talker but only in certain environments – such as the shower or in the car. Some birds talk more when they’re alone, around other birds, hear the radio or TV?or whatever the situation is that sparks their speech training!

Cockatiels have adorable voices and like the other types of parrots, when their eyes pin they are giving you their full attention. This is when you want to say words and phrases you want your bird to pick up!

For example, the most exciting times we share with our birds… are when we are coming and going. This is why almost all birds learn how to say, “Hello” and “Goodbye”. They are excited (or alert) when you walk into the room and they are more likely to pick up the word you say at that time, which is usually “Hello” from most people.

Same thing when you’re leaving the room. So keep in mind, when your bird’s eyes pin, you want to say the words you want it to learn.

As another example, while living on the island of Saipan, I had to leave every night at 6pm to perform in the dinner show at the local hotel there. Every night when I came home, I would open the door and say, “Hey Cutie!” to my cockatoo. One day, a few weeks later or so, when I opened that door… before I had a chance to say anything my cockatoo exclaimed, “Hey Cutie!” to me! It’s now her favorite thing to say. So use these natural heightened senses to your advantage when teaching speech to your cockatiel (or any bird, for that matter).

The rest of teaching your bird to talk? Well, they learn best from other birds… so I recommend using our audio CD’s that play random words… randomly… (so you aren’t playing “hello hello hello hello” to your bird over and over and over making it hate its circumstances like anyone would end up doing in that situation!)

You can find the speech training course over at www.birdtricks.com/how-to-speak.htm

We use the voices of our birds -?plus many other species to give a variety to your own bird at home as?an array of pitches and tones for your bird to match.

Well the contest for the three greatest parrot videos is now over

I’ve enjoyed the heck out of all the videos you’ve been sending me. Some videos have been flat out amazing, while others cute and funny, and everything in between.

So here are the three winning videos, that received the most 5 star votes in three catagories.

Click Here to see the best talking parrot video

Click Here to see the funniest parrot video

Click Here to see the most amazing parrot video

Each owner of these videos has won $250! But I made a tiny mistake that I need your help on fixing… I need the mailing addresses of the people who submitted videos to me, along with your name to verify you’re the right person. But just so you know, i know the name of each person who submitted the video (so I’ll know if you lie and pretend that you’re the one who sent in the video, and then publicly shame you everywhere I can if you try to claim the prize that someone else deserves to win

So if you’re one of the three people who’s video I posted above as the winner of this contest I need you to email or call dana, who handles all my customer service and let her know the address to mail your cash prize of $250 to.

Thanks for a SUPER fun contest, and I’ll be in touch soon!

Chet

I finally got all the videos posted on my
website in the best talking parrot category.

(Remember this is just the first of 3 categories
of my video contest that stand the chance at
earning a $250 prize for best video…

… later this week I’ll also be sending you some
links to the FUNNIEST, and most AMAZING parrot
videos as well.

Please check out the videos here:
http://www.birdtricks.com/video/talking-parrots.html

But PLEASE remember to VOTE for your favorite video!!!

One of these videos will win a $250 cash prize for
submitting the best talking parrot video, but I can
only pick a winner if you participate and cast your
vote for you favorite one.

Here’s how to cast your vote for your favorite
talking parrot video:

Step #1 – Watch all the videos at this link:

http://www.birdtricks.com/video/talking-parrots.html

Step #2 – Pick your favorite video, and double click
on it. You’ll be automatically redirected to youtube.com
where YouTube has an option for you to give the video
a 1,2,3,4 or 5 Star rating.

So all you need to do is double click the video, wait
for yourself to be directed to YouTube, and cast a
5 star vote for your favorite video… maybe even leave
a comment if you’d like to share how much you like
one of the videos.

Then, at the end of the week, I’ll tally up the video
with the most amount of 5 star votes and declare it
the winner of the best talking video!

A few of these videos are pretty good so make sure
you check them out. Here’s the link again:

http://www.birdtricks.com/video/talking-parrots.html

Enjoy!

Chet Womach