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.

Cockatiel

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.

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

I just had to share this cute video of this Cockatiel singing the theme song to the Addam’s Family. Make sure you watch it to the end as the Cockatiel is even trained to thump his head on the ground on certain beats! Pretty clever training. I don’t know the person who trained him but well worth watching.

Enjoy!

Chet

A bit of a somber post for you today as I just read this article on MSN about how the worlds best talking parrot has just died.

You can check out the article here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20723212/?GT1=10357

This bird was the entire reason I got interested in the process of teaching parrots to talk. In fact it’s what inspired me to create my talking course for parrots. My heart goes out to the caretakers of this bird, as it was a truly remarkable creature.

Why don’t we all give our birds a little more attention today… as you’ll never know if it’s the last chance you’ll get to spend some quality
time with them.

Sincerely,

Chet Womach