Parrot Training Myth #1: It takes a long time to train a parrot.

Almost every parrot I’ve personally worked with that belong to our clients and customers, have been able to show improvement, progress and success immediately within beginning training.

Most parrots show positive results from training within their very first training session! And most basic behaviors can be taught within a couple days to a bird. I’ve been able to teach the “wave” to a bird in less than two minutes! Success happens fast with parrots and they love training once they’re opened up to the world of it.

It’s best to keep training sessions SHORT and end the session before the bird does. This will leave you both wanting more! Most training sessions are only a few minutes long, and shouldn’t exceed 15 minutes.

Parrot Training Myth #2: You can’t train a bird without getting bit.

Super basic training techniques like “touch training” and the “power pause” are techniques you can use and never have to worry about being bitten by your bird.

These are techniques you can use with your bird still INSIDE their cage, and yet see positive results within minutes. The Power Pause literally takes 15 minutes with most birds while touch training happens even faster.

Parrot Training Myth #3: Some birds are just too old to train.

A bird is NEVER too old to start training, and neither are you! So don’t let your bird’s age stand in the way of its success. A client of BirdTricks.com taught her 87 year old macaw to be quiet on cue and it had never learned anything before. Anything is possible, no matter what your bird’s age is.

I taught a 35+ year old blue fronted amazon how to freefly outside safely. You can watch a fun video of him here, he’s famous for being the “Interrupting Parrot”.

When it comes to parrot training, age doesn’t matter.

Parrot Training Myth #4: I can’t get near my bird, therefore I can’t start training it.

If your bird has an issue with you getting close to it, we have techniques you can use. We focus on all areas of fear with birds, as well as aggression. We even worked out these strategies LIVE at our Seminar in Florida and talk about the “3 Phases of Fear and Mistrust” and how to find out which phase you’re at, so you can have success with your bird.

A very common phase is the “Getting Closer Phase” where you can’t even get NEAR your bird without it lunging, attacking, screaming or running away. Both fear and aggression play a role in this phase and it’s something you really CAN work through.

Parrot Training Myth #5: Training parrots is hard.

It’s doesn’t take a rocket scientist to be able to train your parrot. Techniques are easy for you to understand and apply and we make it as easy as possible for you apply the techniques you learn to your bird for the ultimate success.

There’s no fancy lingo that you can’t understand, we put it very basic so you aren’t overwhelmed (and neither is your bird) instead training is made fun and interactive for you and your bird and you don’t have to spend all day working on it, either!

A few minutes a day is all your parrot will want to train anyway, so you can still maintain a social life. Though whether or not you choose to after discovering the fun filled world of parrot training… is up to you.

The hardest part? Getting started. For a variety of training tools and fun bond building games to get you started, check out the parrot training store.

My friend Patty (who also blogs here) has been very eager to handle my macaws because she has always been surrounded with cockatoos and would love to get some one on one experience with them. So the other day I brought out my blue throated macaw and set him on her hand.

Like any bird lover would want to do, Patty really wanted to be able to pet Jinx. What happened was Patty put her hand directly above Jinx’s head and he didn’t understand what she was about to do and got tense. She could tell he wasn’t going to be okay with what she wanted to do so she backed off. I then told her about our “signal” we give to our birds to let them know our intentions. I showed her the signal (shown in the video above) and she was able to pet Jinx.

This is a great thing to do with your bird for social situations as well as for yourself so you and your bird some a better form of communication… allowing you to get bit accidentally a lot less often!

So many people have heard the old saying, “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” and assume it applies to older parrots too. But I have news for you – it doesn’t!

No parrot is ever “too old” to learn new tricks.

In fact, old parrots is where BirdTricks.com was founded with Tiko (pictured above) a 15 year old blue and gold macaw and Linus, a 10 year old umbrella cockatoo. Tiko had been a trophy pet all his life, and never handled since the age of 2. His owners were people who didn’t know better… Chet and Dave’s parents, and one day when the two brothers thought about making a magic parrot video to incorporate the birds into Dave’s magic act, they found something very cool…

When they began training and mentally stimulating these birds, the birds became nicer. They began to become handle-able and social.

And that is why we here at BirdTricks.com recommend trick training SO much. We like to think we beat it into your heads to do it. And this is just one reason of many.

If you have the courses, you will find Tiko on the cover of Volume 2 and Linus on the cover of Volume 1. Along with Chet and Dave. They use those birds in all the demonstrations to show you real, untamed birds going through the same training you’re about to endure. Just to prove to you how fast and easy it can be. You see the successes, you see the failures and everything in between so you learn from everything they did.

So when you hear someone say an old bird can’t learn new tricks, think again. Our trick training courses are proof they can, not to mention the thousands of testimonials of people having success with their birds too from one year young to 87 years old (yes, a macaw that old was taught how to be “quiet” on cue).

It is NEVER too late to start training your bird.

How fast can you really train your bird?

In many of my training videos I continually show examples of how to train birds to stop biting, or step up in very short periods of time. It is not uncommon for me to be able to get a bird to stop doing bad behavior within 2-3 days.

Many of my clients send me comments about how implementing one of my training concepts or strategies fixed their birds problem in less then 15 minutes.

On stage at our Total Parrot Transformation seminar I trained a parakeet to touch the end of a stick in front of hundreds of people in about 30 seconds.

But can every bird be trained in such a short period of time?

Is your bird’s behavior so bad it might take a year to train him, and you just need to be patient?

It’s possible, but I think that answer is typically a cop out for people who don’t fully understand what it takes to tame parrots.

I don’t mean that to insult you if you currently believe in your heart of hearts, that the only way to fix your bird’s behavior is with more patience, I’m sure you’re a good person and love your parrot.

It’s just that I’ve been there before, with an abused African Grey Parrot who was not responding as well to my training techniques as I would have liked. I was quickly able to teach him several things, but there was so much emotional FEAR inside this bird that I was not able to help him overcome those fears and his progress hit a brick wall before I could consider him tame.

For four months I continued to work my normal techniques on this African Grey with little to no results, which forced me to make a decision…

I either needed to ‘give up’ and take the patience and time approach. Or I needed to drastically rethink the way I was doing thing.

I decided to drastically rethink the way I was doing things.

The determining factor in this decision was actually made while simply watching my African Grey try to get to his water dish.

The way my African Grey’s cage was set up, there was a perch that lay across the main perch in his cage that he would have to step OVER if he wanted to get to his water bowl. For any normal bird this wouldn’t have been a problem… but with my African Grey, the perch was an obstacle to be feared, and he refused to touch it.

Over the course of the first four months I had him in the cage, he never built up the courage to step over this perch.

Instead he’d come up close to it, and then leap over it… literally jumping into his water dish.

This is when I had my big breakthrough and realized, “if a perch that had always been in the cage, and had never moved, and had never fallen down while my bird was standing on it, couldn’t be patient enough to earn my birds trust, then how in the hell was I going to earn his trust with nothing but patience?”

So I decided that patience was mostly BS, and that I needed to rethink my training approach to scared birds completely.

This is how I came to evolve the 3 Phases Of Fear training model that I taught to at our live Total Parrot Transformation seminar, that was eventually responsible for training my African Grey to stop biting and step up on cue within 30 days of me finally figuring out the formula.

The 3 Phases Of Fear training model is a holistic approach towards training your bird that is based off one key principles. They are:

Key Principle #1: Your birds progress is being blocked by EMOTIONAL reasons

Just like almost all of the problems we humans have are based off of unhealthy emotional reasons, like our Daddies not spending enough time with us, being abused, etc., parrots typically are held up from becoming more tame from emotional reasons too.

As the name of my Training Model suggests (The 3 Phases of Fear), there are three MAIN emotional roadblocks that parrots run into that prevent them from being tame. Each of these Mental roadblocks seem to be caused by specific, and very different emotional reason.

This means that in order to help your parrot develop, and overcome a certain type of fear he has, you need to use a training technique specifically designed for overcoming that particular fear; and STOP using those techniques once the fear has been overcome.

But it’s a little more complicated then that…

Not all Emotions are weighted equally!

Have you ever seen Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid?

In his pyramid, Maslow suggested that people can’t work on filling the needs at the top of the pyramid before filling the needs at the bottom of the pyramid, because some needs build a foundation for even having the ability to want other needs.

In birds there are three stages of emotional needs that you will need to work on to ever have a tame bird. I call these these stages:

1) The Getting Closer Phase
2) The Accepting Contact Phase
3) The Initiating Contact Phase

In each of these three phases a parrot has a particular type of fear that is triggering him to bite or be afraid of you, and it takes a particular type of technique, or several techniques to help your bird get over that type of fear.

And like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you’d better not try to work on the 2nd and 3rd phases of fear before first addressing the emotional needs in the first phase.

A perfect example of this is my free video online that teaches a technique that I call the Power Pause technique. In this free video I show how I got two different birds to stop attacking when people came near them. (The Getting Closer Phase Of Fear)

It’s a specific technique for people who’s birds have an emotional problem with their owners getting to close to them, and in a few short minutes helps most birds fix this problem.

Some of my clients think this technique is MAGIC and want to use it to solve everything wrong with their bird… but it doesn’t work that way. It’s a technique that’s awesome at addressing one of the emotional roadblocks parrots still in the first phase of fear have.

If any of my clients who’ve had success using the Power Pause technique during the first phase of fear, were to try to use it to train their parrot to do a behavior in the second or third phase of fear, it wouldn’t work.

This is because the emotional roadblocks that your parrot has to overcome to be comfortable with you coming close to him, are different from those he has to overcome to enjoy being pet, and different again for the emotions he has to overcome to be comfortable stepping up onto your hand.

When you are clear about where your parrot’s emotional weaknesses are, what techniques can help you overcome them and what ones can’t, that’s when you can achieve incredibly fast taming and training results.

If your bird is not getting noticeably better behaved 9 out of every 10 days you train him, then you are most likely not using techniques that are addressing his emotional needs the way they need to be.

If you’d like my most advanced teachings on how to match up the most appropriate training techniques help your parrot overcome his emotional roadblocks, I would encourage you to watch my 3 Phases of Fear & Mistrust DVD presentation. You can get a copy here:

Total Parrot Transformation Seminar DVD Series

We are running low on these sets, so there might be a couple week delay while we wait for a new shipment to come in, so please be patient, and feel free to email us if you can’t wait that long for your copy to show up.

Key Take Away To Ponder:

If your parrot does not have a lot of emotional roadblocks to overcome, his training should be incredibly fast. With these types of parrots, you can drastically increase the quality of your relationship with them by simply doing daily trick training exercises. The parrot owners who talk about how they fix their bird’s behavior in minutes or a few days are typically owning this kind of bird with a low level of emotional baggage.

If simple daily interaction and trick training sessions are not improving the relationship you have with your bird, your bird likely has more Emotional Baggage, and you should consider investing in more training education to fully understand how to work with the issues your bird has developed. Your bird is probably not ready for trick training yet, and needs to have some emotional roadblock removal first.

The more emotional baggage your parrot has, the MORE training techniques you will need to use to tame him, and the more you will need to fully understand his behavior. But this does NOT mean it has to take a long time. You may not be able to fully tame your bird in a few days, but you should be able to drastically transform your bird in 30 days.

I’m not saying anyone can completely eliminate their birds problems in 30 days, but if your doing things right, you should be able to make enough progress that you’re incredibly encouraged to continue working with your bird.

Try to remember that you are probably on track if 9 out of 10 times that you interact with your parrot you are NOT getting bitten, and he is making noticeable progress. If this does NOT describe how the relationship with your parrot is going, and you do not make daily progress with him, consider investing in more advanced training like my Seminar DVD series or from another professional parrot trainer that can help point out why your not getting the results you’re after with your bird.

Here’s hoping this helps some of you get a little better understanding about what you should be able to expect out of your training.

I really don’t like the word “desensitizing”, it sounds so…insensitive. It is an appropriate term, however, and sometimes necessary. If you’ve read some of my recent posts, you know that Theo, my goffins cockatoo,  is often overwhelmed by new things, sometimes by old things, and that I have been concerned about how she would handle the changes in Florida.  In no particular order, these are some of the bigger concerns I had and how she actually responded to them:

1) the chaos of packing up the house – didn’t care…….

2) the actual trip to FL – no biggie……

3) being in the company strange and bigger birds – bring it on……..

4) being in a different house/cage – yawn

Theo fell in love with Jamie and Dave right away (another first).  On the first day following our arrival back in Florida, they took their two galahs, Bondi and Bandit, and their African grey Cressi into the house for a fly around.  We brought Theo in as well.  I figured she would be interested, but kept a watchful eye for any signs of stress.  Within minutes, Theo joined the party and was actually enjoying being tossed into the air with the others.  Who IS this bird??

Dave has suggested to me that I baby Theo.  I can’t disagree.  While I would not handle things differently than I did when she first came to live with me, the very slow, tedious adjustment to just about everything, Theo is obviously ready for some challenge now.  I wonder how long I might have waited to open this door for her if I were still in Austin. And then I think about the recent incident with the purple flip flops and the terror I saw in her eyes and I have to wonder if someone switched Theo out with another goffins during the trip to Orlando.  I have no idea what’s going on, but I LIKE it!

All of the Womach’s parrots are unusually open to new things and experiences.  In fact, it blew me away.  Events that send most parrots screaming and scurrying for cover signal playtime here.  I know a lot of that comes from specific training in that area.  Dave and Jamie have put a lot of energy into seeing that their parrots are desensitized, able and willing to fly to different props under varying circumstances.  Part of their birds eager acceptance is likely because Dave and Jamie have raised them since babies, which is not the case with me.

We, meaning myself on the one hand and Jamie and Dave on the other, do many things very differently.  For one thing, I haven’t trained my birds in the traditional sense. I focus more on behavioral training.  Since most of my birds are rehomed, I have a different level of expectation from my flock because they have had problems to address.

This is especially true of Linus, my umbrella cockatoo. While I don’t have much background on him, I suspect he has been bounced from home to home.  Notable is the fact that he was wild caught, which means that his first contact with humans was as bad as it gets.  That he was willing to give our species a second chance says a lot about him, but he is downright stubborn when, in his opinion, pushed too far.

Linus has been trained but doesn’t necessarily benefit from it in the same way other birds do.  He does not like to be told what to do and I believe he regards training as a showdown – the force of his will vs. yours.  It’s a shame because I really think he would be happier if he could feel content with relinquishing some control and allow himself to walk away with a feeling of accomplishment and a full tummy.  Instead he resists.  He is not food oriented, in fact I worry often about his diet, and he is uncooperative.  So, with Linus, I have only the requirements that he be happy, healthy and handleable.

Jamie and I have bounced thoughts back and forth regarding this subject.  We think that both Libby, my quaker, who has shown some signs of aggression here but not in Austin, and Theo, who has shown fearfulness in Austin but not here, are the two best candidates for training and the the food management necessary.  They both have shown a willingness to work for food.

Both Jamie and Dave can easily retrieve Theo from her cage.  She really likes them both and seems to flow with the way they do things here.  It’s so wonderful to see her so relaxed in a situation that I expected to be traumatic for her.  Jamie took her into the shower with her this morning, let her check out the makeup brushes and experience the hair dryer and everything seemed to meet Theo’s approval.  I am very proud of my little girl and expect to find her missing following Jamie and Dave’s departure from Orlando.

There might come a time when, because of illness or injury, you will need to medicate your parrot.  It’s a good idea to start preparing for that possibility now, before the need for your bird’s cooperation arises.

Several years ago, after I had first gotten Linus, he managed to escape his cage while I was at work.  I came home to a complete mess.  A quick glance showed that all the other bird’s cages were still closed, so I spent the next several minutes assessing the damage and trying to determine if Linus had gotten into anything dangerous that might require medical attention.  It was about 15 minutes before I noticed the blood in the cockatiel cage.

My cockatiels had been raised around Abu, a uniquely gentle and patient umbrella cockatoo, who never had shown interest in harming anything besides my laundry basket.  I assume that when Linus found his way to the cockatiel’s cage, they went over to greet him, not realizing that Linus did not have the same good intentions as Abu.  Whatever took place happened through the bars of the cage.  Tinky’s leg and foot were badly injured and I was surprised that an amputation was not found necessary.  Still, the injury was serious, and I was sent home with a course of antibiotics that was to be injected into the breast muscle of a squirming, angry little cockatiel twice a day.

Cockatiels are so little and the needle on the syringe was so big.  It was actually a gauge used for human medical needs and it seemed like the equivalent of pushing an ice pick into the muscle tissue of a human.  Tinky was a trooper and we only had a problem with one failed injection.  After I got more comfortable with the process, I began to realize how much more efficient the injections were, in this circumstance, than administering the medication orally would have been.  So much can be lost in the struggle between an unprepared bird and owner, that its effectiveness can be substantially diminished.

Years later, Linus contracted AGY, a serious, and very contageous fungal infiltration, which required oral medication – three 30 day courses over a period of about nine months.  The combination of the symptoms of the disease and spring hormones left him disagreeable on a good day – a raging demon on a bad one, and there was this medication that I HAD to get into him.  It was bright yellow, thick, chalky and bitter tasting.  Even though it had been “cherry flavored”, it was just horrible to the taste and I braced myself to be showered in it on the first dose.  To my huge surprise, he just swallowed it, and continued to do that with each subsequent dose through every course of treatment.  This is not very Linus-like behavior.  I got really lucky.  I was not prepared, nor had I given any previous thought to preparing any of my parrots for what happens during times of ill health.

How do you prepare for effectively delivering oral medications? First, be sure you understand the nature of the bird’s illness and what the prescribed medication is intended to achieve.  Follow your vet’s directions for application to the letter and be certain to administer all doses, even after the bird appears to be feeling better.  Know what side effects might be experienced.

While it may be necessary to towel your parrot to give the needed doses of medication, it is also very stressful for her.  If there is a way to achieve this goal without causing distress, it only makes sense to take this route.  Target training your bird for just this sort of situation is an excellent way to prepare yourself.  Try offering fruit juice or liquified fruit as the reward in a syringe (no needle!!) or an eye dropper.  A friend of mine targets her bird directly to a filled syringe.  There are several great videos on this site teaching you methods of target training.

Parrots can be most difficult and unpredictable when it comes to any unfamiliar procedure.  Without preparation, medicating your bird usually goes like this:

HOW TO MEDICATE A BIRD:  (author unknown)

Occasionally, we find it necessary to medicate our feathered friends.
Here are some pointers to help you with this task.

FIRST APPLICATION:

Retrieve the bird from the cage.
Set the bird on a table and hold its head by carefully grasping the neck where it joins the lower jaw, or mandible.

With your other hand, grasp the medicine syringe and place the tip into the left side of the bird’s mouth.

Depress the plunger and squirt the medicine toward the back of the bird’s throat.

Wipe excess medicine from the bird’s beak.
Place the bird back in the cage.

SUBSEQUENT APPLICATIONS:

Attempt to retrieve the bird from the cage.

Apply bandages as necessary to wounds on your hands and arms.

Retrieve the bird from its new hiding place under the coffee table.

Carefully immobilize the bird’s head to prevent further tissue damage to your body.

Attempt to break the “Vulcan Death Grip” and remove the bird’s feet from your hand.

Apply more bandages and a strong analgesic cream to the new wounds on your hands and arms.

Immobilize the bird by carefully wrapping it in a bath towel.

Watch in amazement as the bird “morphs.” Its head and tail will probably swap position,
putting your tender flesh in mortal danger again.

Hold the bird snugly in its terrycloth prison.

Grasp the medicine syringe.

Try to stop trembling in fear and pain.

Place the tip of the syringe into the left side of the bird’s mouth.
Ignore the crushed tip.

Depress the plunger and squirt the medicine toward the back of the bird’s throat.

Wipe excess medicine out of your eyes.

Release the bird and squirt medicine in the general vicinity of its face.
Some medicine may actually go into the mouth.

The rest will be absorbed by osmosis.

Shoo the bird back to the cage.

Spend the rest of the day attempting to regain the bird’s affection with yummy snacks and new toys.