I taught my Senegal Parrot Kili to do the bat trick right out of parrot magic. It was fairly easy to teach it to her because she was already very hand tame. Getting her head down out of the fetal position was a bit more work but nothing unmanageable. Just like the play dead trick, the bigger challenge and most time consuming part was to get her to put her head down. Teaching the basics of the trick does not take more than a few days but then getting the bird to stay still and keep head down during trick is what takes months of perfection.

I even went so far as to teach my parrot to do the inverted fetch that you can see at the end of the video. This took zero training because the bird is so smart that it totally figured out to fetch her ball and drop it in the bin (from the bat position) the first time I tried it. She made the connection and it is just super cool to realize the bird is so smart.

We even taught our budgie to do the bat trick. I told my girlfriend that I didn’t think a budgie could do it but she liked the trick a lot and wanted to try anyway. Unlike the Kili, Duke the budgie wasn’t very hand tame and definitely did not like being held upside down. When we started teaching the trick, Duke would bite and try to get out of our hands. Although it took a few weeks to train the trick, by the end of training, he was a far tamer bird and would tolerate being held in just about any angle and way. Hands on trick training is also a great way to tame your bird to hands and make it less bitey. If a budgie can be taught this trick, I cannot imagine any parrot being unable to do it.