Ok, the parrot did not actually die but she plays a really convincing impression of it. I just point my finger as a gun at her and say bang and she drops over onto her back. Then she tucks her head back and her feet stick up. She lays like that until I release her with a click and then rolls over to get up and get a treat.

It’s been close to six months since I have taught my Senegal Parrot this trick but it isn’t until now that she has done a really convincing play dead. Teaching the roll onto back part was actually the least time consuming part. She picked up the roll onto back and lay part of the trick in about one week. I took the second week to change the cue to my gun finger but that was not a difficult thing to achieve either. The tough part was to get her to lay back all the way. If you look at her original play dead video, you can see that she used to keep her head up in the fetal position. But this was ruining the trick because she would bite her feet and move her head around.

So what I did to make the trick really work is to teach her to get her head back to the floor. At first she would play dead with her head up and I could get her to just tap the floor with her head. It took several months to practice this trick enough (while also teaching many new tricks) that she consistently would lay down and keep her head down the entire time. But I think all this work paid off and now she does an excellent play dead trick.

The moral of the story is that trick training is an evolving process and if your bird isn’t doing the trick perfect you should keep on working on it. It may take just a day, week, or month to teach the basis of a particular trick. But to break bad habits and get the bird to do the trick perfectly could take months or years. However long it takes, keep working at it a little each day (besides your regular training routine and new tricks) and over time the trick will improve and evolve into the perfect trick you are striving to teach.

It’s rare to see a bird sleeping. Nearly impossible in the wild because it will either be dark or the bird startled before you could catch a glimpse. Less unlikely yet still rare to see your companion parrot sleeping in your home. That is because normally it sleeps at night when you do. Otherwise there is just too much activity going on that the bird is too aroused to sleep. But on occasion there are opportunities to see your birds completely relaxed.

If your bird trusts you, if tired it may decide to take a nap in front of you, knowing that you won’t hurt it and will protect it from danger. Most times I’ve seen my birds fall asleep is sitting out on their playpens for a long time when I am busy on the computer doing my own thing. If the environment in the room is very mellow and the birds are sleepy, they will doze off.

My Senegal Parrot starts by fluffing up her feathers and getting really relaxed. Next she gets on one foot and even squats down to get her feathers to cover her exposed foot. The first time I saw this I wondered where her foot had gone! In fact birds lose a great deal of heat through their feet because there is no insulation on them. By sleeping on one leg, birds can save a lot of energy that would be lost otherwise. The way birds leg muscles and tendons work, the bird can sleep relaxed on one foot and hold its balance. After getting on one leg you may observe your birds closing for a few minutes at a time and you know it’s getting sleepy. Finally, if your bird is really going to go to sleep, it may turn its head around 180 degrees and tuck its beak under the scapula feathers. This also preserves a lot of heat energy.

Birds may sleep with one eye open and this is not just a saying. They can have a state of unihemispheric sleep where one side of the brain shuts down for sleep while the other keeps an eye open to look out for danger. The brain is cross linked as on mammals so if the left eye is closed, then the right brain is sleeping. There have been some studies done about bird dreams and scientists have found that some types of birds actually practice their songs in their sleep. I wonder if my parrot dreams about training sessions because I swear to you, she does a newly learned trick so much better after a night of sleep.

It was very difficult to catch the above video footage because on the occasions I’ve seen my birds fall asleep, reaching to get the camera would always wake them up and ruin the opportunity. This must have been a particularly sleepy day that they slept through it as I caught them falling asleep.

It seems like my parrots get especially sleepy midday during a drop in pressure prior to rain. Sometimes there is a thunderstorm coming and the birds get really sleepy and fall asleep on their playpens and I get sleepy and fall asleep on the bed next to them and nap an hour. It’s kind of fun because all gets quiet and everyone is just really sleepy and wants to relax. I trust that they won’t do anything crazy while I’m asleep and that if they do it would probably wake me up. Then I wake up refreshed and so do the birds. They are usually excited to be handled after this and are happy to spend time with me. I think it’s a nice way to spend meaningful time with the birds and to build a mutual trust both ways.

*Note, when I do not support actually sleeping with your bird on the same bed or location. I know that babies have been killed sleeping with their parents and the same thing could happen to a bird. What I mean by taking a nap with your bird is having them on a perch or cage near you but not close enough that they could get hurt.

Now that you have read about non-food motivators and how to ration them so that you can be the distributor of these rewards, let’s looks at the actual balance required for a healthy relationship.

-10 – - – - – - – - -  0 – - – - – - – - – 10+

Fearful                                       Aggressive

In this range of parrot behavior you can see two polarities of a bird that has an issue with the owner or visitor. But as a parrot owner, you want to find the middle ground. You do not want the bird to be fearful and run/fly away from you but neither do you want it to bite and be aggressive. It is important to find that middle ground without favoring one way or the other.

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Hates                                               Loves

This is the range of love/hate from a parrot and obviously no one want to be hated by their parrot because that will lead to the fear/aggression scale we saw above. So if you find the balance of neither fear nor aggression, you will be out of the hate zone for the parrot. Now the bigger question is where should your relationship fall on the love scale? The obvious answer may seem t0 be 10 out of 10, that you want your bird to be head over heals in love with you. But this may not actually be a healthy relationship because the bird will be so dependent on you that it will get very depressed or out of control in your absence.

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Independent                          Too dependent

So since we are trying to figure out how much you want your bird to love you, let’s consider how dependent the bird should be. If your bird is completely independent, then it wants nothing to do with you because it can sit in its cage on its own and keep itself busy. The other extreme is an utterly spoiled and dependent bird. This is one that will scream or pluck feathers the moment you leave its site. The spoiled bird will be constantly demanding attention and drive you crazy. So a healthier balance is a bird somewhere in the middle. A bird that can keep itself busy but be happy to see you and want to spend some time with you as well. The toy diet I mentioned is a great way to help maintain this balance by keeping the best toys out of the cage. Ignoring screaming and giving your bird independent downtime in the cage are vital components to maintain this balance.

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Can’t pick up                          Can’t keep off

This range sums up the last few quite well. If your bird hates you, is too independent, fearful, etc, you won’t be able to pick it up or take it out of its cage. I know many people have this problem. But on the other hand, many people can’t get their bird off their shoulder or can’t get it back into the cage. Both of these cases are taking things to an extreme and cause problems for the owner and the bird.

-10 – - – - – - – - -  0 – - – - – - – - – 10+

Neglected                                     Spoiled

This final range can shed some light on which way a relationship is being swayed. It is not a good idea to spoil your bird whether it is with toys, food, or attention because it will become too dependent on having that. But of course you do not want to neglect your bird either and leave it bored and under stimulated. This is where you need to find your own routine and healthy balance.

It is necessary to balance the bird’s time out of the cage with time in the cage. If your bird doesn’t like to come out, then vice verse, you have to get it out of the cage some more and get it more used to being out. It is important that the bird has toys in the cage to keep it busy but it should not have too many toys to the point that it would rather stay in the cage than come out. You should feed it a healthy diet and never starve your bird, yet it is necessary to train it when it is hungry and feed it the food it likes best. All of these are elements of a balanced relationship with your bird. Check back to this blog frequently for more tips about maintaining balance with your bird.

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

I pet my Senegal Parrot in response to her petting herself or getting fluffed up if she has been quiet and well behaved. If she screams for attention or bites to demand being pet, I ignore her. Thus she is learning favorable behavior and I am using petting as a reward.

Petting Diet

My Senegal Parrot likes being pet so I ration that as well. I do not pet her (even if I want to) if she is doing something undesirable. On the other hand I will reward her for doing something good by petting her. This can work well as a reward when the bird is not hungry for food rewards. As part of a personal experiment, I almost exclusively reward my parrot with petting rather than a food reward for doing the bat trick. Since it is such a hands on trick, it is just easier for me to pet her rather than rush to get a treat. Even without the food reward, she still performs the trick enthusiastically.

So instead of petting your bird just whenever you want something soft to cuddle, consider petting your bird for a favorable behavior. A favorable behavior doesn’t even have to be a trick per say. A favorable behavior can be sitting on its perch and not flying off (for a bird that is flighty) or a favorable behavior can be sitting quietly for a bird that is normally noisy.

Whatever you consider to be the favorable behavior, make sure you are rewarding that favorable behavior and ignoring (and most certainly not rewarding) the unfavorable. If you want your bird to sit on its perch unless you take it off, do not pet your bird if it gets off the perch and runs/flies over to you. By rationing the petting to behaviors you want the bird to do, your bird will learn to do more of that to get the attention it enjoys.

Often times I will reward my bird for behaviors that deserve a reward but not food every time. For instance I will scratch my birds head for stepping onto my hand sometimes or for coming out of the cage without an effort. I do not give this reward every time but my bird knows what it should do and knows that it should try every time to not miss out on the chance to get that reward.

Trick Training Diet

And I mean literally a rationing of the amount of training and not the amount of food. If you train your bird too much, it may just get tired of training. I try to end my bird training on a good note and the bird wanting more. After a while, bird trick training really goes beyond just having a chance to eat food for your bird. I think my parrot genuinely enjoys the process of training for all the excitement and attention. I think it finds the earning of the reward even more rewarding than the food itself. And the way I know this is because my bird will sometimes go on training after not being hungry and spit out the earned treats. Imagine that? A parrot doing a trick and spitting out an unopened sunflower seed! Yes! Parrots really can learn to enjoy the training but it is important to keep it all in good fun and never push them too much. The birds should look forward to training rather than try to avoid it.

The next article in this series will compare the merits of food vs social diets for companion parrots.

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.