Budgie

One of the things that most fascinates me about parrots is the differences in their personalities. Even within the same species, each bird is unique with its own demeanor and preferences.
We should fully research the species we keep, looking into both their captive and wild settings, so we are aware of traits that are typical for that species. But in the end, each bird is its own man, so to speak, and those intricacies will stand out.

Hyacinth macaw

I have owned two umbrella cockatoos at different times in my life – they couldn’t have been less alike. Abu, my first, was laid back and amicable. She was quiet and reserved and she would stay perched for hours, as long as she had something interesting to do and her favorite people were nearby – things unheard of with the vast majority of this species.

Linus, on the other hand, is temperamental and high strung. Nothing, but nothing, keeps him in one spot for more than a couple of minutes, and he will always pause to look over his shoulder as he wanders away to be sure that I notice that he’s doing things his own way. It’s as if the two birds came from alternate universes.

Congo african grey

One thing I have learned over the years is that despite the differences in temperament, most birds are very compliant and patient. Most will accept change and adapt well as long as we don’t let things become too uncomfortable for them too many times. Even Linus, by far and away the more challenging of the two cockatoos, would patiently wait for me to get things right before he showed the signs of reaching his threshold of tolerance with my human ineptness.

The problem is that being human, we have a hard time recognizing when we are pushing the limits at all. One day we will be going about our regular routine and everything will be fine, and then the following day the same routine is met with anger and mistrust. Everything we do is wrong. We stand there scratching our heads wondering if this is even the same bird because there’s no way your bird could have changed so much overnight.

Your bird has changed, but it didn’t happen overnight. It has taken a long time to get to this point. It is fed up and has put its little foot down and said: “That’s it!! I’m over this!” It refuses to cooperate with the same activities that were seemingly acceptable yesterday. It’s effort to communicate its unhappiness to you has ended in failure as we missed all the warning signs and persisted in doing things the same way – over and over again. Now the relationship is in jeopardy.

Rosebreasted cockatoo

As with every behavioral problem you face with your bird, there ARE warnings that preceed it. Here are three easy to spot signs that trouble is brewing. YOUR bird may display additional signs (back to each bird being an individual), but these signs are evident in all species when limits of tolerance are being reached:

1. The stink eye: Most people who have had birds for a while see this right away – it is quite simply a dirty look. When birds are feeling happy, respected and safe, the shape of their eyes is perfectly round. When your bird is uneasy with what is going on around it, the eye shape changes to varying degrees of “squinty” Go to the mirror and give yourself an overly dramatized angry/warning look. That’s the look. Watch how your bird reacts to different things throughout the day and notice how the eye shape changes. It is a useful tool in reading body language – especially in cockatoos.
2. The hesitation: Whenever your bird even slightly hesitates in doing the things it normally does without pause, it is something you should pay attention to. This is a clear sign that your bird is giving second thoughts to interacting with you. A good example of this is in the step up. When you reach to retrieve your bird and your bird thinks twice, even though it eventually does step up, it is a warning that something is going wrong in your relationship. It might be the result of you being too pushy and demanding in your expectations that the bird comply with your wishes.
3. The “dis”: In the wild, when a bird does not wish to interact with another from it’s flock, it will simply turn its back on that bird as if to say “Go away. I don’t like you.” They do the same to us when they wish to relay that same message. It’s pretty rude by human standards, but a signal doesn’t get any clearer than that. However, I think it is also an effort on their part to avoid confrontation with us when they feel we have the tendency to be too pushy. Imagine how disrespected they might feel when we disregard that effort.

Quaker parakeet

We sometimes ask too much of our birds. They need to be respected and they need to be given choices. It can’t always be us telling them what to do and expecting them to cooperate. They have minds and ideas of their own and should be given the right to have things their way sometimes.  It’s only fair.

There are times where we need our bird’s immediate cooperation, such as when danger is present. I have learned over the years that when you show your bird respect, it will CHOOSE to show you respect by complying with your wishes on these occassions. If you observe and respond to the three warning signs above, you should be able to sidestep pushing your bird, and your relationship, over the edge.

Blue and gold macaw

Are you noticing lately that your sweet, happy cockatiel is a little nippy? Has your quiet-as-a-mouse African grey become loud and opinionated? Is your cockatoo cuddling in ways that make you blush?
It’s the onset of the spring season here in the northern hemisphere of the world. Although in most places it is still very cold, our birds are able to perceive the subtle signs of spring, even when all we see is the harshness of winter.
Parrots see things we do not. Their amped up eyesight allows them the see light patterns that are the telltale signs of spring. They are able to recognize that the days are getting longer and that warmer weather – and breeding season – are around the corner.

Umbrella cockatoo

These signs trigger hormonal changes in our birds and cause behaviors that may lay dormant the rest of the year. Nestiness, excess vocalizing and territorial aggression are common this time of year. And as unreasonable as it sounds, many times when behaviors turn aggressive it is our fault for being  unprepared or unaware of the triggers.

If your bird makes his way under the couch and bites you when you try to retrieve him, you are paying the painful price for making not one, but two mistakes: 1) you allowed your bird to follow its nesting insticts and head for a dark space, and 2) the intrusion of your hand triggered the instict to protect the nest (territorial aggression).
While you could never call this behavior acceptable, it is understandable and even provoked. It isn’t the onset of a behavioral problem (unless you reinforce it with your reaction to it). You chock it up to experience and you don’t make the same mistake next year.

Blue throated macaw

However, we must be careful not to use hormones as an excuse or an explanation for ALL unwanted behaviors – ones that might be present all year long and simply escalated because of hormones.

The perfect example of this was a woman I knew a few years back who had a yellow sided conure. Throughout the year, whenever she would try to pick the bird up from its play stand, it would lunge at her hand, sometimes nipping, before it would finally relent and step up. She always played down the event saying that she must have frightened the bird or would try to defend the action by saying it was crabby because it hadn’t slept enough the night before.

The following spring, her bird, then four years old, actually bit her hard and drew blood, she called me for help with her “hormonal” bird. No doubt her bird was hormonal and conures are territorial at any time of the year, but this was a problem that had begun a long time back.

The point of this post is this: I have always encouraged you to be understanding and forgiving of behaviors that are relative to breeding. It is a difficult time not just for humans but is stressful for our birds as well. Since birds are guests in our homes, it is our job to do what we can to eliminate from the environment the things that cause the behaviors. Unfortunately, we are humans and we understand only a portion of what is happening to our birds.

While we are busy being kind and compassionate, we have to be careful not to excuse behaviors that are not seasonal, or blame new unwanted behaviors on hormones. When we see a problem, at any time of the year, we should address it before it become ingrained in the bird’s behavior and becomes a challenge to deal with. Sometimes the behaviors we see in full bloom in spring are the results of seeds planted earlier in the year.

People still seem to think discipline works with birds. IT DOESN’T! Yet I’ve been teaching a person how to touch train and when they don’t get a reaction they want or when the bird looks to bite them, they – without even THINKING – immediately react to hitting the bird on the head with the target stick… WHAT?!?!

Or shouting a firm, “NO! That’s not allowed!”

I can tell you right now if I told my husband that stuff, he’d do it anyway JUST to prove a point that he CAN and I can’t tell him what to do.

Umm… sound like 100% of parrots? Do you really think your bird is going to react like a dog and feel bad for hurting you?

Sometimes, no matter how much I told someone “Stop yelling at your bird, distract it with something else.” they just wouldn’t listen and nothing is more frustrating to me than having someone ask for my help and then not take it and then COMPLAIN that whatever they are doing isn’t working. Ummm…? Maybe you should stop what you’re doing since it’s not working and listen. Kind of like the reaction you want from your bird, huh?

Many people don’t hang out with their birds because they’re destructive. I get that. I spent a lot of money on my furniture, I don’t want it ruined. But I still keep my birds out on it with me, and I keep a PILE stock full of TOYS for them, things I use to distract them with when they’re up to no good. It works like a charm! I keep a variety, things they haven’t seen before, colors and textures and everything you could think of, I also use myself. You can always click and reward your bird for just being cool and collected, not doing anything but being a sweet bird. Nothing wrong with that, everything right with that.

It seems to me people (ie: humans) have much more tolerance with kids (grandchildren and the like) than they do their birds. Well, your birds are pretty much like children.

If you look at it like that you might treat them differently, you might PREPARE to have them out and about by having things for them to do instead of yelling at them for trying to find something to do on their own that only gets them hit or yelled at or put back in their cage.

I hope I don’t sound too much like I’m ranting…

Above is my toy box I keep around the TV. We only watch TV in our den and we love to do so with our birds a bit so they can hang out and have no expectations of us or themselves to do anything. I keep lots of balls and a variety of weird things (I shop in the cat toy section for these because they’re different and only serve this single purpose) the birds are supervised with them and spend the whole time playing with them while I can calmly watch TV or chill out and talk with Dave. It’s nice, it’s peaceful and it includes them.

It’s not disciplining, it’s distracting.

Hyacinth macaw

If I’m going to be honest, I have to admit that I used to have a real problem with the idea of a training diet. It seemed unthinkable that a bird, virtually a wild animal in terms of its lack of domestication, should be locked in a cage and then denied food, something it would be free to acquire in the wild. It is psychologically damaging for any sentient being to be kept at another’s mercy, how could this ever be considered a good thing?

Training bridges a gap, fills in the blanks in the relationship between a human and a parrot. Where there was an inability to communicate, there is now established a “language” that both could understand and build a relationship around. Instead of looking at each other like aliens, you and your bird are comrades, teammates. It changes everything.

Blue and Gold Macaw

Of course, I wanted this for me and my bird, but I didn’t want to have to starve him to get there. I was afraid that while I was laying the groundwork for communication, that I would be violating the very basic understanding and trust that I would care for him and see to his needs. One step forward and two steps back – it didn’t seem worth it.

It took me a while to come around to the notion that food management did not equal suffering, but I had to let go of some of my “old” thinking to reach that conclusion.

Budgie

My first hint came when I began studying the habits of wild birds – looking at the ways they spent their time and realizing the difficulties they face everyday. Life in the wild isn’t easy. There are times when food sources are not abundant and birds may go to roost at night having had barely enough food to get by.

With the best intentions at heart, we have the tendency to feel that we owe our birds the ultimate in comfort in our homes. There are likely many different reasons for that thinking, but this is not necessarily what is best for our birds. It is unnatural for birds NOT to work for their food, which never, ever appears to them in the wild by way of a hand out.

When done properly, food management will teach your bird to see his empty food dish as an opportunity to train – something he will anticipate as the bonding and learning experience it is, but also as a way to earn his food.

Congo african grey

Trainers will refer to “motivation” in the training diet. This speaks to the level of hunger your bird is experiencing. A properly motivated bird is hungry enough to want to train and be eager to go through the steps. A bird that is too hungry will be uncoopereative and unwilling to “earn” food. Letting your bird get to that point is not only unproductive from a training standpoint, but it will damage your relationship with your bird.

If you are doing it right, your bird should never even be aware that you are managing his food. Using measurement, and through trial and error, you can get a fairly accurate idea of how much your bird eats and limit his portions to only that amount.

You never want to take your bird’s food away, instead, you want it to run out. There is different psychology involved between the two actions. When you remove a dish from your bird’s cage containing food, you might be presumed to be the cause of your bird’s hunger. If the food runs out, there is simply no food, just an empty bowl. Once you begin training, your bird will see the empty bowl as an opportunity, as I said before.

Blue throated macaw

Another advantage, two actually, in using a training diet and feeding your bird at a later time in the day is that: 1) your bird loses his expectation for timely feeding, something else that rarely happens in the wild. He will no longer call out demanding to be fed when he sees the first rays of dawn or at another time of his choosing, and 2) if you feed him just before he normally starts his sundown calls, it can eliminate a potentially loud and unnerving part of the day for your neighborhood.

I promise you that your bird will not starve to death if you don’t place a bowl of food in the cage at the crack of dawn, or even at the crack of noon. After observing how food management lends itself to the training experience, I now know that it does not cause hardship, but helps to set the stage for success in what is one of the most rewarding parts of your bird’s life.

female eclectus

I try to cover this topic at least twice a year because it’s so important. I never have to look hard to find an event to inspire one of these posts.

I needed some supplies the other day and went to the local bird store where they have a few parrots for sale, among them a female eclectus and a cherry headed conure. Both of the birds had been in the store for several months awaiting purchase. They were, by this time, well adjusted to strangers gathering by their cages for a closer look, and sometimes little fingers would poke through the bars. They always handled the intrusions without a fuss.
This day, there were two women admiring the birds. One was a young woman, probably in her early 20′s looking at the conure. She was set back about three feet from the cage, kneeling. The other woman was older, perhaps in her 40′s, and had a toddler in a stroller with her. She had her hands resting on the cage bars as she spoke boisterously to the eclectus.

photo of cherry headed conure by sfcitizen.com/blog

I stood back and observed the two women interacting with the parrots, and watched each parrot’s response. I remember feeling very impressed with the young woman. She had positioned herself so that she and the bird had level eye contact and she stayed at a non-threatening and respectful distance.

It seemed that she was intuitively aware the the dynamic between herself, a much larger predatory animal, and the bird, a small, caged prey animal. She spoke quietly, but engagingly, to the bird, who was clearly taken with her. It moved to the side of the cage closest to her and turned its head to the side to get a better look. The bird’s body language said comfort.

camelot macaw

The older woman, the one with the apparent child rearing experience, was far less impressive. She was forceful and discourteous. She made no attempt to connect with the bird and it sat tensely at the point furthest from her in its cage.

She talked with the man accompanying her about how important it is for a child to have the responsibility of a pet and that this one would be a perfect choice. I hoped that the child she referred to wasn’t the toddler. When the man protested about owning a bird, she reminded him that “birds live in cages. What could be easier than that?” He didn’t disagree.
I was suddenly nervous for the future of this bird and felt inclined to say something, so I joked that birds no more “live” in cages than people do in bedrooms. I mentioned their need for out of cage time and human interaction and exaggerated the behavioral issues that result from inadequate care as best I could.
She smiled at me politely and then excitedly turned to the man and anounced that the red on the ecletus was a perfect match for the drapes – now they HAD to get it. I think that’s when the gloves came off for me. Imagine the deciding factor being compatibility with the home decor! At that time, I MIGHT have made up a horrible story about someone’s extensive plastic surgery nightmare following the bite of an angry parrot. I’m not admitting to anything, but if I DID fabricate that story, I’m not at all ashamed.

female eclectus

I am pleased to announce that they left empty handed! That lady, who I don’t fault for her ignorance about parrots, is not someone who should own one, at least not at this point in her life. Her energy level and body language were stressful to the bird, and she never even noticed. She was clueless about the needs of a parrot. She was ready to make an impulse purchase that might have had horrible consequences for this very sweet bird.

By contrast, the younger, much wiser, woman looking at the conure would have made an ideal home for a parrot. She was, by nature, exactly what a bird needs in a human: she was thoughtful, and deliberate and had clearly taken the time to check out parrot ownership. I had a chance to talk with her for a moment. Her reason for not getting the conure was the best one there is: she wasnt ready for the commitment.

Blue and gold macaw

We are parrot owners. And we are GOOD ones, I will venture to say, since I am taking the time to write this and you are caring enough to read it. We love our birds, and, in fact, everyone else’s too. It’s who we are.

But, we have a responsibility. While we are singing the praises of our beloved companions, we must be certain to avoid “selling” parrot ownership to the wrong people. Parrots do not make good pets for all people. Whenever we are faced with the opportunity, we must let prospective new owners know the real truths: while parrots are beautiful, intelligent and fun – they are also loud, messy and destructive. Their basic care is costly and very time consuming.
If you are able to get across only a single idea, let it be that, aside from providing the aspects of care that are necessary to maintain life, failure to provide the care necessary to promote good mental health can result in emotional issues ranging from biting and screaming to feather destruction and self mutilation. Hopefully that will give some people pause.

Mitred conure

Try to remember that every time you let someone walk away with the notion that a bird makes the perfect pet, that person might just go out and get one. If you don’t inspire caution, some pet store parrot could begin a life of constant rehoming as one owner after another fails.

With the right education, even the lady who wanted a bird to match her drapes might be taught to be a good owner, but first we have to guide her. Let’s make that our mission in 2012. Let’s help birds by helping people understand their needs – or understand that they are unable to provide them.

Umbrella cockatoo Linus

With the holidays behind us, I can finally find the time to breathe. The chaos of the Christmas season is always very stressful for me and sometimes I can be a little less than festive this time of year.

Jamie and I have been working closely lately on a project she is developing and she had to point out to me that I have been a bit abrasive. She brings ideas to the table and counts on me to help her find a way to make them a reality. I have been quick to shoot them down and it is deflating to her creativity.  I’ve been kind of…begins with b…rhymes with itchy. I  hate it that she had to point this out to me and that I wasn’t able to see it for myself.

It makes me wonder how I have been around the birds. I have always found them relaxing.  Sure, they are a lot of work and sometimes loud, but I find it peaceful to have them nearby. They make me think about the unsophisticated elegance of nature and they remind me of how simple life is supposed to be. I seem to lose sight of that during this time of year.

The birds are so receptive to my emotions that I wonder how much of my stress I might have passed on to them. Unfortunately, Linus, my umbrella cockatoo, is not here this season because he is always my gauge. He’s like a mirror. I could always see my own mood reflected back at me through him. If I was impatient with him, he was impatient with me. He always told me when I needed to decompress.

This year I had to be told by Jamie.  So I am letting go of the holiday stress. I am going to find a new appreciation for the things around me and let the birds and everyone else know how much they mean to me.  Happy New Year to you all.