Parrots, like human beings and other animals, do not like to be forced to do anything that is against their will. Often times, coming up to the cage and sticking your hand in disturbs the parrot’s environment and leads to biting. If the parrot is perfectly content and safe in the parrot without human attention, then it is unlikely to want or appreciate it.

The training diet is an important component of eliminating biting behavior because it gives the trainer something to motivate the parrot. As I have discussed in previous articles, the training diet does not have to be limited to food. You can use coming out of the cage, toys, attention, and vocalizations in addition to food as motivations not to bite.

The most important thing is to NEVER reward biting behavior. Generally the reason parrots bite is to block unwanted contact. The parrot is trying to train you by using negative reinforcement for the approaching behavior. If you back away, yell, scream, or leave the parrot alone, you will be REWARDING the biting behavior and increase the likelihood of the parrot learning to bite in similar situations again in the future.

Since we cannot use punishment to eliminate biting (because punishment will just lead to more fight/flight mentality and more biting), that only leaves us with the opportunity to use positive reinforcement instead. The only way to teach a bird not to bite is to reward it for doing ANYTHING other than biting. This can mean doing a trick, sitting quietly on a perch, vocalizing, or even stepping on your hand. Teaching your bird to do a trick when it is angry is a great way to distract it from the reason it wanted to bite and turn it into a positive situation.

Targeting onto finger is the ultimate step before regressing involvement of target stick

The reason I think targeting is the best tool for teaching parrots to step up is because it lets them make all the decisions and do all of the learning. The parrot is faced with a voluntary choice, follow target stick onto hand and get treat or just walk away from it and get nothing. This lets the parrot feel like it is choosing to step onto you rather than the classic “poke parrot with a stick until it steps on it style training.” Since you are not forcing the parrot to do anything, the parrot has virtually no motivation to bite you. Worst case scenario, it doesn’t choose to walk over to step up.

5) Don’t expect instant results – If your bird is biting, it probably learned to use biting to achieve something it wants. You cannot expect to undue months or years of learning to bite overnight. You have to be consistent, focused, and keep trying. If you start projecting human like thoughts on the bird (“it hates me,” “it’s doing it to spite me”), you will only disappoint yourself and not achieve results. This process can take minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years. The only way you will get results is if you keep trying until your bird gets to the right point. The only way I can guarantee you will not earn results is by giving up.

At first it may be difficult for a new parrot owner to differentiate between fear, aggression, and other signs the parrot may be showing. As you become more experienced with your bird, you will start to be able to predict what the bird’s behavior will be. For a parrot that always bites, it is actually pretty obvious that when you come near it, it will bite. The difficulty sooner comes with a parrot that is generally good but bites on occasion. That is the situation where you will have to learn to read your parrot and try to avoid those disturbances that make it bite. For the always biting parrot, you are going to have to teach it a new lifestyle through training diet, clicker conditioning, target training, and a lot of patience. Follow these steps, and you won’t have to deal with situations like this:

4) Target Training

This is the section you have probably been waiting for. Here is where I show and teach you exactly how to teach your bird to step up as an alternative to biting. So you are getting two in one. A bird that is less likely to bite and a bird that willingly steps onto your hand. The fact is, by teaching the bird to step up, you are eliminating the major cause of biting which is fear of hands.

Although this video features a Senegal Parrot, I guarantee that the exact same techniques and principles apply to all parrots. Perhaps the scale may vary between a parakeet and a macaw but the concept is exactly the same. This works great for senegals, cockatiels, budgies, parakeets, conures, parrotlets, lovebirds, african greys, cockatoos, amazons, eclectus, monk parakeets (quaker parrots), and macaws.

Target bird you are afraid to handle through cage bars

The first thing is to get your bird used to the target stick and the concept of touching it to get a treat. Since this article is more about using targeting to train a bird to step onto your hand, I will not devote as much time to explaining how to initially teach targeting. I will assume you know it as this point but if not, you can learn all about it from these two articles:

Target Training Budgie (but the concept is the same for any bird)

Single Handedly Target Training (very important skill you will need to apply here as well)

Once your bird is reliable at targeting (whether in or out of cage), you will be ready to move onto the next step. But seriously, your bird should be willing to make multiple steps and go anywhere in its cage to be able to touch it. One piece of advice to people whose bird bites the stick too hard or aggressively is to click about a quarter second before the beak touches or squeezes too hard on the stick. The bird will pay more attention to the click and ensuing treat and won’t destroy the stick or learn to bite hard.

The next stage is to get a perch you can hold in your hand to target the bird onto. I recommend literally using one of the perches that used to be in the cage because the bird will be used to it and not fearful. The bird will already know it is something safe to step on. I do not recommend using a different kind of stick, machined dowel, or anything else because the bird may be scared or aggressive toward it. Never use the target stick as something to step on or the bird will get very confused. This stage is quite simple and upon reaching success, you will be able to transport your bird about the house safely.

Target onto perch by holding parallel and using target

Hold the perch parallel to the place your bird is standing at a close distance and slightly higher than your bird’s feet. With your other hand, you will have to hold the clicker, treat, and target stick. Point the tip of the target stick in front of your bird but far away enough that it must step onto the handheld perch to reach it. As soon as it has stepped up and touched the target, reward. Do not let the bird off the perch until it has completely eaten the reward. You want the bird to associate eating treats on the handheld perch. If this is the first time you are doing this, do not get ahead of yourself and take the bird away from the cage yet. Let the bird off of the perch by either targeting it back onto the cage branch or holding the handheld perch slightly behind and below the bird’s normal perch and it will step back itself. This will need to be practiced until the bird is comfortable to be targeted onto the perch and to be removed from the cage and brought elsewhere.

Now that you know how to safely take the bird out of the cage, you should have enough confidence to bring it to another room and begin the real training on a remote (out of cage sight) training perch. The bird has to be trained away from its cage to avoid territorial issues and wanting to go back. Practice targeting in the training area and targeting onto the handheld perch. When you have built reliability and confidence in this technique, you will be ready to move onto targeting onto your arm. Do not hinder on the perch stage for too long beyond when your bird is good at it because it can hurt your success training to step on hand if it is too used to perches only.

Training the bird to step onto your hand will be similar to stepping onto a perch. I recommend you use the perch to take it out of the cage to the training area rather than sticking your hand into the birds cage because that is asking for a bite. From the training perch, start by practicing some targeting the bird already knows. You may want to try different perches to get the bird used to going wherever, even targeting on the floor or table. When the bird is warmed up and targeting practically anywhere, you can sucker it into stepping onto you arm without realizing by using your arm as the perch. Hold your arm parallel to the perch it stands on and target onto your arm with the tip of the stick. This is a good beginning because your arm is stronger, less personal (bad attitude to hands maybe?), and less harmful if bird changes mind and decides to bite. If the bird doesn’t bite, your training is going very well and continue practicing this. If the bird does bite, you may be moving too fast and need to work on targeting some more or try to use a better training diet to motivate.

I also recommend that you let your bird make multiple steps toward your hand and target stick. Don’t immediately shove all of this in front of it because it may bite. Instead, start a few steps away and let it chose to come over at its discretion.

Target onto flat hand to introduce step up with less risk of bite

Next, you can try targeting onto your flat hand. By not exposing your fingers, you are giving the bird less to think about, less to bite, and less concern. After this you can try to target onto your finger. You can keep your finger curled up at first so that the bird can’t bite the tip where it is more sensitive. I usually like to keep my thumb curled under and all my extra fingers out of the way so my bird isn’t tempted to nibble on them for fun. If you are successfully targeting your bird onto your finger and reaching consistency without bites, you are nearly finished. Begin saying “step up” every time your bird is stepping onto your finger reaching for the target stick. This will later become the cue to step.

Finally, if you are really confident that your bird is stepping up and not biting when you use the target stick, you can start to lose it. First practice targeting it on. Then hold the target stick further back that the bird sees it but cannot touch it. Say step up and click as soon as the bird is on your hand, even though it did not touch the stick. Soon you will be able to just say step up and not use the target stick. Continue clicking and giving treats for stepping up though. The bird will realize that the stick doesn’t even matter for the “step up” trick and that just stepping on is enough to get a treat. If your bird is not stepping or you start a step up session cold turkey and it forgot what to do, you can flash it a glimpse of the target stick but without actually targeting it and it may help remind it what to do. Of course if that fails, you can return to targeting.

When you are reliably getting the bird to step up from the training perch, you can begin targeting it out of the cage onto your hand. You will basically want to repeat all the stages of target training you did on the training perch again at the cage. The bird may have a different concept of strangers approaching the cage. While it learned to trust you in the training area, does not mean it will tolerate you putting your hands on its cage. That is why you should repractice the handheld perch, arm step, hand step, and finally finger step by the cage. Luckily by now the bird knows these concepts and what to do and you are merely teaching it that it is ok to do this at the cage as well.

If you want other people to be able to handle your bird, you should let them run through all of these stages themselves. After one person can do it, it will take much less effort (perhaps just one or two times) for the bird to accept targeting and step ups from a stranger as well because it knows that treats are coming wherever the target stick is.

In the next and final post of this 3 part series on solving parrot biting problems, I will discuss some strategies and discipline required to teach what you learned in this section to your parrot. It is as important to have a motivated trainer and motivated parrot as it is to follow these techniques.

Territorial parrot bites approaching strangers.

Kili, my Senegal Parrot, can be described as cute, lovable, and cuddly by some (that would be me). But my girlfriend would sooner describe the parrot as a ferocious, atrocious, little beast. With hormones raging, an ongoing molt, and the troubles of bird life, Kili gets very territorial and aggressive toward people other than myself. She can be describes as a “one person bird” as Senegal Parrots often are.

This is the classic tale of a biting parrot. In many cases the parrot bites everyone including the owner. I suppose I am lucky that my bird is so bonded to me, but then again I’ve been working with her and teaching her tricks since she was a baby. Nonetheless, these techniques work for anyone and any bird. This is because they are based on the rudimentary elements of behavioral psychology and are aimed to work at the most basic level.

Here is my 5 step process to go from a biting bird to a bird that will step onto your hand without biting:

1) Forgive and forget - From this moment on, if you want to give it your parrot an honest shot at making this work, you cannot blame your parrot ever. You have to accept responsibility and also realize that you are on a higher level than your parrot. You have to be the adult and be a role model for your bird. You can never assume that because your bird bit last time that it will bite this time. You have to give it a fresh chance every time. If you keep assuming your bird will bite, your behavior will send the same signal to your bird that caused it to bite all the time before. This does not mean you have to take bites all the time, we will discuss some ways to avoid the actual flesh tearing bites, but you will have to pretend to ignore the aggression.

Lingering on bites or past experiences ruins training progress.

2) Training Diet - If your bird is not on a training diet and is biting you, that explains a lot. In some cases, a proper food diet change alone can improve bird behavior. Get your parrot on a pellet diet and moderate the amount of food it gets. Only give food to your parrot as a reward for correct behavior. Never give your bird a reward for biting. Never give your bird a non-food reward for biting. There is so much info available about training diet so I will not go through all the details. Instead, read this article about food based training diet, and then you can read this series abut non-food training diets (ways you can get your bird do stuff even when it isn’t hungry). So if your bird is not already on one, don’t make any excuses and put it on a training diet because you will not succeed in getting your bird to stop biting if it has no reason to.

Pellets are a good basis for training diet. Save seed/nut treats exclusively for training.

3) Clicker Conditioning – This is actually the fun and easy part. Clicker conditioning is simply to make your bird used to eating treats out of your hand and associating the sound of a click from a clicker. You can buy these in most pet stores (check dog training) or online. When your bird is hungry (before meal time), sit next to your bird’s cage (assuming you can’t take it out, if you can then take it somewhere else), have clicker in hand and bird’s favorite treats ready. Your bird should be calm and focused. If the bird is trying to attack you through the bars or run away, you are going to need to do power pause first. Ideally you should be at the side of the cage the bird is and it should neither attack or run away. It should just sit and watch you. From this point all you have to do is click the clicker and immediately give a treat to your bird. You should repeat this until your bird doesn’t want anymore treats and do this for a couple of sessions to be sure your bird has really picked up on this process. Even if you do a little more of this than you need to, it’s ok because the bird is building a positive association with you and the clicker. Can’t beat being nice and giving treats for no reason.

In the following post, I will get into the actual training involved in teaching the parrot to step up without biting. Be sure to check back and read this because it will be a walk through of the training process involved. In that post, I will show a video of how my girlfriend got bit by my parrot and then step by step the process we used to resolve the biting.

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.

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.