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.

This is my Senegal Parrot’s first appearance in a video and I had only had my bird for about 6 months at the time it was shot. In the video she demonstrates 7 tricks: wave, shake, nod, turn around, bat, fetch, and bowling. That is greater than an average of 1 trick per month.

Also I had taught several other taming behaviors and established a regime. She also knew target, let me pet her, hold her in any angle, and open her wings to check feathers. I taught these tricks at a leisurely but consistent pace. Check back at this blog for more training tips.

You may have seen my previous post about my budgie going through a toilet paper tube. Well we took this trick one step further.

Now the budgie runs through a slinky as well.

This trick add on only took five minutes to train as he had already learned to go through various sized tubes.

This one is more exciting though because you can see the bird running through the slinky and because it can be bent in different directions as opposed to the straight tube. One time we let him run into the slinky and quickly bent the exit end and hooked it up with the entrance end and he kept going around in a circle a couple times till we let him out.

So if you have taught your bird to go through a tube, go ahead and try to find a slinky to add another trick to your repertoire without the effort of teaching a whole new trick. The bird should pretty quickly figure out that the slinky is just another tube to go through if it is already proficient at the tube trick.

Start by letting it run through a contracted slinky as a plain tube and once it figures that out, you can start expanding it for longer runs. If the bird isn’t picking it up, go back to the tube trick post and just use the same techniques to target the bird through the slinky. Please be careful and use two hands or get assistance for holding the slinky open.

If you let go of one end, it may spring shut and injure your bird. Be safe and enjoy.

Since we had already taught our budgie to jump through a ring, we wanted to take this a step forward and teach him to go through a toilet paper tube as well. The first difference between the ring and toilet paper tube was that toilet paper tube is more confining so the budgie was adamant of going through it at first. This was no problem however, because Duke had received all the requisite training to learn this trick and we had him go through the tube willingly by the end of the training session.

Prerequisites:

-Clicker conditioning

-Target training

-Jump through a ring training

So before training your parrot, you will want to make sure that it is proficient at the above skills. If not, you may want to go back and practice those a few times before proceeding to teach this trick. While it is not required that your bird knows how to go through a ring, it will make it easier that it knows how to go through something round as a tube is just a deeper version of a ring.

What you will need:

-Target Stick

-Clicker

-Treats

-Toilet Paper Tube

-Tape

If you are training any bird larger than a budgie, you can substitute the toilet paper tube with a wider diameter tube such as PVC. I used a 3″ piece of PVC for my Senegal Parrot because I could not find a suitably sized tube. You can also try an oatmeal can with the ends cut off or a wide roll from paper.

For your first training session you will want to tape the tube down to a surface so that your hands are free to control the bird, target, click, and reward. You may even want a second person to assist you because there are so many tasks required at first. In the video you will see that the clicker, target stick, and treat should all be placed in the same hand in order to liberate the other hand to hold the bird. If you are not used to targeting your bird in this way, you should refer to the blog post about Single Handedly Target Training Your Bird which teaches you how to do it.

Once you’ve prepared the toilet paper tube and taped it to the table, put your bird down in that area and let it familiarize itself with the tube a short while. You may get lucky and the bird just goes through it out of curiosity in which case you can click and reward. Most likely this will not be the case. Start desensitizing (aka getting your bird used to) your bird to the tube by targeting it near and to the tube. Once the bird is ok with being near the tube, you can target it to the entrance of the tube. After this point, place the bird at the entrance to the tube but insert the target stick from the other end of the tube. Stick it through the tube to come out on the end near your bird. As the bird starts walking to nip the target stick slowly start pulling it back and into the tube. Hopefully the bird will follow it all the way or part way through the tube. For this you should certainly click and reward. If the bird follows the target stick to the entrance of the tube but refuses to go in (as was the case at first with my bird), you are going to have to force it through the tube a few times for it to realize that it actually isn’t scary and that it will earn it lots of rewards.

Hold your bird in your hand at the entrance of the tube and stick its head in part way. Keep your hand behind it so that it has no chance to recede out the rear end of the tube. With your target stick (also clicker and treat) hand, show the target stick at the exit of the tube. Even without the stick, odds are the bird will just come through the tube toward freedom on the other end once it realizes there is no backing out. When it comes out the exit end, click and give lots of reward. You may have to repeat this a few times but pretty soon you will see that the bird is coming through the tube more readily. If this is the case, you can try to relax the hand you force it in with so it can choose to back out or come through the tube. If it backs out, don’t reward and try again. This will teach it that only coming through the tube earns a treat. After this stage, just place the bird at the entrance of the tube and show target stick on the other side. If the bird chooses to go around the tube for the target stick do not reward and try to place it closer to the entrance next time or block the way around the tube with your hands. If the bird is still showing improvement, you may be able to stop targeting through as it knows to come through the tube. Now in your next few training sessions you can start to place the bird farther away from the tube entrance and let it make the choice of running through the tube and not around. If it is not going through the tube, return to an earlier stage. If it is still making progress, try putting your bird at the side of the tube and let it figure out to come around the tube to the entrance side.

An extra tip for you. Don’t point the tube the same direction every training session and don’t have the bird alawys go through the tube the same direction (except the first few times as to not confuse it). If it gets too used to running right to left all the time or something like that, it may get confused if you turn the tube. So after you no longer have to stick the bird in the tube, use your free hand to hold the tube (instead of taping it) and aim the tube in different directions for every run.

Once your bird has mastered the toilet paper tube, you can try moving up to a paper towel tube instead.

Here is a video of my Senegal performing the same trick (not as exciting):

Here is how to hold target stick, clicker, and treat in one hand

Be sure to practice this grip before working with your bird. Last thing you want to do is frustrate your bird because you can’t figure out how to hold everything at the same time and click. This could confuse the bird and hurt your training efforts. It is not difficult to do but it may take a couple minutes to get used to holding things this way.

Try to hold the stick in such a way that the treat is hidden or farther out of the way. You are not using the treat to lure the bird but targeting with the stick. You should practice this a few times on a training perch or table before moving onto the next steps.

Now you should be ready to target using just one hand. This frees your second hand to hold the bird or prop. To target a new, shy, or scared bird onto your hand (that has been target trained away from hands already), place your hand on the perch so that they connect together. Hold the target stick to point over your hand in a way that it is only accessible from your hand and not the training perch. The bird should walk across the perch, onto your hand and to the stick. If it is not doing this, you are should try holding the target stick closer or go back and practice targeting some more.

For targeting an aggressive bird out of its cage, you can basically use the same technique. In the following video, you can see Kathleen targeting Kili my Senegal Parrot (who can get territorial and bite strangers approaching the cage) out of the cage without getting bit.

You can also use this technique for targeting your bird onto a stranger’s hand from your hand. Hold the target stick over the stranger’s hand and bring your hand, on which the bird is sitting, up to the stranger’s hand. The bird will be so focused on the target stick, that it will overcome the fear or aggression it has toward the stranger. One time I had a stranger (to the bird that is) over and he wanted to try to pick my Senegal Parrot off of her climbing tree. The moment he put his hand on her tree she came running right over. However, this was not to step up peacefully but to bite in retaliation for violating her territory. I told him to try again but this time I held my target stick right over his hand. This time the bird came right over and went on his hand without the slightest hint of aggression. To him, it looked as though I waved a magic wand over the bird and magically it obeyed. What I was really doing was cuing my bird to do her “target trick” which made her forget her aggressive motives.

The wave was the first trick I taught my Senegal Parrot and so it had become her best and most practiced trick over time. That is why I was surprised that she forgot the cue for it when I started to train her to lift her wings. I use the word “wave” as the cue to wave her foot or I can use a hand cue by waving my fingers. To lift her wings I say “wings” or I point two fingers at her. She started to do wings not only when I would say wings but also when I would say wave. I realized that the “w” sound in both words was what confused her.

I felt bad that she forgot her best trick and wanted to correct this before the problem got any more serious. So instead of continuing training for the new wings trick, I went back to practicing wave for a while. I dropped variable frequency of reinfocrement techniques and went back to rewarding every trick. I started to practice the wave for maybe 80% of the tricks in the session rather than the usual maybe 10% (because she used to do it so well, would get less practice). But I did not practice the wave exclusively. I would stick some other tricks in on occasion so that she wouldn’t get so used to waving every time that she wouldn’t listen for the cue.

The way I got her to learn the verbal cue back for wave was fairly simple. She still clearly remembered the hand cue so I would say wave but she would do wings. I would ignore her. I would try this a few times. If she waved, she would get rewarded. If she did not, I would ignore her and then on the next try say wave and wave my hand for the hand cue. What I was doing was retraining the verbal cue for my bird for a trick she had already known. I would also practice the wings verbal cue in between as well so that she can learn the difference in the sound. Parrots are really good at discerning sounds so I think anyone who tells you that the bird cannot remember verbal cues is misleading. It just takes more practice to maintain the verbal cues but they can learn them and be consistent. My bird knows 6 tricks on verbal cue and growing. Teaching a verbal cue is easy but time consuming. If your bird already knows a trick with a hand cue or is learning a new trick, just be sure to say the verbal cue every time you are cuing it for the trick. Eventually it will associate both the word and the hand cue and will perform for either.

So in that same 10 minute training session that I realized that my Senegal Parrot forgot how to wave, I practiced it extensively with her until she could do wings or wave consistently on verbal cue. I was sure she learned the difference because on the following training session that day she was doing significantly better. Seems like she just needed a reminder of which word goes to which trick.