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

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

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

Blue throated macaw

The word enrichment means to enhance and make fuller.  It has become a very popular word among bird owners.  It’s a wonderful thing that humans are considering ways to improve their parrots lives.  I usually hear the word enrichment used in connection with toys and foraging opportunities.  These are huge ways to better a parrots life, but there are SO many other applications.

Enrichment means maintaining or improving health through diet and exercise.  When our finicky eaters turn their beaks up at the new food you have introduced, do we give up and say:  “Well, he just doesn’t like kale”, or do we find new ways of preparing it to spark an interest?  Have you tried winding it into the cage bars, weaving it into their hanging toys, or mincing it and adding it to mashed banana? Are we really looking at and managing their diets to include the nutritional balance they need? For the bird that is content with lounging on his perch all day, you will have to point out to him that this is not the life. If they don’t feel well, or are fat and lazy, they are not enjoying their lives.

Congo African Grey Parrot

Enrichment means opportunities to learn.  Birds love to learn.  It speaks to their very nature.  They explore every inch of their cage looking for fun, new developments.  They try to explore every inch of your house.  Training with your parrot makes them think and reevaluate decisions and strategies, and the experience stays with them long after the session has ended.

Rose Breasted Cockatoo

Enrichment means proper socialization.  Your parrot should be taught to enjoy all people, not just you.  A parrot that will only tolerate handling by one person is in for trouble.  At some point in your life, you will have to be away from him, whether it be for illness, vacation or business travel.  He will be miserable and resentful when left in the company of someone he doesn’t like or know.  It’s unfair to let that happen, no matter how nice his preference for you might secretly feel.

Blue Fronted Amazon Parrot

And yes, enrichment means lots of toys and foragers.  Parrots love a good challenge.  Work and play are the same thing to them.  The harder they have to work for something, the more they seem to enjoy it.  Often, though, they have to be shown that there is fun to be had.  You can’t simply put a forager into the cage that has a bolt and a wingnut and expect them to know what to do with it.  Show them how to manoeuvre the nut off the bolt, to lift the cap and see that there’s a treat waiting for them when they accomplish that.  They will learn how to do it just by watching you.  Let them watch you play with their toys and see what the possibilities are.

Enrichment means you.  Your love, your time and your attention to detail is the most important enrichment you can offer.

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:

) 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.