As promised, here’s a quick update on how my CAG’s training went today.

African greys sure do develop phobias for things more than other birds I work with, but even so, today I was able to get Bean to consistently take two steps off of his perch, and up the side of his cage to touch a target stick.

He’s still nervous if I try to feed him his treat while he’s on the side of the cage, so I have to let him back down to reward him, which makes the rate of reinforcement hard to work to my advantage, as every rep takes longer than I would like it to, when he has to climb all the way down to get his treat… it’s a big delay, and it’s hurting the speed of his progress.

But none the less… it was a BIG improvement over his earlier training session today where he didn’t want to put both feet on the cage at the same time and climb towards that scary evil person holding the club (aka ME).

I noticed that I’m running into an issue of him not wanting to climb to target because of a fear of things in his cage… mostly a large swing that’s getting in the way of his targeting. I’ll probably take that out of his cage tomorrow.

He trained for a good half hour without showing any signs of fatigue which I thought was pretty good for his first week of training.

And it was going so well that I was even able to add a second target training drill at the end of the session where I got bean to touch a target stick as it was positioned over my hand… trying to desensitize him to the fear of my hands and finally get him to step up.

I have my fingers crossed that by tomorrow, he’ll willing put his foot on my hand. I doubt I’ll be able to pick him up, or have him be comfortable with being picked up, but I think he’ll at least get to the point where one of his toes will unknowingly be set on top of my hand.

I’ll keep you posted!

Chet

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 1:03 am and is filed under African Greys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.