Dead Parrot?

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.