Is It Too Late To Hand-Train My Bird?

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Is it too late to hand-train my parakeet?

I got it about four years ago, and hand training was going well until it got face mites and I had to take it to the vet. I had to grab the poor bird and squirt medicine in its mouth to get rid of the mites.

Needless to say it lost its trust for me. Now it just bites the heck out of my hand if I go near it. Is it possible for the bird to slowly regain its trust and hopefully come onto my hand and out of the cage? – J

It is never ever too late to train ANY bird. A great example of this is a lady that Dave and Chet talked to a while ago… she trained an 84 year old macaw to be quiet on cue! This is a bird who has it ingrained in its head that screaming works as a means of getting attention and has had this habit for 84 long years!

Thank goodness she didn’t give up on this bird.

You can earn your parakeet’s trust back if you go about it the right way. Sometimes we have to do things our birds don’t think is in their best interest and they lose trust in us. However, if you do more things that make it trust you than break it, you can get to the point where you can do those things because you bird knows that you are thinking of its best interest.

At our Total Tranformation Training Seminar in Florida, we had “Mr. X” speak who was a trainer by the name of Glen Foster. I really thought he put it best when he said, “You should look at your relationship with your parrot like a checking account. If you make enough deposits, you can take some withdrawls. But if you take too many withdrawls, you will get yourself in the negative.”

What that means is the most positive interactions (trust and bond building experiences) you have with your bird, the more “deposits” you are making towards a happy and trusting relationship. You didn’t make enough deposits to match how many withdrawls you made when you gave your bird the medication in the beginning, therefore, you ended up in the negative.

You are going to have to work extra hard to get yourself back to zero (out of the negative red zone) before you can make any withdrawals again. You need to really build up that bank account. Anything negative to your bird is a withdrawal so it’s important that when you are training – it’s fun and positive for the bird.

This is why we always tell people to start with touch training! This doesn’t cross the line with the bird, invade space or anything like that. It allows the bird to make the decision to learn, we simply allow the opportunity to be there and reward when he makes the choice to interact.

You can train your parakeet from inside his cage using touch training and slowly work to outside of the cage and eventually stepping up and performing tricks that all build a great relationship between you and your bird. Touch training even transfers over to flight training easily! And parakeets don’t require that much space to learn how to fly well.

Use touch training first and then move onto tricks. I promise it will all create the relationship you had in the beginning, before the mites, only 10x stronger!