Teaching Budgie to Crawl Through Tube

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):