Weight Lifting Parrot!

 

I found this cute little parrot kit at PetSmart and had to buy it! It’s mainly for small parrots like budgies and the like but I decided to give it a try with my medium sized birds. I can see why it’s for the small ones, though, as my parrots could easily ruin the thing!

 

Above is a short clip of Bondi lifting the barbell weight it came with. I love the way it is set up because it sets your bird up for success in learning how to do it. The bird has no other choice in what behavior to really do with the barbell so it is a fast trick to teach. Here are the steps I took to get Bondi to learn this in ONE training session!

 

Photo from www.petsmart.com

 

I got her to touch the blue ball on the end of the barbell first. I would have preferred if she touched the skinny stick part of it, but she wasn’t interested. Because the toy was new, she was naturally curious and once she touched the barbell, I clicked and rewarded.

 

Once she understood touching the barbell got her a reward, she began doing it easily so I decided to change things up. I pushed the barbell as far to the right as possible, so some of the connecting stick piece was showing more. I let her explore the blue ball part of the barbell and when she accidentally touched the stick part, I clicked and gave her a jackpot reward. She was willing to touch other parts of the barbell to earn the treat since I was no longer rewarding for just touching the ball. From this point forward, I didn’t reward ever again for touching the ball part of the barbell.

 

Next, I encouraged her to touch the middle of the stick as I moved it back to the left more and more each time. She got confused a couple times, and went back to touching the ball but quickly remembered it wasn’t earning anything and tried again with the stick part. Once she touched the middle of it (which I had to help her do by lifting it as high as it would go) I began only rewarding for her grabbing the skinny part by the middle and not the sides.

 

Note: I lifted the barbell up because I realized it was uncomfortable for Bondi to put her head in between two things. It’s important to recognize these things when teaching your bird new things. If I wouldn’t have caught onto that, the training session would have gone a lot slower and wouldn’t have been as fun for Bondi.

 

Once Bondi was grabbing the middle of the barbell by herself as I held it up, I tried it once where I didn’t hold it up and she immediately went for it and picked it up. I clicked and rewarded and she began offering the behavior over and over again. I realized I could get her to do more than one lift of the barbell if I wanted, and we worked up to 3.

 

To learn more about prop trick training with your own parrot, check out http://www.birdtricks.com/trick-training!