Training Stubborn Parrots To Step Up

As you may already know, I give all of my parrot training students access to an inner-circle membership website where they get to rub elbows with my personal parrot behavior cunsultant and I. And the other day this great quesion was asked on the forum, and I thought I'd repost it here on this blog, because I'm sure it will help you in training your parrots. Here was her post: "I'm kind of confused here, Casper will come out of his cage and play on it for hrs don't get me wrong there. When I need to get him in I have to put treat's inside is food dish so he will go in. I just can't get Casper to step up out of or off of his cage and boy I tell you I have been trying to use the treat's every day. Silly part of all this is since he learned to do the wave when the treat's come out that is all he want's to do is the wave now, and the begging for the treat's. So how do you get that foot to come down to my arm instead of a wave? I must sound like a little kid here trying to do this. Will try to keep up the treat reward and keep a positive note." And here's the answer I gave her... pay attention and it will change your parrot's life, if you have a similar problem with your parrot: Chet here with what I would do... I had this exact problem with my cockatiel, wouldn't step up from on or inside his cage to save his soul, simply wasn't an option for him. So here's what I did: First I target trained him. Have you done this yet? If not it's taught on the cd that talks about clicker training for aggressive and scared birds. Forget the part about aggressive and scared birds, and just focus on the method called target training. Or... if you're bird is already trained to wave, which it sounds like he is, make sure he knows how to do it with a clicker, as it will help in what I'm about to talk about. What I did with my 'tiel was let him out of his cage, where he would always climb up on top of and hang out on the top of his cage... again it sounds like your bird already does this too. Then what I did was took the eventual goal, of my bird stepping up onto my finger and broke it down into steps, and decided that I was going to train my bird to walk over and step up onto my finger, totally on his own free will. By this I mean that I laid my finger, in your case your hand, or whatever you want him to step up onto, on the top of his cage, so that if he wanted he could walk over and step up onto it. Which he didn't do for a few days. then I took a clicker, and his favorite treat and just sat there... waiting for any movement my 'tiel made that brought him closer to my finger. At this point he was at least a foot away from my finger. After about 2-3 minutes my bird finally moved, not like he wanted to get closer to me, but in the act of turning to go do something he wanted to do, happened to get about a half inch closer to my finger. So I clicked and gave him a reward. Since he already new what the click meant, this meant to him... Game ON! And the wheels start turning in his little brain to see how he can earn another click and treat. I kept clicking every time my bird got closer until finally he caught on that he was supposed to move towards my hand. When he figured that out, I stopped clicking for coming closer, and started clicking for bumping any part of his toe or toenails against my finger... NEVER moving my finger, even if he stepped on it. We'll do that later. So he eventually realized that all he had to do was step on my finger and he got a treat, and I never picked him up quickly thus violating his trust, or fear of not getting on my finger, so he was more than willing to do it. Then after this behavior was down pat, I'd say after 2-3 days, I started lifting up my finger an inch or two once my bird started stepping onto it, not much, and always staying in my birds comfort zone, as I didn't want to upset him, and violate our little agreement of him being willing to step on my hand as long as I didn't scare him. Then I would click and reward for one second of him sitting on my hand, and put him back on his cage top, and repeat, then two seconds, three seconds etc. you get the point. One note though, is that I rewarded my bird with a click, and then always fed him the treat so that he had to get off of my hand to go get the treat, I didn't want him being bated by the treat, but instead making the decision on his own free will. Try it out, it works awesome, even with scared birds, Chet