Scritches for Everyone!

False dichotomy: Flight skills or Recall skills? (updated)

The idea that one has to work on either flight skills or recall skills with a new flyer is an odd one. The two training tasks are so complementary. Doing controlled flights under your cue is how a bird can build up confidence along with skill, and those three elements — good recall, skill, and confidence — are what makes a good outdoor or indoor flyer.

They need all three to fly safely, and it doesn’t make sense to ignore one to work on another. If you neglect the recall training, every time you allow latency you are training the bird that it’s OK to ignore your cue. If you don’t gradually increase the skill level of the recalls, you risk the bird becoming bored with the training and not progressing physically.

The only time these elements come into conflict is if you’re trying to move too fast. If recall needs work, you can do that at whatever the bird’s skill level is, and do lots of repetitions. The reps improve recall, increase overall confidence, and can be done while gradually pushing the skill level. Carly’s first outdoor flying consisted of A-B flights between me and a perch, increasing in distance; short loops away and back to me, increasing the diameter; A-B recalls flying down from tree branches, increasing in height; and targeting to me through a tree (combination of climbing, hanging, dropping, flying) to learn how to descend if she landed too high for her flying skills. These can be done in a systematic way if the bird has a good recall and the confidence with it’s skill level that you can maintain an outdoor training session without flyoffs, refusing to come down from trees, or panicking.

For a companion parrot, being outside with poor recall and/or low confidence just increases the probability that it will panic or get into a situation that is beyond its skill level. These are not parrots who were raised outdoors by parents in a nest in the wild. They are not used to everything the outdoors presents.

Putting a bird in a situation that is beyond its abilities and forcing it to essentially “learn or else” and become desensitized to its own fear is one of the worst training strategies there is if you are trying to base the relationship on trust and positive interactions. It’s called flooding.

UPDATE: Apparently those claiming it was necessary to make a choice between training flight skills and recall agree with my point (from public Freeflight group):

Yes doing controlled flights is ONE way to build up the birds confidence and flight skills.

So, if you can do it that way, why encourage an unnecessary choice between recall and skills, which is more risky for the bird?

I urge anyone considering freeflying their companion parrot to consider this subsequent statement as well, before using the unfledged baby or “just let ‘em fly” approach:

Recall is extremely useful but is not required to fly birds out doors. — Chris Biro

and ask yourself if you’re comfortable taking this attitude with a valued companion.

That statement alone says enough for me to close the book on anything coming from this source.

3rd Fledge Day Anniversary

It was exactly 3 years ago today that Carly did her first jump-flap off the counter onto my arm. Even with all our other flying adventures, it’s still the most memorable event. I don’t know who was more excited, me or her!

Here she is a couple weeks later (and a few cell phone cameras ago!) practicing. You can barely see here, but she has only 2 or 3 flight feathers on each side.

She was so eager to practice every day that when we were finished she’d often leave her dinner to come back and do more. Contrafreeloading in action!

I think she likes this stuff.

Carly doing a vertical “paratrooper drop” landing at the beach. Photo © Hillary Hankey 2009.

Of course we’re celebrating this afternoon by…. going to the beach.

For an article on techniques to try to help previously clipped birds take this first step, see the current issue (Summer 2009) of Good Bird Magazine where Mandy Andrea has an article on teaching the mature bird.

Harness Training — Going with the Flow!

I had an unexpected breakthrough tonight with Piper on the harness. If you’ve been following the blog you know that Piper developed a dislike of his previous harness which had an over-the-head loop. So we stopped using it and have been training a new design (shown here). It’s been slow going, but we were to the point where he would walk up to the end of his perch, have me put the strap around his neck and fasten it, and put the belly strap under one wing and through the back strap. We’ve been doing this for awhile, and whenever he showed any sign of wanting it off, off it came. So tonight, after a very lazy day, I went to do our usual short session before our dinner time recall training, and we got to the usual point. He seemed very keen on his sprouted sunflower seed treats, and not paying much attention to the harness, so I decided to take it a step further and go for the strap under his other wing. That went fine. So I gave him big bonuses — handful of sprouted seeds, and he still was fine. So then I fastened the belly strap also, and gave him another handful of sprouts. Still fine! I kept feeding him his sprouts for several minutes, while carrying him around on his harness.

This surprised me but it shows how you just have to go with the flow of what the bird is presenting you. If an opportunity shows itself, take it. And if you are making big breakthroughs, give big bonuses! (Heck, even on little breakthroughs I give big bonuses.) But tonight I gave him almost his whole dinner while on the harness. My plan is to keep doing this for the next week or so: harness training combined with his whole dinner.

Here he is while eating dinner out of my hand (sorry for the blur — trying to work iPhone with one hand while feeding!)

This comes at a very good time, because he has become very interested in exploring the outdoors now (trying to follow me out the front door) and getting quite relaxed walking at the beach. So I was planning to start working A-B recalls on the harness at the beach this week.

So of course this warranted a celebration. Witness the fate of probably the last surviving blood orange of the season in southern California:

Training note: Piper is being trained at at-lib weight. His indoor recall is excellent, more reliable even than Carly’s. He is just over one year old, and it is not recommended to restrict weight on parrots less than a year old. His weight range now is only slightly higher than when he arrived at 4 months old, and he is in good condition from flying a lot indoors, so this is a good range to work with. His response to training does not warrant any change. Acclimation to the outdoor environment is something that can be done without weight reduction, as it is an entirely separate issue than food motivation. Comfort with the environment is one of the major elements in the list of factors that should be considered when training a new behavior, and it is far up the list from weight reduction.

My position with regards to outdoor training is that you go at the pace the bird himself sets, whether that is a matter of flight skills, recall response, comfort with the environment, or eagerness to fly in the first place. I am doing this for the enrichment and benefit of Piper. I’m sure Carly would love to have him as a flying companion, but first and foremost, they enjoy each other as indoor companions, which is where they spend the vast majority of their time. I feel no need at all to push the pace of training. African Greys can live to be 40-70 years old. Piper is 16 months!

Complete Harness Training Series.

Training a Scared or Aggressive Parrot To Step Up

In 2002 when I first struck out on my own as an animal training consultant I did some work with a parrot sanctuary in Texas. At this facility, the birds were stepped up onto hands wrapped in towels. Often this approach means force is being used to train the parrots to step up. We all really wanted the birds to learn to step onto hands voluntarily. It was my job to train it with positive reinforcement. I had 50 parrots to work with. All either showed fear responses or aggressive behavior towards hands. (Many of these birds can be seen in my first book “Good Bird!” A Guide to Solving Behavior Problems in Companions Parrots”)

What I quickly discovered was that asking a parrot to go from two feet firmly planted on a perch to one foot on the hand was a BIG approximation, one that most birds would not do with that kind of history. I had to find a way to make smaller approximations. So I developed a technique of placing my hand at the end of the perch and using the target to get small steps towards my perching hand. This way if your parrot is not ready he does not need to get on your hand, but can still make progress towards making it happen and you can reinforce it. Here are some photos of me demonstrating it in my DVD and another at a facility where I consulted.


At the time few skilled training professionals were working with parrots with such challenges and I am quite confident I had not seen this particular method elsewhere in my years of training. Certainly early in my career I learned from other great trainers the importance of letting the bird approach the hand and reinforcing small approximations. But what to do with a parrot that is really struggling with aggressive behavior or fear responses towards hands right when he is at the cusp of touching a hand was not something I had seen someone demonstrate. It was actually fun to explore options and experiment until I found a technique that worked pretty consistently.


Since then I have had the chance to practice it and fine tune it with at last count over 1000 parrots at workshops I teach. I do very freely share this technique in my DVDs and almost everyone gets to see a demo of this at the live seminars. In the DVD you get so see a parrot go from lunging so hard at my hand that he almost knocks over the perch, to eagerly pulling my hand closer so he can step up on it.

The bird is a blue and gold macaw belonging to a friend. I had never really interacted with him much before we filmed and by no means was he already trained. We filmed over a weekend. It took two twenty minute sessions to go from lunging to "can't wait to get on your hand!" I still smile every time I play that clip at a seminar. Makes me happy to see a parrot's behavior change so dramatically.

The DVD that features this clip is called Parrot Behavior and Training #1 . Click here and you can see the "before" and "after" with the lunging blue and gold macaw about half way through the video featured in the player on this page.

Hope it helps inspire a few parrot people out there! Happy training : )


Barbara Heidenreich
Copyright Good Bird Inc 2009
www.GoodBirdInc.com

The economy… and parrots.

This is a post I put up on the forum about something extraordinary that happened to me a couple weeks ago.

“About a month ago I had someone come knock on my door. They had seen the extra bird cage(s) I have in my garage, and wanted to come introduce themselves. Turns out this person- a nice women- is my neighbor and has parrots, too. She was coming to ask if I would possibly want more. She lost her job, and isn’t able to make rent on her house so her and her family are having to drastically downsize and move into an apartment. Unfortunately this means she no longer has the room for her large parrots.

After a long discussion, I politely declined taking the animals, partially because I was unsure about taking in two random parrots and partially cuz I didn’t have the rehoming fee she was asking for. But I gave her my phone number and contact info in case she wanted help finding a home for her birds down the road or anything. I felt bad for her- she has had these birds since before her child was born, so about 8-10ish years, and now she is being forced to give them up.

Well that happened about a month ago, right? Didn’t really revisit the idea, had a lot of stuff happen in between that just totally put any prospect of new birds out of my mind. Well yesterday I am home early for a change and someone I don’t recognize is knocking on the door. Hello? Its the lady again, wondering if I had thought about the birds. I told her no, not really, I was hesitant because I had an extremely large bill from two other older birds that I had adopted that passed away the past couple years and just can’t handle it at the moment. She starts crying and asking if I would just please come look at them, she needs to leave in a week and hasn’t found a suitable home for her animals and just wants to make sure they go to a good home.

So I go over and look at them….

Its a timneh grey and a blue and gold. Both birds are animated, extremely outgoing, great attitudes and behaviors, and are in perfect feather. The timneh grey is a dollbaby and was blowing kisses the entire time and let me hold her. Well.. crap…..

The owners main concern is her birds going to a good home- she put ads in the paper and all that but the people that responded wouldn’t let her do a home visit and she wasn’t going to just sell her birds to the highest bidder. She had come over and seen my birds and interacted with them and saw how well cared for they are. So she turns to me and tells me - please take my birds, I know you will be an excellent home for them.. I know you are worried about fees, but having them go to a good home is more important then any money I would have gotten for them, so please just take them.

So guess who has two new birds? Yup.”

Just remember… people aren’t the only ones that suffer in this economy. I took the birds to the vet for a well bird check and they passed with flying colors, and the vet sighed as he heard how we got them, with a shake of his head. “Its happening more and more lately. People just can’t afford their animals any more.”

I want to take this opportunity to extend this offer- I have a bunch of Mazuri food I’ve stored that I can send to you if you need a bag of food or two to help offset a minor expense for the month. If you want some, please contact me via email. I will ask you to cover shipping charges, but that is all.

Recommended Articles on Freeflight Training

As a follow up to my post on freeflight training for companion parrots, I would like to share links to a couple of articles that describe the process NEI uses for their birds. The first is an article by Deb Stambul, who attended the second level NEI workshop where they learn hands-on with new NEI birds. It should be stressed that although they are new freeflyers, they have been in the program working with professional trainers for a long time before this one-week workshop, have excellent flight skills in huge aviaries, and have already worked on recall training in those protected environments. This is the part where they make the transition to the open outdoors.

Learning How Professionals at NEI Train Birds to Fly Outdoors Safely

The second is an article that appeared in World Parrot Trust’s Psittascene magazine a few years ago, in which Steve Martin of NEI describes how involved the process is and what he expects from trainers.

To Fly or Not to Fly?

Fanny Schutte training a Scarlet Macaw at NEI’s 2009 workshop.

Chris Shank also does freeflight workshops at Cockatoo Downs every year or so, demonstrating recall training and also featuring guest speakers like Susan Friedman. I’ll try to write about that in an future post.

Help for a Friend of Parrots

I try my best to keep my posts fun, entertaining and hopefully educational. This one is a bit tougher to write. Those of you who have attended my parrot training workshops get to see lots of video clips. Many of them feature a good friend of mine named Terry Debrow. I met Terry years ago through a parrot sanctuary called Parrots and People. Terry is good people and over the years I have had the pleasure of getting to know her family well, including her amazing grandson Colton. Colton even did some office work for Good Bird Inc a few summers ago. He has always been a very responsible young man and a support to his family.

I was devastated to hear he is the victim of a great injustice. He recently joined the air force and moved to California to pursue what was for him a dream career of analyzing photos taken by planes.

He was admitted to the VA hospital for routine gall bladder surgery. Apparently a resident was allowed to perform the surgery and nicked his aortic valve. There was attempt to fix it, but follow up was not sufficient. The end result is that Colton has had both of his legs amputated due to lack of blood flow. To top it off there is serious talk of discharge from the military due to his condition. The family is beside themselves. Not only has Colton’s legs been taken away from him, they fear his career will be too. And at this point this young man has been powerless to do anything about his circumstances.

I am sharing this story as I think it is important for people to know what happened to Colton. He is still in ICU and the future is very uncertain for him at this point. I do hope people send some positive energy his way. Here is a link to a news story done by a local television station.

Barbara Heidenreich
Copyright 2009

Acclimation Accomplished? (fingers crossed!)

One of the nice things about warm summer evenings here are the beach sunsets. I noticed a woman photographing us for quite a while yesterday, and it turns out she’s a travel photographer, Diane Marinos, who lives nearby and is doing a personal series on Scripps Pier in all of the varying light and weather conditions. Should be a great series — its so changeable here with the fog and cloud banks, crystal clear Santa Ana winds, etc.

I had been only training Piper up above the beach where he was more comfortable. He got spooked too much down below when on his harness, so I decided to take it more slowly. Now he sits on top of my head and sings and whistles and gets treats, while Carly goes on flights. Yesterday she was mostly interested in hanging out and watching the sunset. Very relaxing for all of us.

I started flying Carly at the beach once she started to show an interest — by spreading out her wings and kind of bouncing back and forth. The behavior I observed from Piper earlier this year was entirely different — neck outstretched, occasionally attempting to do a startle flight. This is not the behavior of a bird that wants to fly for the fun of it; it’s the behavior of a bird who is afraid. So now that he’s getting more acclimated I’ll start doing some harness training down on the beach and take it from there.

I was talking to Wendy last week about something I’ve been pondering while Piper is in training. And that is, if he’s not eager to go outside, gets spooked, and on top of that there are lots of risks inherent in outdoor flying — why push it? I haven’t been, but occasionally I think about what our long term plan should be. And really, it’s the same as it was with Carly: I’ll take it as far as he’s comfortable with. He doesn’t like to be left in the office when we go out to the beach, so I thought it was worthwhile to give him the opportunity to acclimate to being out there on a harness. He flies to the door often when I have the leash in hand now, so it’s clear he isn’t reluctant to go outside. And if whistling and talking are any indication of being relaxed and happy, I’d say it was worth it. Now we’ll just see where to go next.

The second photo looks like Piper and I have smoke streaming out of our heads. LOL. Carly must be off flying in this one.

Photographs © 2009 Diane Marinos.

Featured Blog: Living with Parrots Cage Free

There is a lot of good information on the web about parrot behavior, training and care. I’m going to try to give a shout-out to a site or blog that people may not know about every so often. The more we can learn from each other the better!

This is one I just discovered myself recently (thanks Sid) and it is full of well thought out posts that are grounded in a background of Applied Behavior Analysis, focusing on providing enrichment, empowerment and choice in our relationship with our birds. The author, Robin Cherkas, features her own flock and their amazing “fort” set-up in her blog.

Living with Parrots Cage Free

The most recent entry, Deal or No Deal, starts, “Each day I contemplate ways to give Coco choices, whether seemingly small or large. . . .” How cool is that?

I’m trying to figure out a way to upscale Fort Coco into a full size Fort Raz. People need forts too. Yep.

Next Page »