Bhristopher Caldwin

I am not proud of this. But, at least i not longer have to worry about it. the majority of my kitchen is an island about waist high. Whenever we enter the kitchen, whomever has the parrot, usually puts him down on the island while we go about our business and he plays with the various things on the counter. There is also a gas stove on the island. The bird prefers to be grasping something I suppose... So he always goes to the stove so he can have a little perch. No matter what we did, he would STILL go to the stove. Until today. (For those of you with thumping hearts, Chicken is alive and well, and was only scared) I was making noodles with him on my shoulder, he was chipper, happy and fluffed. Hell, he hadn't even pooped on me. It was a good kitchen trip, all things considered. until... I let him off my shoulder to drain the pot and mix the sauce into the noodles. After letting them cool I moved him from a side counter, back to the island. While I turned my back to grap some spices he wandered over to a cooling iron pot support on the stove. The noise he made was the same one he made when we tried the feather tether. he jumped, I yelled, the dog ran. It was all very scary. His foot is okay. He avoids the stove now. I feel like a shitty owner. but, all things considered, the lesson is at least, learned. TL'DR Bird stepped on hot stove. Bird no longer goes near stove. Owner feels like idiot.

There is a lot of great advice in this thread and I think most of it can be summarized in two words. Patience and Perseverance I've sorta been dealing with the same thing with my parrot, chicken, just continue to hang out with your bird, train him (it's a great way to spend time that will also produce rewards further down the road) and just be around him! You're lucky the bird is so young, it'll make his adjustment to you a lot easier.

Target training is great, it's the easiest thing to begin with especially because birds stick everything in their mouths! I use a chopstick for chicken, but my post was mainly focused on anchoring the clicker in the birds mind as "you've done a good job now you get a treat" After you do that, then you can use target training of the bird doesn't like you or the sigh of your hands. It's actually pretty cool! So, for some reason, your parrot hates your hands: What you do is this... Find a stick, one he wont be able to completely demolish and one that won't utterly terrify him (I use he because chicken is a male, and thats how i'm used to referring to parrots, if you have a female bird... I apologize!) Anywho: Get a stick. Then, slowly move it towards him until he nips at it. Click the clicker. Do this over and over (MAKING SURE TO REWARD TO PARROT) until the bird understands that the stick, whatever it is, should be nibbled when presented. Pair it with a command.. like "come on" for optimum effect. Finer points: 1. If your bird destroys the stick with his beak, thats ...okay.. in the beginning, but you want to make him gently do it.. So what you do is NOT CLICK, and don't move the stick(or allow him to take it) until he nips it gently. 2. NEVER POKE YOUR BIRD WITH THE STICK. 3. NEVER POKE YOUR BIRD WITH THE STICK. 4. Keep training short. 5-10 minutes max, then an hour or so of bird time.

Chicken and I are working on the same trick. Maybe I shouldn't use his favorite toy, he's not fond of giving that one up. CanIhaveThat

Hey guys, I've had a lot of success in the last months with Chicken and I wanted to share how I've done it. Clicker training is awesome. This is literally the one I have, and i only spent 3.00 on it. I'm sorry if there is already another post on this, I didn't search, but I'll make this as easy to understand as possible, and who knows, maybe I'll get a sticky. Here's how it works. Clicker Training relies on Pavlov's training study. Remember the guy who would feed dogs after he hit a tuning fork, and then, after a month or so, when he hit the tuning fork, the dogs became conditioned to hear the sound of the fork and expect food? Clicker training works the same way. Basically, you want your lovely little animal to think that he/she is a GREAT BIRD, a GOOD BIRD and THE BEST BIRD IN THE WORLD and is about to get a treat when he/she hears the clicker. It doesn't take long for the message to set in either. The first few days are easy. Click the clicker when you're near your feathered friend and in a happy, excited voice, say "gooood bird!!!" and hand them their favorite treat. Do this every 20 minutes or so on one of your days off or whenever, your goal here is to condition the bird to think that "click" means "I'm a good bird and I'm going to get a treat" Once you've linked the clicker to the idea that what the bird is doing is good, you can use the clicker to reinforce good behavior and communicate with your bird. Things NOT to do with a clicker. 1. Do not let children get a hold of it. If the bird hears clicks, it should ALWAYS get treats. Clicking without treats is taboo, as it makes the clicker less important. 2. Don't just hold it when you aren't training. I have a habit of fiddling with things while i'm doing something else. If you click that clicker, the bird gets a treat. 3. NEVER CLICK THE CLICKER UNLESS YOU GIVE THE BIRD PRAISE AND A TREAT. Doing so, as mentioned before, lessens the impact of the clicker. The easiest example i can give you is the light switch trick. In the video, you can see chicken turning off a light, hearing a click, getting praise and receiving a reward. It only took an hour or so to do. Here's a step by step you can follow at home. (It's best to WAIT UNTIL the bird recognizes the clicker as a good thing, because then it's easier to communicate with him or her what you want) 1. Get your feathered friend. 2. approach a light switch. 3. Give the command you want the bird to recognize. 4. put the bird near the light switches. a. What you do now is click when the bird TOUCHES the light switch with his beak. Do this about 10 to 15 times, depending on how smart your little friend is. Don't click if they chomp down really hard, you want a gentle touch otherwise all the lights in your house will be chewed to hell, right? b. After the bird has gotten down the light switch part, don't click when they just touch it with their beak. This is actually kind of cool, because you can see your grey's big brain in action. "Why am I not getting a click?" they seem to wonder. So they go back and fiddle... when they do, they'll eventually FLIP THE SWITCH!. Click. Reward. Reinforce. Your bird now turns on and off lights. You can use the same steps in 4b to change the direction. It's been about two weeks now and Chicken (my bird) knows that if the room is dark, the switch goes up. If the room is light, well, you get the point.

My parrot is a total wastrel. I'm sure you know this, but just spend the next month or so bonding with the bird. Don't worry about training or any of that stuff, just let the little girl grow to love you. If you have a clicker though, now is an excellent time to start pairing the noise of the clicker with praise and a treat. (save the clicker, ignore training) It makes teaching birds to do things extremely easy. Chicken turns off lights, opens soda/beer cans and asks to go to his stand when he feels unsafe. I did all this in a month with clicker training.

I love making toys for my grey. Here's what I do, in case you want any ideas: Chicken LOVES colors, red his favorite, so when I'm out I keep my eyes open for bobbles and knick knacks he can pick up and shake in his little fist. Check the package though. Made in china usually means lead paint. Tie them together with straps of leather, or chain. If you have light colored leather, find some safe dye and change the colors of it, the bird will enjoy it more. Let it dry, hang it up, watch the play. Also, I've found toys for small dogs, like toy chiuhuas, are a great hit.

My parrot and I are bonding more and more every day. He doesn't even bite hard anymore, when he does decide to use his beak interactions with my hand are soft and sweet. We cuddle, sort've, but he's only cool with that if he's in his cage. Last night I picked him up and without thinking said "Scritch Scritch." He tilted his head down and we cuddled for a good two minutes! Wooohooooo for progress! Also, here are pictures of Chicken taken from another thread... as this seems to be the board to put them on. http://imgur.com/a/uwWuG#0 Er. Apparently I can't use BBcode to resize images here, if I directly paste them they are HUGGGEE, so here's an album.

Man I would've been heart broken!

My parrot sleeps in my room with me. I usually have a smaller sleepytime cage on the dresser that he dozes off in at night. This is the usual show, nothing out of the norm here. Except last night. I wake up around 3 am, and I feel something climbing on my head, I jump up and hearing surprised parrot noises, immediately calm down and coax the poor guy off the cover and into my hands. the look he gave me was kinda funny. I put him back in his wingabago, same towel set up as usual and went back to sleep. That'll be the last time I forget to lock his cage. Guuuddd, imagine if I had rolled over onto him

Hey Judy, Thanks for the reply. I guess i've been pushing him a little hard, but I'll back off and accept him for who he is. I got the training dvd from the people at bird tricks and he's learned a few neat ones so far. As for pictures, I only have a few on this drive but i've put them up on my smugmug. Yeah, there are annoying watermarks, sorry, I forgot to turn that off when I published them. The one's where he's outside since i'm sure someone will ask: He has trimmed wings, so he cant fly. He was safe. The one picture where he looks startled is actually a funny story, which is why I decided to upload it. We just got home from the vet and I took him outside for the first time in about 10 years, I put him on the ground and stayed near him and something awesome happened, he started foraging! I spread wild bird seed on the ground for the other birds and chicken walked around, clawed at the ground, found some and ate it. So we went over to the fence so I could take some pictures of him and we encountered the most deadly predator imaginable. A butterfly. I didn't sit there laughing at him, in case your wondering. I picked my little phobic buddy up, reassured him and walked him inside. Pictures Lightswitch Trick

The whole beak thing is really just a remedy, I used it to deter biting, I was already being bitting so if I got an extra chomp in my direction, so be it. The point of the training was to make him understand that when I say step up, I mean it. i haven't been bitten in two weeks. Chicken will step up to me even when i'm reaching up to a stand, which is pretty cool because birds like being high, not low.

It stopped the biting altogether though, it may've been a bit harsh, but it only had to happen once or twice before he understood that hell or high water, when I say step up, he's going to step up. edit: I want to clarify. only grab at his beak if he tries to bite you.

Chicken has had an on and off again relationship with everyone, except me. I hated this bird, mainly because I didn't understand him for most of his life. No one trained him, he learned that biting is a way to make hands go away and was generally a nuisance because he was lonely. I've been training him for two weeks, he even sleeps in my room now. He no longer bites when I ask him to step up, he's quiet in the morning. I think he's happy to spend so much time around me. I'm having difficulty getting him to be okay with touch though. If a hand is anywhere else but his his feet he becomes nervous and starts biting his nails. I try to introduce him to new things every day. Sometimes He'll let me scratch his head when he's in his cage, which is a start but it's rare, and he wont climb into my hand as I do it. What do you suggest?

I've had my parrot for 17 years. Well, scratch that, I've lived with a parrot for 17 years. We got him when I was a child and I used to be a little brat to him.. I've recently started really trying to train him, as well, no one ever has, and he's finally started to stop biting. I was wondering how long I should wait to try having him on my shoulder, how to react if he bites while there, etc.

I've had my parrot for 17 years, we got him when I was five and until about six months ago, we had a horrible relationship. The bird used to hate me, and I mean hate me. I would walk into the room and he would puff up, start crouching and do everything he could to scare me off. To get rid of biting, I did the following. Do not pull away and hell, or say "no bitey", the bird can confuse your excitement with praise. Say nothing at all and continue to push towards your goal of step up. With your other hand, softly and firmly, go to the birds beak and grab at it. Your parrot needs to understand that when you say "step up" he's going to get on your hand, hell or high water. When you pull away from your bird as he lunges at you or bites at you, you're teaching them that biting makes hands go away. Once you eradicate that thought process, the parrot will no longer bite. It takes a while, and you'll get a few more nips, but this worked for me.