My African Grey screeches when she knows I'm around but.....

[birdmom]

Hellooo and welcome! Well its a sticky wicket isn't it?

I try to teach my birds a vocabulary that I can live with but its not always so simple. I took in a roomate a few years ago, who thought it was fun to go outside and wolf whistle so loud the neighbors two blocks away could hear, it --she had the blue jays trained to come and get peanuts from her. So, Buddi picked up on it right away and within 30 days, she started to make this reallllly loud wolf whistle. As you can imagine, the roomate was history when she refused to stop. I don't want to live with that for 80 years. Since then, I learned that unless I repeat the noise regularly or they hear it, they sort of drop it from their repertoire, unless I guess it was something the bird had ingrained for many years, I am guessing it takes some time for a new thing to stick. Is she hearing the screeching noise from another source, is it something you can eliminate? If not, what I try to do is give my birds sounds that I like, that they can go crazy with, so I whistle alot, with the radio and we have a call out/answer whistle, they say the first part and I reply with the second part. Sometimes I hear them doing it inside the house, when I comehome, they recognize the sound of my car I think and they know I'm coming so they start the whistle in anticipation of my arrival. So, maybe try to teach them a little jingle that you can associate with your arrival and it could replace the squarking? It could take a few months tho.

 

On the biting, I found that Buddi would do that to me, if she was jealous of another person too close to me to whom I was paying attention. So I found that if I picked her up and kissed her and told her I loved her, in a demonstrative way, while speaking to this person, she realized that I placed her in a higher status, and she stopped the nipping. One thing tho, try not to react when they bite, and did you try the bobbing up and down of your hand to distract them when they bite? Sometimes you can distract them from what set them off, by just bobbing your hand up and down. My birds both know what Don't Bite means. I tell them, Kissing Only. So, if they start to react to something and I see a nip coming, I'll bob a little, and say dont bite, kissing only, and they'll cock their head and then I'll get a little kiss instead of a bite. Well, thats alot of information. Good luck and give it time.

[birdmom]

Yes, blowing on them does work, it distracts them. I've used it many times, good suggestion.