If you do research on whether you should allow your bird on your shoulder, you’ll find a lot of sites warning that this is a definite no-no. “Shouldering your birds leads them to think they are dominant to you.” “Allowing birds on your shoulder can cause you to lose an eye.” Etc.

While absolute rules are easy to understand and pass along, the question of whether to allow your parrot on your shoulder is not as black-or-white as some other parrot-related advice. The messy truth is that whether your bird can safely be on your shoulder depends entirely on your bird.

Reasons why shouldering your bird could potentially be dangerous:

• You can’t see your parrot’s body language. While you might know his moods really, well, it’s hard to act appropriately if you can’t see his body language.
• Your bird is very close to your face. Any small aggression on the bird’s part carries with it a small chance of disproportionately serious injury. While the odds may be small, that risk may not be worth taking.

Misconceptions about why you shouldn’t let your bird on your shoulder:

• Birds who are placed in a higher position than you, think they are dominant to you. Dominance theory is based on observed canine behavior. Parrots in the wild don’t follow a social hierarchy based on dominance. Parrots prefer higher places because that’s where they feel safer, not because they want to assert status.
• Birds who are on your shoulder will bite you. I don’t think shouldered birds are any more likely to bite; the problem is that you can’t react and effectively avoid the bite if you can’t see the warning signs.

If you have a bitey, unpredictable bird, don’t let him on your shoulder. Not because he might start thinking he’s higher than you in the social pecking order, but because you might get hurt. It’s really just that straightforward.

Cooper, Rainbow Lorikeet. Photo by: nettsu

Here’s a funny irony: I allow Stewie, the more aggressive and bitey of my two birds on my shoulder all the time. He’ll bite me, sometimes pretty hard, if he’s unhappy or he thinks I’m trying to coerce him into doing something he doesn’t want to do (e.g., I’m trying to pick him up to put him back in his cage). But when he’s on my shoulder, he’s a content little conure. If I turn my face, he’ll oh-so-gently and deliberately groom my eyebrows. He’s at his gentlest when he’s preening my face.

On the other hand, I prefer that Mika not be on my shoulder too much. While she’s a sweet and gentle soul, she’s also a little unpredictable and clumsy. She (almost) never bites, but she also doesn’t have separate settings for gentle and aggressive. She only has one setting which falls somewhere in between.

If she’s “biting” me, she beaks me aggressively. When she’s preening me, she preens me aggressively. All contact seems to be at the same level, not quite hard enough to be hard, but not quite gentle enough to be delicate either. She’s also very clumsy – which means that her idea of “preening” my face means falling forward into my face and pinching my eyelids. Yikes!

Last, but not least, Mika is a profuse pooper. My god can this girl poop. Stewie tends to poop in certainly places — not necessarily places I want him to poop, mind you, but he does seem to have his own rules about places he finds acceptable. As a consequence, he rarely poops when perched on my shoulder. Mika, on the other hand, poops whenever, wherever and as often is most inconvenient.

Thus, reason #3 not to let your bird on your shoulder: bird crap all over the back of your clothes.

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Learn more about how to train your bird to stop biting from Jenny Drummey, a Phoenix Landing coordinator.