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Clicker Training for Parrots – Workshop Slides

In case you missed it, here are the slides for the Clicker Training for Birds workshop presented at Phoenix Landing in September. This class focused on the principles of operant conditioning and, specifically, how it applies to our interactions with our birds — and how to use those principles in conjunction with a clicker to…

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3 Common Clicker Training Mistakes

Clicker training is a fantastic method for taming and training parrots, effective on everything from little budgies and cockatiels to ornery cockatoos. It’s amazingly simple and easy to do, and yields really fast results. The basis of clicker training is positive reinforcement/operant conditioning, and the “secret” of the clicker is that it’s a simple way…

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Clicker Training for Birds: My Parrot Training Bible

Getting Started: Clicker Training for Birds by Melinda Johnson is my bible for anything related to parrot ownership, including taming or training my parrots. If you read my blog or read the Bird Board forum, you’ll notice that I mention it frequently — both to people who have problems with their birds (e.g. “my bird…

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Clicker Training Myths and Misconceptions

Despite the hard work of a lot of proponents of clicker training, and several excellent resources about clicker training specific to parrots, there’s still a lot of confusion around what clicker training is, how it works, and how you use it to train companion birds. As an avid reader and participant in the training section…

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Getting Started Clicker Training Mika

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to convince Mika to eat a bigger variety of food. I’ve put off training with her because she’s such a picky eater that it’s hard to remove treats from her regular diet to use for rewards. Furthermore, she’s a very slooooow eater. So far there’s nothing she…

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Clicker Training Coins in a Piggy Bank

I found a cute little toy store in Clarendon with a completely unusable Web interface, but a great brick-and-mortar store. As soon as I walked by the Kinder Haus I knew I had to go in (and my companion knew it was for Stewie, no foolin’ him) and I found lots of great, high-quality (German-made)…

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Small Clicker Training Props for Birds

This is the bird prop I got for Stewie from Nature’s Chest — it’s intended to teach him color discrimination. Unfortunately it’s too small. He doesn’t have the dexterity to get the rings onto the peg.I’m going to try to teach him pull the rings off the peg instead and give them to me. He…

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Clicker Training a Caique

Here’s a great video of a caique (pronounced: kai-eek) flying and putting his toys away on cue, courtesy of the Bird Click group on Yahoo.

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Fast Progress with Clicker Training

I can’t believe how quickly Stewie has caught on in our training sessions. Clicker Training for Birds is based on operant conditioning principles – basically: teach the bird that a particular action will result in a treat. Even before I started with the formal clicker training, Stewie already grasped the concept of doing something for…

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Working on Harness Training

A long time ago I decided to buy the Aviator Harness for Mika. Last weekend I finally got it out and introduced it to both the birds. The Aviator Harness comes with a DVD, which I have to admit I haven’t watched yet 🙁 Apparently you’re not supposed to watch it where your birds can…

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Parakeet Training: Budgies Doing Tricks

Some people are under the impression that budgies (budgerigar parakeets) aren’t trainable because they are so small. Quite a few people, in fact, think budgies aren’t even real parrots. Not only are they parrots, check out this guy’s very entertaining comedy act comprised of trick trained budgies. (He’s saying “Allez, allez!” which means “let’s go”…

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