Updates and Musings About Life with Parrots
Here’s our most recent video of Mika demonstrating target training. As I’ve mentioned numerous times (as I learned from the Bird Click group), targeting is the best first prop trick to teach a parrot. It’s easy because it requires almost no chaining, and can be used to teach subsequent tricks. To be honest, doing clicker…
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(Updated Oct. 18) It’s my pleasure to post another in my ongoing series of interviews with well-known “parrot people”. Today’s interview is with Chris Biro, best known for his educational program The Pirate’s Parrot Show and the amazing YouTube videos of free flying macaws in the Moab Desert. Chris Biro has been doing his The…
Read More...Whenever I need a good laugh, I like to watch funny parrot videos on YouTube and similar sites. (It’s not for nothing that I’m the self-proclaimed Crazy Bird Lady.) It’s really not hard to find funny videos of sun conures, in particular. Below is another recent find and favorite. In this video, Snicket, a young…
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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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When I first got Stewie I tried training him to step up because conventional wisdom has that this should be the first thing a bird learns. All Stewie learned was that if he bit me hard enough I’d eventually go away. 🙁 Then I found the Bird Click group on Yahoo and took the advice…
Read More...We’re taking a break from our regularly scheduled programming to show you something really cool. Ever wanted to play fetch with a bird that has a wingspan of 8 feet and talons large enough to wrap around a tennis ball? Meet Evie the Eagle: This trick is super-advanced flighted retrieve (i.e., not just retrieve, not…
Read More...Here’s Stewie doing his coins in a piggy bank trick. The blue piggy bank is just a ceramic bank I picked up at a toy store. The “coins” are plastic disks from a Connect Four travel set. The coins in the piggy bank trick was taught the same way as rings on a peg (which…
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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…
Read More...One year ago TODAY, Stewie came home to live with me, and my life hasn’t been the same since. Because he was found on the street unbanded, we have no way of knowing how old he is, much less his exact hatch day, but July 15 marks the 1-year anniversary of his being my little…
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Here’s a video of Stewie putting rings on a peg. This trick is based on simple retrieve (although I didn’t start working on it until he perfected “ball in a cup“). I trained retrieve with a variety of objects, including these rings, so when it became time to teach this ring toss game, Stewie already…
Read More...Despite the fact that Stewie has been extra vocal in expressing his displeasure with me in the last week and I’ve only been moderately successful in tempering his bad mood, I wrote up some tips on what to do if your parrot screams a lot for the PetKnows blog. While we might not like that…
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