Updates and Musings About Life with Parrots
In my last post, I wrote about Mika’s progress learning how to fly. It’s been two weeks and I haven’t repeated the exercise of luring her with her favorite junk food, but she has undertaken a couple more attempts at landing somewhere specific… with mixed results. Just goes to show that a parrot learning to…
Read More...
Mika showed me this weekend that she REALLY likes Sun Chips: she saw me eating some and flew to my arm to get closer. This is a big deal because Mika doesn’t really fly. Or to be more accurate, Mika doesn’t know how to land. She flies very rarely and when she does it’s usually…
Read More...
Rachel Ritchason is the Santa Barbara Zoo’s Curator of Birds and Records. She began her career in 1998 at the San Francisco Zoo, where she was a bird keeper. Rachel joined the Santa Barbara Zoo in 2007, where she went on to become the registrar in 2010 and bird curator in 2012. She holds a B.S…
Read More...
Lara Joseph is a professional animal behavior consultant and trainer. She is also the owner of The Animal Behavior Center, an international educational center focusing on teaching people how to work with animals using the principles of positive reinforcement and applied behavior analysis. We’re excited that Lara took time out of her very busy schedule…
Read More...
If you’re asking the Internet “How can I train my bird for freeflight?” the better question is really “Should I try to train my bird for freeflight?” (Free flight, to be clear, means flying your bird outdoors without physical restriction.) I’ve shared my personal, amateur opinions about freeflight before, but today I wanted to…
Read More...
It’s National Pi Day: 3.14 (but only in the United States, where we list dates backwards). Last year we listed 3.14 reasons why pi(onus) are awesome. Here is my list of why I love my Mika girl: She’s nuts! Yesterday I walked in the door listening to my iPod and she flipped out. She spent…
Read More...
Last night I attended a showing of A Place to Land, a 30-minute documentary about the different circumstances of parrots, and in particular rehomed and sanctuary birds. The film won a national Student Academy Award in 2009. The venue for the screening was a tiny community arts group in DC that hosts film screenings and…
Read More...It’s been a somewhat slow year for postings here on Best in Flock, but I thought I’d do a year-end wrap-up as we approach 170 different articles. We didn’t work on a lot of new clicker training tricks in the last year, but Mika made a lot of progress with flying. I also started making…
Read More...
Mika made me proud this weekend. Not only did she take a couple of flights that didn’t involve crash landing behind the couch or into the recycling bin, she also ate her first pieces of fresh food since she’s been with me. Ordinarily, when I offer her something that isn’t dry and hard (pellets, nuts,…
Read More...
If you love something, set it free If it comes back, its yours If not, it was never meant to be – Sting (but he wasn’t talking about pet birds) I’ve recently seen a few posts on bird forums about pet parrots escaping from their owners and, luckily in these specific cases, being recovered. One…
Read More...Speaking of flying… the video below is of a French guy, who rehabilitates eagles, flying with one of his birds off a mountain top. He’s been teaching the eagle (who has a two-meter wing span!!) to fly and this is the bird’s first long flight at high altitude. The thin air tires the bird out…
Read More...
