Updates and Musings About Life with Parrots
Finally I have some video to share of Mika (white capped pionus) working on her retrieving skills! [updated: I’ve noticed some criticism of this video floating out there, so I want to make a couple of points: 1) This is NOT her regular cage. I just needed a surface to work on that I could…
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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…
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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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...The latest trick we’re working on is waving. This is usually one of the earlier non-prop behaviors parrot trainers teach their birds, but I started with behaviors I could capture instead of ones I’d have to shape. I finally felt we were both ready to work on this trick, and once I knew my plan…
Read More...Another attempt to capture Stewie on video. Better than our previous video clip, I think. The “put the ball in the cup trick” was the first big “stupid parlor trick” this little sun conure learned, but when we started training he was still pretty bitey; in fact, he’d reach around training props just to bite…
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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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