Updates and Musings About Life with Parrots
I recently read the new Karen Pryor book “Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What It Teaches Us About All Animals” and would like to recommend it to anyone who has an interest in training and how learning takes place. I’m a huge of Karen Pryor’s “Don’t Shoot the Dog” — the book that…
Read More...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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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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In my previous post about skateboarding parrots, I mentioned the skateboard prop I bought and the first steps I took to train my sun conure to stand on it. Basically I began to desensitize him to this new object by C/T’ing him for stepping close to it and beaking it. But I needed to be…
Read More...I’ve probably mentioned that I recently read Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor, a book that popularized clicker training among pet owners in the United States, and which spawned a whole industry — including clicker training books like Clicker Training for Birds by Melinda Johnson, which talks specifically about how to train parrots. Since…
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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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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...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’m still a terrible cinematographer, but I figured I’d go ahead and post this anyway. I wheeled Stewie’s playstand in front of the computer (with a built-in camera) and did a couple reps of targeting. Because the target stick is a black chopstick and the background is basically black, you often can’t see it in…
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I pulled this old draft out of my archives. It’s from late last year, but I thought I’d go ahead and publish it now, even though he already knows how to retrieve and put the ball in his cup. After very fast progress with targeting, we hit a bit of a bump moving on to…
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