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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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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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…
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In 2010, I wrote a blog post about Stewie’s and Mika’s favorite foraging toys. I recently found that post again and wanted to do an update. Their favorite toys have really changed! All new Stewie- and Mika-approved recommendations for 2018: Homemade Parrot Foraging Toys Homemade = cheap. Hooray for cheap. Here are our favorite toy…
Read More...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…
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…
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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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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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I frequently see people struggling with getting their bird back in its cage. I adapted one of my recent BirdBoard responses into a blog post. How do you get your bird to go in its cage? My parrot always puts up a fuss and runs/flies away when it’s time for him to go back in….
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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…
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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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