Lovebirds have a reputation for losing their “pet quality” when paired up. But this video shows that lovebirds can be handled, remain tame and be taught to do cute tricks like “shake hands” and “turn around” even if they’re part of a bonded pair.
The creator of this video credits Tani Robar’s videos as the source of her training inspiration.
Even if your birds are bonded to each other, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t benefit from lots of continued human interaction and training. It’s just one more way to make their lives fun and enriching
Check out this great video of African Greys and Eclectus parrots playing basketball - this video is making the rounds on bird message boards and might just be the next viral parrot video (alongside such classics as Snowball)
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 wheel in front of the camera. 2) She is not food deprived. She has plenty of food available all day, but she will work for treats because she WANTS to. 3) I made this video to demonstrate the how's and when's of bridging with a clicker. I purposesfully avoided praising her because one of the mistakes that newbie trainers make is that they'll confuse the bird with lots of noise and mistimed clicks. Don't worry, she gets lots of praise and affection outside of this 5-minute demonstration video.]
Before we got to this point, we started with her standing on her regular cage’s door and taking the pink ring from me and then letting go again. Then I upped the criterion so that Mika would get C/T’d only when the ring landed in my hand.
When it finally “clicked” for her that she needs to put the pink ring in my hand, I set up her travel cage in front of the camera to document a practice session.
In our previous sessions we only worked on the door of her cage so she didn’t need to move much, just lean in one direction or the other. This video shows Mika’s first session on a surface where she has to walk in different directions to get the object into my palm. I also didn’t hand her the ring, making her fetch it herself. She did better than I expected given the new, higher criteria, demonstrating that she understood the end goal.
We’ll continue working on this trick for a while to get Mika’s retrieve really solid and generalized to a couple different options. But one thing I want to be careful about is making sure that Mika continues to enjoy playing with foot toys by herself and doesn’t start to think of every toy as simply an object that needs to be retrieved to me.
Some people are under the impression that budgies (budgerigar parakeets) aren’t trainable because they are so small. Quite a few people, in fact, think budgies aren’t even real parrots.
Not only are they parrots, check out this guy’s very entertaining comedy act comprised of trick trained budgies. (He’s saying “Allez, allez!” which means “let’s go” in French)
Now that you know just how entertaining budgies can be, don’t you feel sorry for those pet shop parakeets crammed into a small cage who never get let out and never get handled? Budgies, just like the larger parrots, need lots of mental enrichment and activity to keep them happy and well adjusted.
If you’re interested in training your parakeet to perform tricks, check out Melinda Johnson’s fabulous book: Clicker Training for Birds.
A little while back a sulphur-crested cockatoo was a viral sensation when a video of him dancing to the Backstreet Boys began to circulate on the Internet (his YouTube vid has almost 2 million views!).
Well, someone pointed out a new video of a bare-eyed cockatoo shaking his tail feathers, and let me tell you Snowball the Dancing Cockatoo has got nothing on Frostie.
Pepper the African Grey is a representative for Phoenix Landing, my favorite parrot adoption agency – and this weekend she rose to stardom singing for a national audience. This precocious parrot sang The Star Spangled Banner to open Puppy Bowl V.
Check out Pepper showing off her pipes at the Puppy Bowl:
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 training with Mika hasn’t been a high priority. I started clicker training Stewie a year ago mostly to tame him – he was pretty aggressive and I needed a fun, positive way to interact with him. In my mind, THE biggest benefit to training was that it turned him into a tame and loving bird. Since Mika came to me already tamed and affectionate, teaching her to do tricks never had the same urgency. Thank goodness Mika forgives me for being lazy. However, I do intend to get her caught up – at the very least she should be able to do the same tricks Stewie does. It’s only fair.
The next step is to keep working with Mika on fetching a big pink ring. We’ve done a couple of sessions and it never clicked with her what I wanted her to do, so my current tactic involves letting her watch Stewie as he demonstrates retrieve. (In interviews with Dr. Pepperberg, she describes this method of teaching Alex the African Grey as the “rivaling technique”.) Hopefully I’ll have some videos of Mika retrieving soon.
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 likes that doesn’t take her a few seconds to eat, so we’ve been very slow to get started with training — that’s because the training reward should be something that can be eaten quickly enough that it doesn’t stop the flow of training. The bird should not be given any opportunities to get distracted from the behavior being reinforced.
My first goal before I even started training was to change her diet: no more peanuts, fewer seeds, high-quality pellets instead of filler and, if possible, fresh foods. In addition to being better for her, it would be awfully convenient if Mika and Stewie ate the same foods – it would cut preparation time in half!
The good news is that seeds are finally a much smaller part of her diet, with the majority of it consisting of a combination of Zupreem Avian Maintenance Natural pellets, the same type as Stewie’s but bigger, and Kaytee Exact Organic pellets, plus a mix of dehydrated vegetables. She still gets pumpkin seeds for snacks, but the sunflower seeds are only for rewards now.
Even though unshelled sunflower seeds still take a little longer for Mika to crack and eat than I’d like, it seems like the best training treat option for her. I might even try shelled sunflower seeds if it appears that it takes her too long to shell them herself.
So I think we’ve finally overcome the hurdle to the very first step of clicker training: finding an appropriate treat.
We’ve started on the second step of clicker training: charging the clicker. This is where we introduce the parrot to the concept that click –> treat.
Once that’s established we work on teaching that trick –> click –> treat (i.e. that specific behavior –> reward)
I actually never charged the clicker with Stewie — we just started on tricks right away; to tell the truth, I’m not sure he even gets the whole concept of the clicker — but he certainly “gets” training. For some reason it just seems like Mika requires more introduction to the concept and the clicker might be necessary for marking the desired behavior more precisely since she does react more slowly than he does.
Here’s a video of me charging the clicker with Mika and asking for step ups:
At the end of this session, right after this video ended, I tried introducing the target stick, but she just ran away from it, so I’m saving targeting for a separate training session.
Since I haven’t really done any training with Mika, there aren’t a lot of videos of her. So if you’re wondering why there are quite a few of the Stu-monster and so few movies of my pionus, that’s why. I promise it’s not one of those no-one-takes-photos-of-the-second child things I’ll take more videos once she knows how to do some tricks, and I’ve asked my videographer friend who did the cute Introducing Stewie video to make one of Mika as well. With her looks, there’s no reason she can’t be a movie star too.
Update: July 31
Only our second training session ever and she already seems to get targeting. She’s even taking a few steps towards the target on her own. Hurray!
Having just posted about Stewie the sun conure and his reluctance to play nice with Mika, the precious new Pionus in our life, I’m reminded of an absolutely adorable video on the topic of how to make friends (starring Bo the sun conure):
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Welcome!
Welcome to my parrot blog, where I share insights with other and would-be parrot owners on ways to keep their pet birds happy. I'm not a professional trainer or avian expert; these are just my opinions, observations and insights based on my life with Stewie and Mika, and my efforts to do the very best for my birds. I also read voraciously and will share other cool stuff I find related to parrot ownership and training.
My first goal before I even started training was to change her diet: no more peanuts, fewer seeds, high-quality pellets instead of filler and, if possible, fresh foods. In addition to being better for her, it would be awfully convenient if Mika and Stewie ate the same foods – it would cut preparation time in half!
