I brought home a new-to-me senegal parrot on Monday (it's Wednesday). So far, everything is going wonderfully; almost too good to be true kind of wonderful. Leo is very calm, playful, friendly to everybody, steps up on command, non-aggressive, cuddly, and pretty much an attention whore. I have him in a separate room from the other birds for now, both for quarantine purposes and to allow the birds to adjust to each other's presence.
His previous human has kept his wings clipped. I'd like to allow him to grow his wings back out, but I don't want to do so until we have established a good training foundation. I have tons of experience training dogs, but birds are so very, very different. Cookie, the cockatiel was already friendly and trained when I came around, I'm still working on just making friends with Goofy, MrC's amazon, so Leo will be the first bird I've target trained and then trick trained. I want to make sure I don't make any mistakes.
I've read through the giant threads on target training. Taming is not an issue. He's already eating out of my hands and practically throwing himself at me when I open the cage door to bring him out. It's time to start the target training. My worry is that he's a little bird. I don't want to overfeed him. How much time is appropriate each day so I don't give him too many treats as a reward? So far he seems to like carrots and apples, and I cut those into fairly tiny pieces (maybe 1/8 inch square). He gets full pretty fast, so I stop training when he stops wanting the treat. Is that a good guideline? Should I limit it even further? We've already got one overweight bird (Goofy) that we're working on getting slimmed down, so I don't want to create another.