Tame lorikeet with bad manners

[SaraBear]

Wolf, please take your time and don't feel any pressure to respond right away, I'm happy to wait and I'm also happy to accept any other thoughts from anyone else.

[ParrotsForLife]

First off I would like to apologise for not getting here sooner, but also because I am too tired to answer you right now, but you will be the first answer when I wake up, it has been a long difficult day for me.

Parrotsforlife; I did not say that the rude party was you or identify the party in any way, I just apologized for it. If you feel that you said something that could have been considered to be rude, then remember it and try to do better in future posts. That is all that I will say about this on forum.

Have a good night everyone, I am too tired to continue rationally.

Lol me and Liz were the only replies and she said basically happy words lol and I was giving my opinion it was obvious you were talking about me otherwise why would you apologise for rudeness if you didn't consider anything rude and you weren't talking about me as you said?

[liz]

This forum is for the birds. I want to hear more about your Lorikeet.
I have found that children ab.ove average intelligents are more difficult to raise than the happy average kid. They think more and need more enrichment than the others. I have found this in Myrtle who can be a malcontent and make me crazy on some days.
When she does not want to do what I tell her she will just say "no". She has turned Aunt Betty's "oh well" dismissal of me back on her. Myrtle now brushes Aunt Betty off by saying "oh well". I think it is funny but Aunt Betty does not.

[SaraBear]

liz:

I think you may be right, yesterday I took her with me to visit my mother and my sister lives with her too, they also live in a much larger house than mine. They fell in love with her straight away and gave her all sorts of stimulation and attention and although her behaviour didnt change completely, it significantly improved. I realised that she really is a very intelligent and social bird, much more so than the ones I had before her, and that she needs a lot of attention to keep her stimulated.

[liz]

Each little bird has it's own personality. Each good human should be looking for the personality to learn what each one needs.
Both of my kids are gifted and were boogers for me to raise on my own. They did not achieve some things that the average kids did because they would get bored with it. My son barely made it through school even though most of his test were 100%. He was bored in the classroom and did not do what the rest of the class was doing.
I have to keep my birds supplied with new things every day or they get bored and get into trouble. It is just as hard as raising kids.

[Wolf]

Let us begin with the target training, I think that due to what you had read or heard about this type of training that you were beginning at a too advanced level for you to achieve the results that you were after. Due to the fact that this reply may get rather long and I am not a fast typer use this link to begin your target training with your bird. viewtopic.php?f=11&t=227

Another aspect that you probably need to look at is the diet that you are feeding to your bird as well as when you are providing what foods as this will also impact how well your bird responds to treats for training or any other use that you use treats for. The first thing that you need to do is to find out what your birds favorite foods are that are suitable for a treat and remove them ( just one or two of them) from her daily diet, reserving them for treats only. This will preserve them as high value items that the bird will respond to for a treat or for bribery purposes. Your timing of training and interaction could also be a factor in how well your bird responds to the treats that you offer them. Such an example would be if your bird has just eaten, it is less likely to accept a treat to do something for you when it wants to do something else, such as going into its cage or remaining on you instead of going to another person.

One must also make a study of this birds species behaviors as well as that of its individual personality as either one of these may be in play and influencing the way that the bird is reacting to what is going on around it. Lorikeets are known to be highly possessive of their human as well as for not giving any warning nips, instead, they go straight for the hard bite when displeased. Since they are so protective of whom they are bonded with it is always best to understand this as part of the birds nature and one of those areas that is not often subject to change, If they see or think that you are too cozy with physical contact with another person or animal bird or otherwise they may opt to defend their rights to you by biting the other person or animal or in cases where it is unable to reach the offending party they may bite you instead in the effort to get you to move away from this other threat to its claim on you.

Another thing that I think that you need to take into account is excitement. Most people do not understand that excitement, even positive excitement is just a breath away from the negative of biting. With humans we usually fail to recognize this relationship except for in mob behavior, where everything is going all so well and spirits are high and then someone upsets this and their is a violent reaction. But this is the same with our birds so when they are excites a gentle beaking becomes an actual bite or they are so happy and playing and time comes to do something else that is not as much fun and when we ask them to step up they react by biting us to say no, they want to continue. When they first come out of their cage they need time to get over the initial excitement or when they are tearing up a toy they need some time to wind down before we can safely ask anything of them.

From your description of her past this bird may also have some minor insecurity issues from her previous home that she needs to heal from and who can say how long it takes to recover to being bullied regardless of who did the bullying. This may intensify her natural protective behavior of you and her rights to you. This needs to be considered for its possible impact on her behavior. Then just as Liz has mentioned, due to her level of intelligence she may well need additional time with you or more mental and physical enrichments to keep her mind occupied.

This by no means covers all of the possibilities, but it hopefully will be enough to help you to see and understand your bird better so that you can bring your relationship with her to a better state of being.

[Chantilly]

Hi Sara

I have a lorikeet too, and like yours she is a female, came to me clipped and hating her cage. When I got Shrek I often got very nasty bites from trying tonget her away in the beggining. Shrek was hardly ever held and lucky to get 1/2h in one week at most. Like Wolf has suggested your lorikeet may be insecure as was mine, These birds are the most social species of lorikeet and they need allot of attention. When I first got Shrek I would have to hold her for ages because she was so worried she would not be let out again after that. After about 1 month of getting into a routine of holding her each day she has leart that it is ok to go back to her cage... (And she wants to, because they get hungry fast...)
I would think that allot of your lorikeets behaivour is based around her not knowing the routine. And I think that getting her into a routine is probably the best thing for your relationship right now as it was for me.
May I ask you how long you have had her?

I am not trying to go against what Wolf has suggested, but I think that target training is going to be very hard with a lorikeet, especially seeing as there is hardly anything that is good enough to use as a treat for a lorikeet, it will also be incredibally hard. If you have found a good treat please let me know for my birdy.
I dont know if you have been able to find anything of greatenough value but I know wild lories love what is called 'Ice cream beans' I grabbed heaps when I was away but when I got home they had gone bad and were crawling with fly larve, so I never got to try them with Shrek. I think native flowers and 'bush tucker' (wild fruits ect.) would be the most valued foods for a lorikeet.

I dont know what the others think but that so long as you keep on letting her out each day your lorikeet will see the routine and know that she can go back to her cage and everything will improve from there, I am definately not a proffesional, this is just my thoughts based of my own experience with my crazy bird, who by what you have described sounds allot like your bird. I will continue typing this tommorow but I really have to go now, sorry
I wish you the best with your baby , and hope that you found this helpful.

[Wolf]

Chantilly, you are not going against anything that I have suggested, you are adding to it in ways that I can not as I do not have this species. I realize that finding a suitable treat may not be easy, but it should be able to be accomplished, even if it is just a certain fruit juice, but definitely much harder than with most other species of parrots.

Your input is greatly encouraged and appreciated and may prove to be more beneficial than mine, not that hard to accomplish.

[Chantilly]

Thanks Wolf

[SaraBear]

Thanks guys, for sure Chantilly it seems like she just craves attention so much that even the very thought of being away seems to make her anxious! The routine idea sounds perfect I will definitely have to try that out.
I used your idea Wolf of making sure she wasn't too excited when I took her out, so I played with her with my hand in the cage first without letting her out, and then when I did, I used target training to get her back in where I played with her some more so she wouldn't think that being in her cage meant boredom or being left alone.
I also let my daughter do some target training with from outside the cage, that way they were both interacting with each other without any risk of either getting hurt, you should have seen my daughter's face light up when Skye responded positively!
I agree with you Wolf in that I was probably going too advanced and expecting a lot of results straight away, so taking a step back and doing things inside the cage seems to have helped a lot.
If you guys are interested in the progress I make with her, I'll keep you all updated.

By the way Chantilly, Skye really really likes honey which I give to her on a spoon in (very) small doses, and I do the training just before breakfast and dinner so she's a little hungry when we start and extra motivated.

EDIT: oh and I've had her for a few weeks now (still new to the family)

Thanks again for all your input!