HOW DO I STEP UP TRAIN HIM

[Camilo]

Hello so I am the owner of a nanday conure and I just don't know how to get him to step up onto my finger. He lets me pet him, hand feed him,etc and he still doesn't step up. I've had him for a month btw. If I do try to get him to step up, He will try to bite me. Any advice? Thanks

[Wolf]

I see that this is your first post, so allow me a minute to say welcome to the forum. We care very deeply about these birds, both ours and yours and will do our best to help you and your bird to develop a great relationship with each other as well as to provide assistance in other areas such as training, diet mental and physical enrichment or wherever you need help.

Since this is your first post, I have no idea as to how much you know about parrots in general or about the nanday parrot specifically, nor do I have any information about your bird to help with my reply. Because of this I may go into more detail than you would need me to if you have any experience, this is just so that I can be sure that I am clear enough with any suggestions that I make.

You have only had your bird, whose name is ?, for about a month, which is a very short time for it to adjust to all of the scary changes that have just occurred in its life. It has just recently lost everything that it was familiar with and moved in with you whom it did not really know, even if you had spent some time with it before bringing it home with you, and had no reason to trust you and with only a month of being with you it is just beginning to trust you and it sounds like you have done rather well with it in this area so far. It still has much to learn about its current environment and about you, so it is still a bit scared and although it is trying to trust you still has a ways to go. With parrots trust is really everything and is the basis for the entire relationship, without this trust you really have no relationship.

I would say at this point that it is just a matter of being patient and allowing this bird to make the first moves towards physical contact with you, but I can offer a suggestion or so that should help to speed things up a little. I don't know what you have done with your bird to bring it this far so one of the things that I will do is provide you with a link that should help you with this and then make a couple of suggestions myself.

Here is the link : viewtopic.php?f=11&t=227

Now based on where it appears that you are, and by the way I am assuming that by hand feeding you are actually referring to the act of giving the bird a treat and not in actual hand feeding, you should be able to place yourself at the open door of the birds cage and offer the bird a treat at the door. It is important that it is offered at the door and not by you reaching into the cage at all. you want your bird to come to you for this. Once the bird is coming to you at the entrance to its cage and accepting a treat from your fingers or hand calmly then you should begin to hold the treat in the other hand and hold it so thet your bird will need to reach over your hand to reach the treat. You just want the bird to stretch a little bit for it, if the bird does not begin to step up on its own after the third treat. stop and come back in a couple of hours and repeat doing this but hold he treat just a tiny bit further away from the bird so that it either has to really stretch to reach the treat or step onto your hand with at least one foot in order to reach the treat. You should not need to hold the treat any further away from the bird than this as although it may take a few tries but the bird will make the connection and begin to step up on its own and once that occurs then you just add the verbal cue when it does step up.

Try offering the back of your hand for the bird to step up on, or more precisely the back of your fist or your forearm as they are not so afraid of these as they are of our hands.

Anytime that you are working with your bird speak to it with a slightly higher pitch to your voice sort of as in trying to coax it and use the birds name very often along with a lot of good bird type of praise.

Singing is also a great way to help build trust as they love it when you sing softly to them, even if you sing as poorly as I do.

I hope this proves helpful to you and your bird ? .

[Pajarita]

Is this bird an adult that was rehomed to you or is it a baby? If the latter, how old is it?

[Camilo]

Thanks that was really helpful

[Camilo]

Btw I do take him out of the cage and interact with him, the problem is he just doesn't step up when asked. The only way he comes out of the cage is when I have something he likes like a piece of Apple and he then climbs onto my shoulder to eat. ( instead of my finger)

[Wolf]

This is pretty much normal behavior as they feel more secure and safer when perching on your shoulder or with some birds your head, although you might have to watch for them leaving little gifts in your hair of the kind that you won't appreciate very much.

Hands are shaped a lot like the mouths of the predators that want the bird for a snack and I think that they recognize this and may be the reason that many birds are more afraid of our hands than of any other part of us.

For our birds to step up onto our hand, it is a total act of trust from the bird to us and it takes time for this trust to develop. They watch us much more closely than we are usually aware of and this is partly due to the fact that one of their primary ways of communicating is through body language as subtle as the position of a small group of feathers or the general position of the body. When you live in a large group who are all calling loudly to each other over everyone else visual communication will very often become the more important means of communicating with each other. While they are watching us, I am sure that it is not lost on them that we handle and pick things up with our hands and that makes our hand perhaps the most dangerous part of us for the bird, so approaching and then stepping onto our hands is a very courageous thing for them to do and shows a tremendous amount of trust from the bird. Just relax and be patient and very soon your bird will be stepping up for you all on its own. All you need to know to help speed up this process you now know so just use that knowledge and allow the bird to move at its own pace and he will soon be stepping up when you request him to most of the time.

[Camilo]

Alright thanks, I hope so