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Need help whit IRN step up training

Discuss the methods and techniques of clicker training, target training and bonding. These are usually the first steps in training a young parrot.

Re: Need help whit IRN step up training

Postby seagoatdeb » Wed Jun 22, 2016 2:46 pm

Erfan771 wrote:Firstly thank you very much for taking your time to write this to help me and your text made me really think about the purpose of getting my bird and what kind of rrelationship I want to have whit him and maybe for other birds I may get in future, I don't want a show bird or a special trained one but what I'm trying to achieve the whit these guides I found recently in the net is to get a closer to my parrot and be able to handle him and exact like you tell about your parrots make them to like me a d like to be around me as much as possible since I had him for a while and ccouldn't manage to handle him so I searched for any way that teaches me how to do this properly and the best I found was Micheal guide but now your words convincing me that there may be better ways to get to the same goal, you know referring to your questions I don't have a good feeling when I grab for the bird and he get in panic and tries to flee from my hand, and I don't feel that that's the best way to teach them but it's just that I don't know any better technique, so if there would be a way to make my bird coming to me or on my hand to take him to where I want that's of course more impressing to me than stressing him every time and trying to make it good again whit treats and training and even there is some success I often got to repeat the same training because my bird won't do it straight away after being grabbed, like one day he step up very well on command then the next day when I grab him he gets stressed and I need to start again to target him to my hand slowly till he agrees to step up again, iit's going like this for a couple days so I really would like to hear what kind of help you can offer me now to get on whit my :irn:


Michaels training techiniques are not just for a show parrots and Michael has a close relationship with his parrots. Michaels techiniques will work fine for you, your IRN is hand tamed and you have had some success with it. So dont use other people methods if you are having sucesss with what you are doing. Some of the people in this forum have 20 to 30 parrots and dont have a close relationship with that many of them and most of them are much older when they rescued them. You picked Michaels training becase of the kind of realtionship you want to have. You are dong well to work with the patience i have seen in your posts. But you will need to keep having patience. Training your hand fed parrot is like taking two steps forward and then one step back, especially if your parrot is not a baby at the time.

I use grabbing with my young Meyers, he was still young when 'i got him but he had two owners before me, and had bonded with parrots and was not tame to people anymore, and he was a scared parrot...ripped away from his second home and the parrots he had bonded to there. I always use towels in my training, because i try to make vet visits as comfortable as i can, and in an emergency i can towel one of my parrots, because they are not afraid of the towel and even find it comforting. I can tuck my Meyers in my jacket now to take over to my daughter for a visit, and that is mostly because I can grab my Meyers without him being afraid. He loves to be where there are different parots to flock with. He is very tame with me now, and will preen me, playfight with me, follow me around the house. Thats the kind of relationship i wanted. I like to take my parrots on outings or even trips, so I want them to be tamed to that level. They are like my companions or kids. i want them to be able to come to me when i call, for their safety. i dont get mine to do a lot of tricks, I just do enough training to get a close relationship and i give them lots of attention.

If you want to try others methods go ahead, but go back to yours if theirs are not working for you.
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seagoatdeb
African Grey
 
Gender: This parrot forum member is female
Posts: 1257
Location: Kelowna, BC Canada
Number of Birds Owned: 2
Types of Birds Owned: Red Belly Poicephalus and a Meyers Poicephalus
Flight: Yes

Re: Need help whit IRN step up training

Postby Wolf » Wed Jun 22, 2016 10:34 pm

Seagoatdeb is sharing some good advice with you although I don't always agree with her, but that is normal, just as no two parrots are the same, not two people are the same.
Your parrot is one of the species that is referred to as an aviary species because they usually require a lot more personal attention in order to remain bonded to their human, but other than that they are much the same and there is no reason that you can not have the relationship with your bird that you want to have. IRNs are wonderful birds but they bond much closer to another IRN than they do with humans, so it normally takes more time interacting with them.

I do agree that your bird needs more time out of the cage. It needs time out so that it can get exercise, which for a bird usually means flying around a bit. It needs time to explore its environment that it lives in and most importantly it needs the time out of the cage to interact with you.

The time spent out of the cage allows it to explore where it lives, with your supervision so it doesn't get itself in trouble without you being there to help it out. This makes the bird more comfortable where it lives, while time out flying will help it burn off excess energy so that it can settle in and focus on you and your training. consider that anytime that you are spending with your parrot is still training, it does not matter if part of that time is spent just sitting there with it and talking with it or if you are playing with a ball trying to teach it to pick it up and put it in a cup, kind of like bird basketball. Every interaction is training and it is a bonding activity as well.

If there is anything that I see that is getting in your way it is that perhaps you are a bit too centered on accomplishing a goal, which does not have to be a bad thing and it can help you, but is can get in the way as well because you may not give the bird enough time to make the mental connections that it needs to make. you and it do speak different languages so it takes a little longer and while it is learning a new thing it is going to get it right part of the time and do it wrong part of the time. Once it has it down it will do it right most of the time.

Try to understand how your bird would act if it were in the wild with other parrots, then consider that to your bird you are a big funny looking parrot that talks in anther language. Then try to use some of the parrots natural activities to help you to bond closer with it. For instance feeding times for parrots are not just about eating they are a social time and a bonding activity at the same time. Sharing mealtimes is the best way to improve your parrots diet, because it will always want some of what you have to eat. For that reason when you share food with your parrot you need to make it foods that are good for the parrot such as fresh raw vegetables and fruits and even a couple of tree nuts. But it is also a bonding time and socializing as well. Parrots live in a flock and although there is not leader they all go to eat at the same time and they share the food with each other and they are always talking and screaming to each other during this time.

Let us say that you need to start this activity with the parrot in its cage. And then let us say that you are a bit hungry and have a couple of extra minutes that you could go over and talk with your bird, and let us say that you want an apple as a snack and you know that your bird likes apples. Go sit with you bird and talk with him while you eat your apple and while you are doing this offer a few small pieces of the apple, that you have not bitten from, to your bird. You could also cut the apple up with a few piece cut especially for him.

This is a social time for you and your bird as you are spending time with him and talking to him. The pieces of apple become a treat for him because he knows it is not mealtime and because you are sharing it with him It is also a bonding time because of everything that I have said and it encourages your bird to trust you more because it comes over to you and take the treat from you, making you the bringer of good things to eat, and because it begins to trust you more it also wants to spend more time with you and on you.

If your bird will come to the door of its cage and take a treat from you it is a simple matter to hold the treat so that it must either stretch a little bit to get the treat from you and if it will do that then it won't take long before it will begin to step up for you. When a new bird reaches this level of trust I usually recommend that they start using Michael's method of target training. But I know that you have gone further than that and that your bird will target and that it will step up for you. Now he is not stepping up for you all of the time like you would like it to, and then when he does he steps off once you try to move with him or as soon as he gets his treat. So I think that for the part that he does not step up for you that I would say ok and leave him alone for a minute and maybe just take a stroll or two around the room or just stand there for a couple of minutes talking to him and if he allows it to just scratch his head or rub his beak ( both of which are bonding activities) and then after a minute or two ask him again to step up. It is not unusual for a parrot to behave in this manner and right at first you may have to repeat this several times before he is ready to step up, but be patient with him and he will improve. Never chase him around to get him to step up, just give him a little time and ask again, he will start stepping up. You can even show him that you have a treat for him and then give it to him when he does step up. But if he steps right back off, ask him to step up again, even if you have to show him the treat again, but then don't give it to him the second time for stepping up make him wait on your hand for a short time before giving it to him. You may have to repeat asking him to step up and stay and then try to offer the treat when he acts like he is getting ready to step back off and then you just get him to stay on your hand a little longer before giving him the treat until he will stay long enough that you could walk him to the training area. Then you would show him the treat and start to go to the training area but not offer the treat until he is at the training area.

Part of what I am trying to show you is that Michael's methods are just fine and where they are working for you keep using them, but when there are areas that are not fully covered by his methods than we can help and you may get several different responses of how to proceed and you can pick one and try it for a few days and if there is no progress then try a different one. Parrots are a lot like children and what works to teach one something will not always work for another one, but in any case you have to be patient and expect that for a while they are going to do it wrong as many times as they do it correctly.

I don't know if you know anything about a parrots body language or not but if you do not I will be happy to share a link to some basic body language with you that might help you and your parrot. By the way, may I ask what your bird's name is? You might have mentioned it but I don't recall what it is.

Although some of our responses have not been as helpful to you as they needed to be, I would like to correct that and hear more about you and your parrot, It sounds to me that for the most part you are really doing quite well with him. I don't want us to get hung up on the toweling thing more than we need to. Your bird is better off with you knowing how to towel him properly and being comfortable with it, than for him to be scared of it and fighting against it and the same holds true for the grabbing method that Michael teaches. But I also think that he needs to trust you more so that the step up is all that is normally required to take him around your home. He needs to know all of these things and be comfortable with all of them. You just need to work with the step up method more so that he is comfortable with that so that the other methods don't have to be used as much. I only have one other thing to add about Michael's training methods and that is that they are very good, because he does need the level of performance from his birds that he does.

I can't say whether Michael trains his birds to always wait on him to take them out of their cage or not and it is not an issue for me, but I do know that he makes sure that his birds all have a lot of out of cage time that is spent not only with training sessions but that they have time to just be themselves as well as time just hanging out with him. For a parrot this seems to be about four or more hours a day of out of cage time that is spent for just hanging out and being a bird, training and exercise and exploring their world.

I know that this has been a long post, but I hope that it is helpful both in understanding your bird better and in addressing your original questions. If not let me know and I will be happy to try again and answer ant questions you may have to the best of my ability.
Wolf
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Gender: This parrot forum member is male
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Location: Lansing, NC
Number of Birds Owned: 6
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African Grey (CAG)
Yellow Naped Amazon
2Celestial Parrotlet
Budgie
Flight: Yes

Re: Need help whit IRN step up training

Postby seagoatdeb » Wed Jun 22, 2016 11:01 pm

Something Wolf said put me in mind of one of the techiques i use to communicate and tame parrots. So i am just offering it here.

I approach the cage with an eye blinking going on slowly to show i am not a predator and my approaching is friendly. i go as close as is comfortable to the parrot and if it makes a movement like opening and closing its beak in a friendly way, i copy that. If the parrot backs away, then i back away just as much. If the parrot come forward, I speak gently saying good bird, and move slighly forward. When the parrot, comes forward to me when i approach, consistently i know it is time to move forward, to a next step in training, and we have begun to communicate and understand each other already. i approach training like a two way communication of us both understanding each other.

Parrots have to live with other parrots in the wild, so they learn about each parrot and it shapes their behavior and relationships with each other. They are never able to do everything they want. When a parrot decides to do something in the wild he has to take things into account. If he wants to eat something in a corner of a field, and if another parrot is there already eating it and he approaches and the other parrot makes an agressive posture, the parrot has to decide if he wants to risk grabbing the food and getting attacked or finding another tasty bit of food. The parrrot may decide he is going to preen another parrot, and a third parrrot runs up to chase him away. If the parrot that chases him away, only does it when he preens a certain parrot, he can adjust his behavior. But if that parrot is aggressive towards him in other circumstances, he will learn to see any signs that he is aggravating that parrot or he may try to dominate that other parrot.

The more we act like parrots in the wild, the easier they can communicate with us. While we are training them it is important to see what they are communicating to us.
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seagoatdeb
African Grey
 
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Location: Kelowna, BC Canada
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Types of Birds Owned: Red Belly Poicephalus and a Meyers Poicephalus
Flight: Yes

Re: Need help whit IRN step up training

Postby Wolf » Thu Jun 23, 2016 9:43 am

I probably would have said that it would try to intimidate the other parrot so that it would quit trying to attack it, but that is because I rarely see any behavior in my birds that I would actually call dominate type behavior. All parrots are individuals and unique and since out caged birds are exposed to dominate behaviors through us, I can't honestly say that it does not occur with captive parrots. Just like us they learn what they live. Also there is a strong correlation between dominate behavior and intimidating behavior. Just a difference in perception, most likely.
Wolf
Macaw
 
Gender: This parrot forum member is male
Posts: 8679
Location: Lansing, NC
Number of Birds Owned: 6
Types of Birds Owned: Senegal
African Grey (CAG)
Yellow Naped Amazon
2Celestial Parrotlet
Budgie
Flight: Yes

Re: Need help whit IRN step up training

Postby Pajarita » Thu Jun 23, 2016 10:58 am

Erfan771 wrote:Firstly thank you very much for taking your time to write this to help me and your text made me really think about the purpose of getting my bird and what kind of rrelationship I want to have whit him and maybe for other birds I may get in future, I don't want a show bird or a special trained one but what I'm trying to achieve the whit these guides I found recently in the net is to get a closer to my parrot and be able to handle him and exact like you tell about your parrots make them to like me a d like to be around me as much as possible since I had him for a while and ccouldn't manage to handle him so I searched for any way that teaches me how to do this properly and the best I found was Micheal guide but now your words convincing me that there may be better ways to get to the same goal, you know referring to your questions I don't have a good feeling when I grab for the bird and he get in panic and tries to flee from my hand, and I don't feel that that's the best way to teach them but it's just that I don't know any better technique, so if there would be a way to make my bird coming to me or on my hand to take him to where I want that's of course more impressing to me than stressing him every time and trying to make it good again whit treats and training and even there is some success I often got to repeat the same training because my bird won't do it straight away after being grabbed, like one day he step up very well on command then the next day when I grab him he gets stressed and I need to start again to target him to my hand slowly till he agrees to step up again, iit's going like this for a couple days so I really would like to hear what kind of help you can offer me now to get on whit my :irn:


I don't know if you were thanking me or Wolf but, if it was me, you are very welcome and I am just glad I was able to explain myself properly without offending you (I tend to be too brusque, sometimes). And don't feel bad about your confusion when it comes to methods of achieving a good relationship, we all went through that. Parrots are not easy animals to understand and we all made and continue to make mistakes. But I don't think that you need to discard Michael's methods, I think that the only thing you need to do is get to the point in the human/parrot relationship point where Michael starts from with his birds and then take it from there.

What I would do is go back to what you were doing before, meaning the freedom and eating together, but add more to it. First thing I would do is review its diet because you need to make the reward/treat very attractive to the bird. This means not free-feeding (filling up a bowl) the protein food (pellets, seeds, nuts, nutriberries, avicakes, etc) as well as identifying which is the bird's highest value item. I do this by feeding mine gloop and produce for breakfast and all day picking, and seeds/nuts only for dinner (this way, the bird is always willing to 'work' for a seed or a nut during the day). Once you got him used to this diet, identify his highest value item (his very favorite food). You do this by putting out a selection of seeds and pieces of nuts three times in three consecutive days and watch which one is the one that he ends up picking first in a consistent basis (it might not be every single time but it will be the one he usually picks up first). This food must be reserved only to be used as a reward for training BUT, at the beginning, when you want him to bond with you and trust you completely, you need to offer it as a 'friendship' token (meaning, you just give it to him for no real reason other than you like him and want him to be your friend -but remember to do it every day at more or less the same time and ALWAYS use the same praise phrase while you do it, this will get him used to it and, literally, transform it into a reward on its own). Once the bird gets used to your giving him treats at always the same time of the day, he will begin to look forward to your presence and approach you out of its own initiative. Once you see this is happening and he is gladly taking the treat from your hand he would have already learned to associate this very good thing (the treat) with your praise and he will be ready to be completely hand-tamed. Next step is to target the bird to a perch or a surface like a table, for example, and make him step up to your hand by holding the treat in your non-dominant hand (left?) on the other side of your dominant one (right?), and give the command: "Step up!". You wait for him to do it and, if he does, praise, praise, praise and give it the treat. If he doesn't (you should only ask twice in a row), don't say anything but don't give him the treat, wait 5 minutes (do something else, don't just sit there looking at him, he needs to think that you have moved on to something else) and ask again. Keep on doing this (but not one time after another for hours and hours, that would overwhelm it and be completely counterproductive) until he steps up to your hand and takes the treat (praise, praise, praise and do NOT move your hand at all). Don't worry if he doesn't stay on your hand but, if he does, teach him: "Step down". This is the command you use for them to get off your hand and go to a perch and it is imperative that he learns it in order for you to be able to transport him from one place to another because, when he does and once he is on your hand, he will stay there until you command the step down. Keep on doing this until he stays on your hand waiting for the 'Step down" and, once you see he is consistently waiting for you to give the command, start teaching him to stay on your hand doing transport. You do this by giving the 'step up' command and very, very slowly and keeping your hand as steady as possible, move it a short distance (it's pretty much just moving your arm at the beginning) and give the step down command. As he gets used to this and you see that he stays on your hand without a problem, you start slowly walking with him. A short distance at the beginning and, as you see that he stays, you start making the distance longer and longer until you can move him from one end of your house to the other without him flying away. But don't worry too much if he takes off, mine do it sometimes and all I do is just walk over and ask for the step up again - no biggie. Training a parrot without stressing it out and/or damaging his trust in you is just a matter of patience, repetition and persistence without insistence. Once you achieve the basics (step up, step down, transport in hand and recognition of praise) you can teach them pretty much anything you want to.
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Norwegian Blue
 
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Re: Need help whit IRN step up training

Postby Erfan771 » Thu Jun 23, 2016 11:35 am

My parrots name is sun and she's female what I found out recently because no black ring appeared around her neck, aswell my thanks going to all of you who are trying to help me in this post.

Tomorrow I'm leaving home for a trip for ten days, I won't take her whir me since my wife going to care for her, all your advice are very helpful and after I come back I'm going to start from the beginning whit the best things you advised me whit from the post and hhopefully that's going to work out for me.
Erfan771
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Re: Need help whit IRN step up training

Postby seagoatdeb » Thu Jun 23, 2016 1:34 pm

Wolf wrote:I probably would have said that it would try to intimidate the other parrot so that it would quit trying to attack it, but that is because I rarely see any behavior in my birds that I would actually call dominate type behavior. All parrots are individuals and unique and since out caged birds are exposed to dominate behaviors through us, I can't honestly say that it does not occur with captive parrots. Just like us they learn what they live. Also there is a strong correlation between dominate behavior and intimidating behavior. Just a difference in perception, most likely.


Yeah they are just figuring out their relationships.

In my house Gaugan is what i call a "dominant" for lack of a better word, type of parrot. By that I mean that she likes to know where everyone fits in the flock and gets everyone, parrots and people to do things her way, as much as she can. Sunny is a want to fit in and do what other parrots do type. When i socialized them to each other, it was Gaugan i had to socialize to Sunny, Sunny just wanted to fit in. Sunny wants to be with Gaugan a lot, and Gaugan is more independant and wants her alone time sometimes . So she has chased Sunny off when he is too overwhelming for her. At first Sunny had a hurt look in his eyes, but now he understands Gaugans body language so he feels bettter about his realtionship with her and Gaguan feels better too.

In my daughters house her Meyers was the strongest parrot, when she just had a Conure and a Meyers, and they were buddies and the Meyers eventuallly started scaring the conure a little so he would back off, since he was jumping on top of the Meyers and Conures are such attention seekers. It could just be called Parrot politics, but i have clearly seen some individual Parrots that like to be the one everyone else has to "respect" for lack of a better word.
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seagoatdeb
African Grey
 
Gender: This parrot forum member is female
Posts: 1257
Location: Kelowna, BC Canada
Number of Birds Owned: 2
Types of Birds Owned: Red Belly Poicephalus and a Meyers Poicephalus
Flight: Yes

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