I have two budgies, creatively named Bluebird and Greebird. I suspect they're both girls.
When I received them, they were terrified of humans to the point of fluttering around the cage when someone entered their room, huddling together and pressing against the bars to get away. Over the past several months, I've been working on them, very slowly and gently, trying to bring them around.
I started by reinforcing them to be calm around people - they were in a room I didn't have to be in all the time, and when they would sit quietly when I entered, I'd leave (thus removing the negative stimulus - me - as reward). I had my spouse do the same thing, and in a few weeks, they were OK with us being in the room, but would still flip out if we moved suddenly or made much noise. That took several more weeks, but they got to the point of being OK to move in with the other birds - I think that helped enormously, because they could watch me handle Genji and Jetty and learn that I don't actually eat budgies.
Slowly, we started to condition them that talking, moving, sitting and standing near the cage were all OK, by much the same method. Then we offered them millet spray (something they'd never had in their previous home) and began to associate the millet with hands.
Every morning, my spouse or I sit by the cage, with millet in hand, waiting. We'd stay for a fair amount of time, and after a couple of weeks, Bluebird got bold enough to streeeetch and take a bite.
This was complicated by the Greenbird catching a cold - we had to take her to the vet, and then we had to towel her and give her a drop of medicine twice every day for a week. Rather than setting us back, though, it seemed to make her more confident with us. I'm not sure how that happened, since she hated being toweled. She did figure out, after the first couple of days, that if she took her medicine easily, she got let out of the towel and given a treat. We started giving them both treats after returning Greenbird to the cage, and it was like something clicked.
In the next two weeks, we made an amazing amount of progress. Yesterday, they were boldly hopping in and out of my cupped hands after the treats tucked between my fingers. Today, I began teaching "step up," with the Bluebird leading the Greenbird by mere seconds.
All this is just to say, it can be done, even with a bird who acts terribly afraid, even with birds in the same cage, even with complicating things like vet trips during taming.
Keep on keeping on!
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