NEED Help -- How To Solidify Basic Recall Training?

[CinnamonParrots]

Alrighty, So my GCC (7 years old) is quite a little bugger sometimes. She is a great bird, but at the same time, she is such a nightmare. And it does not help when family members in the household are old school and will not accept to help (I hope to leave when I attain my degree!) with training which furthers the task of FIRST getting rid of some unwanted behaviour. Such as screaming, shrieking when we go to the fridge, wash dishes, turn on the tap, run water for any reason, chop food, whisk eggs. All of these sounds get my GCC very excited and she does the typical conure pose "lowered back posture, tippy-toes, wings partially spread out" as if she is ready to fly but doesn't and just vibrates her wings and screams.

So Because of these problematic behaviours (due to an open concept living space) as well as realizing I actually needed to TRAIN my conure to come when called, I have taken upon the task of target training her.

Now the problem is that I have a lovebird and budgie to which I've also previously target trained, but I realized it is difficult to use the same clicker for all 3 birds especially if they cannot be removed from the same room effectively (until I can build some T-stands) The only plausible solution was to remove my conure, but my living room is the biggest space in my house that's not carpeted. So I like to train her there. She has learned to target when I pull out the chopstick, she gets REALLY excited about that. I keep her safflower seeds in a pouch that I can clip on to my pants, she has gotten to the point where she gets excited when I have the pouch as well because she knows it's "treat time if I do stuff".

She has learned to push a wiffle ball around ontop of her cage, because I couldn't get her to pick up the wiffle ball so I settled for pushing. She also learned to target the chopstick VERY quickly!!! and I've used the target as a means of getting her to fly from one stick to another that is mounted on my cages. But then I decided to recall train her. She does this mostly on her own terms, and even when I limit her food intake before sessions, she does not always fly to me. She does perform above CHANCE LEVEL most of the time which is good. But I'd like to solidfy that. And keep in mind, I am doing this all without a clicker, which I feel is the reason she is not responding as well.

Also, my goal for training her was so that she would be able to get more exercise as she has always been semi-clipped and to stop terrorizing my other birds when she is hormonal - and to try and get her to play with her toys!

[Shelby]

A possible reason that she is not coming consistently is because she's not really bonded to you. Try spending more time just "hanging out" with her, watching TV, checking email, etc. She also may not be solid enough on "target" and so she's not comfortable recalling yet.

[CinnamonParrots]

Thanks, That would make sense regarding not really sure what "target" actually is - the stick she will target right away, without it, not so much...as far as bonding goes, lucky for me she is very much bonded and social to pretty much anyone and everyone when we're out. in her home, she is 40/60 between my mom and I I will definitely try more targets with her before recalling her again.

[kiwitheparakeet]

Normally, someone would post this in recall and flight training. Look @ Micaels trained parrot blog

[CinnamonParrots]

I have looked at most of his training videos, but everyone's situation is different, and I figure someone may have some specific input pertaining to my specific situation because Michael's birds are in a room with less distraction where there's actual training space where I'm training my birds in a space very much lived in and of activity so I wondered if people had input on how to train birds in that situation, and if not having a parrot who is "very well behaved" may affect training results.

[Avialae]

What rewards do you use? Do you show her the rewards beforehand when training?