Making your bird love to stay in your hand

[JacobBird]

Jacob, my Blue-Eyed Cockatoo can now step-up to my arm using the target stick. When he is in my arm, he touches the target stick and then I give him a treat. I have been doing this for about almost a week now and I really want him to stay in my arm not only for the treat. Now what happens is that if I don't let him touch my stick and then give him a treat, he will immediately step-down, jump, fly to his perch. Please suggest what should I do now..... Btw, he knows how to target train and knows how to eat from my hand.

[terri]

I dont know if you have been able to do this[head scritches yet] they useally love this .This is a process.I would try this - Put him on a playstand first then when he gets bored of that put him on the back of the couch on a towel with foot toys.With you sitting on the couch.I would think he would eventually come to see you .Then try head scritches.They dont want to be confined when they first come out they want to PLAY AND EXPLORE With birds it can be a very slow process.

[Polarn]

Mines did the same at first, well their still not big fans of sitting on the arm or hand looking pretty Polarn is the only one who really hangs out and that's usually him grabbing a foot toy and landing on my breast when I lay down and then playing fetch or just "american football" on the bed. The American football is me trying to take the item off of him and then the other way around.
But I wanted to be able to move them from place to place after stepping up so I started to with achieving what you have now until I could ask to step up without targeting.

Once they stepped up I would start waiting abut with the treat. Then click and serve. I increased the wait a bit. Then I started to lift my hand up, then down, click and treat. Then take a step, click and treat, then a couple more. Then I wanted to solve em flying off when treated so I started asking them to step up, lift hand up then down clicked and grabbed 2 treats so they could see there was an other asked them to step down, clicked and treated again. Then I did this with one step back before I treated for the step up then took a step forward and treated for step down. Eventually I removed the step up treat since they learned the got a treat when stepping down they would wait for that. Then I just increased the distance between objects I moved from and too.

Only reason I removed the great for stepping up was because I want the whole procedure to be what's needed to be done for the treat. I still treat immidietly for recalls though. And will continue doing for the reliability for eventual indoor free flight meetings.