Some days Kili is great and does all her tricks, recalls, etc without any problem. So I know with absolute certainty that she knows what she is doing. However, some days she is just plain annoying.
Sometimes I find myself getting caught in a trap where she won't recall and I have to persistently keep calling her till she just so happens to feel like getting off her feathered butt and coming or I come closer to make the distance shorter until it's a very easy flight. Other times I will recall her for the purpose of doing something else like working on a trick but she'll take her treat and fly off right away which either forces me to recall her again for another treat or have other problems. I know all of this is not good.
I see 3 options:
1) Reward recall, punish refusal
2) Starve the bird to escalate importance of treats
3) Terminate training session
These are all problematic in their own way. Punishment leads to avoidance and of course a parrot will never willingly fly to the punisher to receive punishment. We try not to starve the birds cause that could lead to physical or psychological harm as well as increase aggression. Terminating the training session may sound like a plausible solution, however, refusal to recall would then become the parrot's cue for "I don't feel like doing any more, screw you."
I propose that these may be some of the problems that lead to Kili's refusal to recall sometimes:
A) Not hungry enough, doesn't care about treats much
B) Tired, bored, wants to go back to cage
C) Knows that refusing might get back to cage quicker and cage = food
What methods can we use to encourage immediate and reliable recall and to discourage retarded or unreliable recall?
One major problem I see with tardy recall is that we face a dilemma. Reward or not? If you don't reward tardy recalls, you might make the recall behavior altogether extinct. We don't want to discourage efforts to recall. However, how can we discourage tardy recalls then? Also, if we use a variable frequency of reinforcement, not rewarding tardy recalls may not even serve any purpose at all.