This is a good idea that I need to start doing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-yBPEikn1UAlso, this morning Charlie woke up in an incredibly excited mood. He's been displaying and making all of his favorite noises since the second he was uncovered. I did a short training session with him and Kiwi before I left for school and they both did great. Charlie got a bit distracted at the end because Evan woke up and walked into the room. Evan is Charlie's favorite person, so instead of doing flight recalls, he sat on Evan's shoulder and tried to get him to do head bobs with him. I'm going to have to start training charlie to fly to me when he's on Evan.
Kiwi flew twice today toward or onto us without a cue!
I took him into the bathroom when I was going to take my shower and put him on the towel holder where he normally stands. He flew onto the counter and crawled onto me while I was brushing my hair. I praised him a bunch and let him sit on my shoulder until he started getting defensive towards my hair brush. I ignored it until he lightly nipped my hand, at which point I told him no, put him on the ground for about a minute, and then put him back on the towel rack. He sat there until Evan came into the bathroom to brush his teeth and then he flew onto me. Once again I praised him and held him for a little while before getting in the shower (we live in a trailer and there isn't really enough room in the shower to bring him into it with me, so he always stands on the towel rack while I'm showering).
I have seen a ton of advice to just ignore parrot biting and I disagree with this. I think that if you have a parrot who is doing it out of fear, ignoring it will probably work. I also think that if you have a parrot who doesn't like you or is little and doing it because he doesn't know his own strength, ignoring it will probably work. But if you have a parrot who enjoys biting and sees it as a game that he can actually play with himself for hours with his toys in his own cage, ignoring it will not work. Kiwi is one of these birds. Kiwi loves chasing and biting things just for the fun of chasing and biting. He does it with pens, with toys in his cage, with shoe strings, and if you ignore it, he will up the anti indefinitely because he thinks attacking things is fun. When I first got him, this meant that he would rip open skin on a regular basis if you weren't watching him.
Now, when he does this he nips very lightly and he will also try to ignore the stimulus that makes him want to do it for an extended period of time. He hasn't pierced anyone's skin in over a year and I can now brush my hair and work on homework assignments in relative peace (without him obsessing over attacking the object and the hand holding it). Before, he used to immediately bite as hard as possible (this meant a lot of bleeding). I use the give-a-warning followed by praise if he stops, keeping him out of situations that trigger the behavior (that's why he sits in the towel stand while I do things in the bathroom), and immediately putting him on the ground when he does any sort of a bite. I've been consistent with this for three years and he went from ripping open skin immediately, to not as often, to learning to stop and hold back, to hard nips, to light nips, and then to where he is now, with long pauses of trying to ignore the stimulus and then a very light nip some of the time if the stimulus is within a foot of him (which he still gets put on the ground for). When I ignore the behavior (now or when I got him), he would continue it for at least 15 minutes and his behavior was very playful. He sees chasing and biting as a game.
Charlie also used to bite now and then. He has never, in the whole 8 years I've had him, bit me so hard it broke my skin. In fact, I didn't even know he was capable of breaking skin until he bit open a boyfriend. When I first started dating Evan, Charlie would bite him on occasion. We used to same method that we are using for Kiwi, and Charlie hasn't bit anyone in about 3 years (he stopped nipping me after the first year).
I imagine that some people on this forum probably disagree with this training method, but I'm going to put it out there anyway, because 1. I have seen that just ignoring biting doesn't work some of the time. 2. This method doesn't use any sort of harm to the bird and has reduced the behavior in one of my birds by a great deal and completely eliminated it in the other.
Just keep in mind that birds bite for different reasons and this wont work as well as ignoring it if your bird is biting for a reason other than it thinks chasing and biting is a fun form of play.