by Faraaz » Wed May 14, 2014 5:49 pm
You will need to target train him first. I first started out with holding the stick in front of my bird Truman. Usually birds have the “urge” to touch or play around with the stick. Truman, when I first put the stick in front of him bit the stick. I did not reward him until he stopped biting the stick once he did I clicked my clicker (Not required but helps, you can acquire one from this website) and gave him a treat. Keep holding the stick in front of the bird. Truman thought he was suppose to step up so he nipped the stick and tried to step up. I quickly halted the behavior and gave him a treat. I continued to hold the stick in front of him. He nipped the stick and then I clicked the clicker and gave him a treat and so on. The next day I took him out just to play with him and I just tried to target just to see if he would remember. He did not bother touching the stick so I tapped the stick on his beak and gave him a treat. DO NOT DO THIS MORE THAN THREE TIMES! If you do it won’t get you anywhere and he would not learn the trick. He will soon remembered the behavior of touching the stick and then get a treat. Later in the second session he was walking to touch the treat. Target training is easy and it can help teaching your parrot a lot of other tricks. Now that you teached your bird to target train now take the stick and make him flip on you finger by moving the stick consistently under and over your finger and then let him touch it. Give the verbal command like "Flip" and keep doing this. Keep your training sessions short to 10-15 Minutes and do it daily. He will soon learn when you say Flip to flip.
Hope this helped. I would like Wolf or anyone else to critique this post if I am doing something wrong.