by Michael » Mon Jul 02, 2012 5:12 pm
There are a few elements here.
A) Parrots will be parrots. Flying around, playing, following you, evading you, etc are all going to be natural parts of their free will that you must accept.
B) Caging (or otherwise restricting like a room) a flighted parrot will be necessary. If you leave them out all day, they will tear up your house and do whatever they want. By restricting out of cage time, you have a better chance of managing it. If the parrots spends all day out, inevitably you will run out of "stuff" that you can do for your parrot to listen to you. This stuff may include food, treats, petting, attention, and out of cage time. But the parrot only needs so much of each of these. A few hours a day at most. Beyond that, it couldn't care less about you and will do what it wants. Again, you either have to accept this or cage it.
C) Training can be used to teach a bird to spend more time on its perches and to stay until called. I use and recommend [url=parrotwizard.com/Training_Perches]Parrot Training Perches[/url] because if you do all training with them, then the parrot also learns potty training and stationing on them automatically.
In the short term there is nothing you can do to keep your parrot down on an open perch. In the long term you can make them a bit more manageable and establish ways of them coming to you. I will outline a few of them here now:
1) Resource Management and particularly food management (treats). This is a huge topic so I can't explain it all now but essentially it means reserving stuff for the parrot to want from you so that you can offer it to the parrot in return for cooperation.
2) Food reduction management. Now we're talking about food management (whether by food scheduling or weight management) for energy levels. By keeping their weight down a bit is not only healthier but also makes them less hormonal and less hyperactive. We're not talking about starving them. I'm talking about giving them the right amount of food rather than so much that they don't know what to do with themselves cause they have too much energy from being overfed. If you keep food in the cage all day long, I guarantee you the parrot is overfed and is dying to fly off that excess energy.
3) Fly the heck out of the parrot and get it tired. Taking it outside (restrained by harness or carrier) or giving it reason to fly a lot indoors will burn off energy and make it more tired. This kind of bird is more likely to stay put than the hyperactive one that wants to play.
4) Provide toys and fun things to do on stands during non-training times to keep the parrot there rather than searching for adventures. Change the toys frequently. Teach the bird to be toy oriented. Use suitable toys.
5) Take the parrot out midday or whenever it tends to be less active anyway. Mine like to nap midday so even if they are out of cage at that time, they may just nap on their stand anyway despite having freedom to fly.
6) Recall training. The byproduct of long term flight recall training is that the parrot learns to stay. It has taken 2 years to get to this point with Truman but now he will finally stay on his perch and wait for me to call him. You can see him wings ready to go but unlike before, he waits for a while before coming. He has learned that if he comes uncalled, I will just send him back to do it again. So all the times the parrot comes uncalled, it is punished by not getting a treat (negative punishment) and also tires itself out needlessly. Eventually it's tired enough that it doesn't jump the gun but does come when called which is the opportunity to lock in the learning of coming only when called.
Also you can consider keeping a travel cage for the parrot to stay put but nearby at certain times of the day. Harnessing indoors (with nowhere to go but back to perch) is also a possibility to teach it to stay on the stand. You get one of my training perches and clip the leash to it. Keep the stand with enough space on all sides that there is absolutely nowhere else within leash length. This would keep the parrot in range of the stand safely but without clipping the wings. Other times when appropriate it can still get to fly.