Young Alexandrine Loud Chirp

[cml]

Sounds like you are making great progress then !

Oh, I forgot to comment on this in my earlier posts;

Occasionally we can tell why he's doing it, such as one of us leaving the room.

NEVER EVER give in to this, unless he's making the one noise you are trying to teach him to use as his new contact call!

[eggplantbren]

It came back. We're trying some extinguishing tactics right now. Hopefully he will figure out that the noise causes me to leave the room immediately.

[liannez]

It's difficult because we're starting to figure out exactly what his noises are for, but we don't want to give him what he wants until he's quiet. Problem is, sometimes that doesn't happen for a very long time. He doesn't quite seem to be connecting that he doesn't get what he wants unless he's quiet.

[liannez]

The other problem is his cage is in the living room and sometimes we just have to go in there to do other things, and no, there is nowhere else we can put him.

[cml]

I understand, and I know it can be very frustrating, we've worked through it as well , and at that time Stitch lived in our living room, just as your guy.

Thing is, dont react in any way, not even by leavning, but continue doing what you were, and look like you ignore him (then you can sneak off). Then immediatly on him making the nice sound you're training praise him.

Screaming can go on for hours, so you need to be prepared for it. In our case it was never more than 10-20min, for which im thankful for, but it can take a lot longer than that - like I wrote, it can take hours. I advice you to invest in ear plugs (they can come in handy with parrots, leroy screams like all hell is loose when showering, but still loves it lifting his wings and preens at the same time ^^).

The key to get passed this is to be consistent, do the same thing everytime. Dont change tactics if you cant see any results in a day or two, it may take several weeks for you to notice a difference.
Patience in abundance is required with parrots!

[liannez]

Well, we took him out to a friend's house today and he was an angel, then the SECOND he got home and out of the cage he screeched, seemingly because he wanted to fly. He screeched a bit more then calmed down a bit. We put him in his cage for dinner and he was calm. He started moving around, we took him out of his cage, and he got loud again. We put him away, and he got quiet, but when we try to praise him for being quiet, he screams. If I didn't know better I would say he hates us.

[marie83]

From what I've read alexandrines are quite noisy by nature. Are you going to let his wings grow back? because I'm thinking that it will help get rid of some excess energy if you do and do loads of flight training with him.
Also i agree with cml, its not going to change overnight I'm afraid, these behaviours can take weeks, if not months to improve so you need to be consitant for a while before deciding somethings not working. Another thing is to be prepared for "testing", just as you think things are improving he might start up with the screaming again for a while but just keep plodding on.

i also believe that prevention is better than a cure sometimes, try giving him extra things to do or a bath if there are certain times of day he is worse but do it before he starts screaming so he can't see it as a reward and associate the entertainment with the screaming.

[liannez]

We would love to do things before he starts screaming but unfortunately his favorite time to scream is when we pay him attention. We wore earplugs today and that helped a lot. He also got into a bath for the first time, so we're hoping that will stimulate him a bit. Lots of screaming today, but we're sticking to our guns! We do love him otherwise.

[eggplantbren]

We seem to be making progress! Here are our strategies.

When he's in his cage downstairs and we're upstairs, we don't go downstairs unless he's quiet. If he makes noise while we're halfway down, we pause (the stairs make noise which we think is a bridging stimulus). If we're in the room with him and he makes the loud noise, we leave. Then return after about 10 seconds of silence (unless he makes the noise again - then we turn around and leave again).

When he's out of the cage, if he screeches, we pause like a statue. Interesting things stop happening when he screeches!

Also, we noticed that he's quite hungry when we get home from work which increases the noisiness so we feed him right when we get home. To do this, we use the pausing method to get the food to him but never right after a loud noise -- the noise causes the food to take longer to get to him!

He's also figured out that we LOOOOVE when he makes little speech-like noises, so that has been increasing.

[liannez]

He's been making insanely fast progress the past few days! I swear he just said "yeah"!!! Do parrots normally talk when they're not yet 16 weeks?