Amazon Mealy

[ASulli0418]

Hello, My name is Adam I am a new parent to an Amazon Mealy for a little over a week now.. His name is Cammi, hes really smart. in the past week we have been bonding and learning a lot about each other, some bites to prove it but I've gotten batter at watching out for the signs,

with in the week I have been working on stick training and hand training, and speaking
I taught him to say cookie, He's been putting his head down letting me pet him and touch his beak now.


he steps up on my hand / forearm / shoulder when he wants to. but he still has his moments when he doesn't want to be touched, moved, and has been refusing to step up to come out of the cage or go back in and to step up on the stick.He actually pushes the stick away with his foot

I've been respecting him and not pushing it but I dont know if that the right thing to do.

thank you for all of the help and advice in advance!
~ASulli

[Wolf]

OK, you have tested the waters, so to speak, you know that he is smart. You have also seen that he is starting to refuse more training and the wise thing to do for a while now is to listen to this refusal and lay off the training and concentrate on bonding with him for now. The first month or so are usually pretty easy as he is in a new place and doesn't know what to expect, so he is on his best behavior, so to speak.
This is the time to gain this birds trust and to bond with him, there will be plenty of time for training after establishing the bond. You will have plenty to do as you need to make sure that you are feeding him a healthy diet and get him on a solar light schedule both of these as soon as possible. The reason for this is that you don't want a hormonal Amazon male on your hands and it is much safer and easier to prevent this than it is to cure it afterwards.

[Pajarita]

Welcome to the forum, Adam, and congratulations on your new buddy (is Cammie a boy or a girl?) but, like Wolf said, this is not the right time to train. This is the time to bond and, taking into consideration that you are still in the honeymoon stage and it has already bitten you (highly unusual during the honeymoon and a clear sign that you are doing something wrong), I strongly urge you to reconsider and just bond with the bird because amazons are naturally aggressive birds and mealies, being the largest of all the zons, can do A LOT of damage when not happy (I have yellow napes, yellow crown and blue fronted -all smaller than mealies- and have scars and notches missing from my ears from them). So, bonding and keeping them to a strict solar schedule as well as a low protein diet is imperative and infinitely more important than training.

[Harpmaker]

Welcome Adam & Cammi! You've already got better advice than I could give, so I'll just add a few comments.

By all means back off when Cammi says to, especially during this bonding period.

The 'Zons I've met love beak scritches. Even a small parrot-keeper like me(Meyer's are comparatively TINY) that is intimidated by that huge beak can scritch the top part of it and back off before the 'Zon gets around to nipping. And there is so much to scratch they never seem to get enough!