jackblack wrote:I have a 5 month old Senegal named Oscar who does tricks. I’ve had her for about 2 months now and she is already reterieving objects for me. In my opinion you can start training them directly and indirectly as soon as they are fully weaned. With Oscar I would take 5-10 minutes training her everyday for a week until she could retrieve objects. She’s a smart one.
Also, just a side note, when you are trying to teach them to do something but you don’t see results or your parrot doesn’t seem interested or isn’t meeting your expectation, don’t give up. I was losing hope as well but in a instant she picked up the object and started walking towards my hand. It really surprised me. Right after that she continued walking towards my hand with the object.
Welcome to the forum! I am afraid that you rushed things way too much for poor Oscar... You see, the issue is not whether a baby bird would or would not learn, of course it would! The problem is 'burn up'. Baby animals need to bond with their owners first [otherwise, they grow up disaffected and end up biting their owners when they are adults]. They also need to learn life lessons just as Nature intended - things like step up and step down, going back to their cage, mastering flight, landing, turns, etc, not to chew on things you don't want them to chew, to play with toys so they develop their spatial and motor skills, etc. Think of puppies, colts and human babies. None of them even start their training until they are juveniles but that doesn't mean that they are not learning all the time, they are! Puppies would start learning useful commands for living -like not to pee/poop inside the house, not to jump on people, not to chew on shoes, not to torment the cat, to come when called, to go back to their bed to eat their treat, etc. Then, by the time they are about 7 or 8 months old, the formal training starts. Same thing with human babies... There was a trend, years ago, to start teaching babies with cards - and the babies excelled at it! By the time they were three years old, they knew things that an 8 or a 9 year old did not! But these same babies did not grow to be as well-adjusted socially as the babies that were just allowed to play with toys AND they did not end up smarter or more learned than them, either. Nature has timelines in terms of development, both physical and psychological. Timelines that were developed and fine-tuned to exactness over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and it doesn't do to think that we know better. We don't.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way because I am not trying to criticize you or make you feel bad but I have to ask you to please, stop the training and just bond with your bird. It might no longer work by now because with bonding, as with everything else, there are windows of opportunity and, if you miss it, you are screwed up but parrots are highly social and very loving animals and you might get lucky. And I use the word 'lucky' because, as somebody who has been on the receiving end of aggression from a disaffected Senegal, believe me when I tell you that you do not want to go through it! Senegals might be small in size but they are fearless and extremely aggressive when they decide they don't like you.