Since it's thanksgiving break and I have a ton of free time in between studying for finals, I've decided to work on Kiwi's "decision" not to fly. He's fully capable of flight- his wings are all grown out. He simply doesn't like to.
There are times when Kiwi will fly just fine. For example, he will fly across the room if we leave his cage open and walk out of the room. We know this because we've found him all the way across the room in a location that he couldn't possibly have climbed to. He just refuses to fly when humans are present.
So this is going to be my Kiwi flight training blog.
This morning I spent quite a while just trying to get him to hop off of his cage. Not fly, not even really need to flap his wings, just hop. After and hour and a half of refusing to get closer than that distance and him trying every different angle that didn't involve hopping to get onto my hand (he even tried hanging into the cage with his beak and flailing his left foot in the air at the direction of my hand. It was pretty amusing.) I finally settled for making him stretch for it, then drawing my hand away as he did so he had to flap a bit to steady himself. He was great with that.
Next, I took him into the spare bedroom and set him on the dresser. There have been several times that he's flown off of that dresser and onto me while we've been in there, so I figured my best chance of getting him to repeat it was there. Sure enough, after thirty seconds of coaxing, he flew a foot onto my hand. I clicked the clicker, gave him a treat, and cuddled him while he ate it.
He's now made about fifteen 1ft to 1.5ft flights off the of the dresser. He's still refusing to do it anywhere else.
I'm open to all tips and ideas and plan on keeping up the dresser training multiple times a day.
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In other news, my boyfriend tends to get really upset when the birds poop on him and is still learning how to use positive reinforcement and ignoring bad behaviors. So we are following Patrick's (I think that's the forum owner's name) advice about potty training. Well... kind of. Patrick advises just timing out your bird's poops and putting the bird in the desired location when it's getting close to time, and only picking him up when he goes.
I'm using a clicker and treats/cuddles in addition to all of the above because 1. Charlie will just go somewhere else instead of sitting there if he doesn't have to poo. He's fully flighted and will go right back to our shoulders if he doesn't have to poo. 2. I want to speed up the process.
So far Charlie has gone nearly every time I put him on his cage door. I haven't been pooped on in 24 hours. We'll see if we can keep this up long enough to get to the point where Charlie flies there on his own.