by Dave & Karen » Sun Sep 22, 2013 5:02 am
What I've found to work best with my birds was to simply let them out of the cage and fly around in the room, we have a lot of perches and other toys hanging from our ceiling so they're all overhead but we can reach the birds easily if needed.
What I did was after getting a new bird, I'd let him out and be free in the room, but everytime I walked up to him I'd offer him a treat, I wouldn't even try to pick him up or call him to me at this point, just hand him a treat and let him get used to me. After doing this for a few days I'd then ask him to step up and reward him with the treat until he got used to me now making him work for the treat by stepping up, this doesn't take very long, maybe a few days at most.
The next step is to offer the treat while calling his name but stay slightly out of his reach so he has to fly off his perch to my hand to get the treat. This part doesn't take very long because by this point the bird already trusts me. Then all I did was make that distance longer and longer until he had to fly all the way across the room to get to me to get the treat. Again, this part took a few days but he got the idea.
Once you can get him to fly to you from across the room you're almost there... Now it's time to reward more randomly instead of every time because you want your bird to fly to you knowing there's a chance to get a treat, also the reward can be a head scritch or anything else that's positive for the bird. Never call him to discipline him... which you shouldn't be doing anyway.
After a few short weeks my parrotlet will come to me just by either snaping my fingers and putting it up where he can land on it or calling his name. I also do this to him often so he comes to me for a quick head scritch or a bite of millet then I release him back to his playing etc, but now anytime I need him to come to me, he drops what he's doing to come to me.
The other birds I got are a bit less consistant, but I used different methods teaching them the recall, they worked but not as effective as this method, also the larger birds do tend to be more free willed and self serving, they will come to me when called but it's more like I call them and sometimes they'll be like "I'll be there in a second" instead of just coming straight to me every time.
this method also works for teaching your new bird other basics like not biting or stepping up etc... more on that if anyone asks.