Building a Strong Relationship with your Parrot – Avoiding Behavioral Problems Later in Life
Liz Goldtein
© 2003 Liz Goldstein. All rights reserved
Developing a great
relationship with your parrot starts the first day you bring him home.
Behavioral problems of all kinds can be avoided by being a respectful
companion, an astute observer, and a creative environment arranger. Respect
will gain your parrot’s trust. Observation will allow you to learn your
parrot’s body language and how to respond to him. Thoughtfully arranging his
environment (providing plenty of enrichment) can prevent behavioral problems
from even beginning. For a description of the science of behavior and
terminology and to see the scientific basis for the behavior section of this
article, see my http://home.bellsouth.net/p/PWP-behaviorist/Papers/behavior.html
Fundamentals of Parrot
Husbandry
Diet
A parrot’s diet should
consist of fresh fruits and vegetables, pellets, and seeds. There is much
information on the internet about appropriate percentages for each species. I
just want to stress that a balanced diet with lots of fresh food is very
important. Feeding can be a form of environmental arrangement – hiding food in
cardboard boxes or foraging toys lets your parrot work to earn his food, and is
a great way for him to entertain himself. Be creative!
Caging
A parrot should have the
largest cage possible, especially a parrot that has to spend many hours during
the day in his cage. He should have toys at different levels in the cage, but
not so many that he can’t move around. The toys should be rotated every week or
two to keep him interested. Make sure you check each toy daily to ensure it is
still safe (no loose threads, no exposed sharp edges).
Ideally, a parrot should
only be in his cage when absolutely necessary. The more time you can spend with
him during the day the better. Parrots naturally form pair bonds and keeping
one as a pet essentially means you are his mate. It’s great to have a perch in
every room so your parrot can always be with you. For smaller birds, up to
quaker or conure size, you can use untreated wicker baskets as perches. For
larger birds, there are many different varieties of perches available, or you
can be creative and make some out of PVC or safe tree branches.
Toys and Games
Toys are an important
part of any parrot’s life. Toys are a form of environmental enrichment, used to
maintain captive animals’ health in zoos and breeding programs as well as in
homes. In the wild, birds spend a lot of time foraging for food, flying through
their territory, interacting with other birds, rearing young, and avoiding
predators. In our homes, parrots don’t have much to do! They need something to
exercise their minds and their bodies, and toys provide that. Puzzle toys are
great for developing problem solving skills. Rope toys are great for hanging on
and gaining good balance.
Games are activities
that you do with your parrot. They can range from teaching him to label colors
or shapes, to tossing a ball for him to bring back, to playing hide and seek.
Interactive games are as important with parrots as they are with small
children. They can help create a strong bond between you both and promote
intellectual development.
Training
Parrots are extremely
intelligent. A wonderful way to get them to use their intelligence is by
spending time every day or week training them. Clicker training is a great way
to train your birds to do both fun and necessary behaviors. It involves using a
clicker (a small device that makes a short, loud sound) as a conditional
reinforcer when paired with an unconditional reinforcer such as a treat. The
parrot learns to repeat the behavior he was doing when he heard the click, and
thereby can learn to do anything on cue that he’s physically capable of! Two
great sites for learning more about clicker training are:
http://www.clickertraining.com
Wing Clipping
The decision whether to
clip your parrots’ wings is up to you. I think the decision should be based on
the safety of the parrot and the people or other animals in the house. If there
is a great probability that the parrot could escape if fully feathered,
clipping might be a good idea. If the parrot has been known to dive-bomb and
injure people or other birds, clipping is a key to safety while more
appropriate behaviors are taught. For his safety, be sure to take your bird to
an experienced avian veterinarian for clipping.
The bottom line is that
a flighted bird can be trained to be a great companion as well as a clipped
one. They can be taught to land on specific perches, and not to fly to you
until asked. Do what’s right for you and for your parrot.
Behavior
There are some important
things to remember when it comes to interacting with a parrot. First of all,
parrots live in monogamous pairs. This is why most parrots have a favorite
person even if they are taken care of by all members of a family. Some species
are more likely than others to prefer one person. Within these pairs, each
parrot is more or less equal. Parrots do not use force to dominate one another.
When we try to use force with our parrots, we get one of two results. Either the
parrot becomes terrified of us, or it fights back and we get bitten. Either
way, the relationship is severly damaged. What we want to do is create an
environment in which the parrot wants to be with us and feels confident around
us.
What do I do the first
time my parrot won’t step up from his cage?
Your parrot needs to
feel secure, and that he has some control over his environment. As a baby
parrot gets older, he will want a little more independence. If you put your
hand in the cage to get him out and he doesn’t step up, he has made a decision.
He doesn’t want to come out. You have two options – you can continue to insist
that he come out, or you can leave him alone. What happens in both cases?
If you insist that he
come out, you may accomplish this by jutting your finger into his breast
several times. You may physically grab him and get him out of the cage. Any way
you do it, your parrot will either eventually comply so you will leave him
alone, or he may get so frustrated or frightened that he finally bites you. In
the first case, he complies but has learned that he cannot trust you to respect
his wishes. He didn’t want to come out of the cage, and you made him come out.
He has no control over his environment. In the second case, he bites you and learns
that simply refusing to step up wasn’t good enough – in order to get the
message across to you that he didn’t want to step up, he had to bite. Next time
you may not get the warning messages; he may go straight to biting. Can you see
how there are so many negative possibilities in using force and insistence with
a parrot?
On the other hand, you
can withdraw from the cage, close the door, and retreat from the room. Don’t be
too hurt that he didn’t want to come out. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love
you! In this particular instance, he learned that if he doesn’t step up, you
will leave him alone and he has lost the chance to be with you. Now we need to
work on future occurrences. What can we do to increase the probability that he
will want to come out onto your hand? Behavior can be increased by finding a
reinforcer. That means that every time he steps up, he gets a reward from you,
whether it’s a small treat, or a kind word, or a head scritch. Sometimes we ask
our parrots to step up without thinking of the consequences we provide – if he
steps up and we take him to his playstand without giving him any attention, he
might not want to step up. If he steps up from your shoulder and you put him
back in his cage, he might not want to step up. Try to be conscious of always
giving a reward for stepping up. Practice when he’s out of his cage, practice
when he’s in it. You can have a bird that steps up every time you ask him to,
and using rewards is the best way to accomplish that.
What do I do the first
time I get bitten?
Don’t lose your temper.
Don’t brush it off either. Your parrot was trying to communicate something to
you. There are 2 reasons why parrots bite – either they are so frightened they
feel they have no other recourse, or they have learned that it is an effective
behavior for getting what they want. Biting is not a behavior seen in wild
birds (unless the bird is being attacked by a predator). If we can be good
observers of our parrots’ behavior, we can avoid bites. First, what to do in
the moment of the bite.
Walk away and leave the
parrot alone if he was in his cage or on a perch, and set him down if he was on
your hand. This is probably what he wanted in the first place. If you continue
to do whatever it was you were doing with him, he might very well bite even
harder. So leave him, take a breather, and think about the situation. What were
you asking him to do? What was his behavior like before the bite? Parrots have
an array of body language that can tell us when they are excited, frightened,
annoyed, or angry. If you can learn to recognize this language, you won’t get
bitten in the future. Try to remember all the signals he gave you before he
bit. Did he pin his eyes? Lean far away from you? Lunge toward you? If you had
left him alone when he started displaying this behavior, you probably wouldn’t
have been bitten. There is a danger involved in ignoring body language. Once
the parrot has been pushed to the point of biting many times, he may give up on
the warning signals. He has learned that they didn’t work – that to be left
alone he had to bite, and will do just that. But by knowing his signals, you
can avoid this problem.
Choose one of those
signals that he gave and decide that it’s the warning you will always heed. For
example, when you have him on your hand and he lunges at you, put him down on a
perch. Be consistent, and he will learn what he needs to do when he is
uncomfortable and wishes to be left alone.
At the same time, try to
improve the problematic situation. As we discussed in refusal to step up, step
ups should be rewarded. If what you have is a parrot being very territorial
about his cage, ask him to step up from the door instead of reaching inside. If
your parrot likes to bite while you’re watching tv with him on your arm, try giving
him a little toy to chew on as soon as you both sit down. Always think about
what you can change in the antecedents (events before a behavior) and
consequences (events after a behavior) in order to change the behavior you
don’t want.
What do I do when he
screams?
When starting with a
young parrot, you can easily ensure that you have a bird who doesn’t scream
incessantly. Birds scream for two reasons. One is that it’s a natural behavior
– many species like to scream first thing in the morning and last thing in the
evening. It’s a self-reinforcing behavior that they enjoy and you should be
understanding and realize it’s part of being a parrot. The other reason is to
get attention. As screaming is a very difficult behavior for us to ignore, they
quickly learn that screaming = attention. The things we do when our parrots are
screaming might not seem like reinforcement to us, but if the screaming
continues, by definition it IS reinforcement.
What to do then? The key
is to reward quiet vocalizations and ignore screaming. Done consistently from
the beginning, you can have a non-screaming adult parrot. He may like to know
where you are in the house when you aren’t in the same room with him. Try
whistling back and forth. When you hear him making a quiet vocalization, go
into the room and give him a few minutes of attention. And whenever he gives
screaming a try, ignore it. It is important to be consistent. If you are doing
well for a few weeks, but one day he screams louder than ever while you’re
right next to him in the room and you shout back at him, you have just rewarded
a higher level of screaming and will have a bigger problem on your hands!
Living with a parrot is
very different from living with dogs or cats. It can be a challenge, but a very
rewarding one. Parrots enrich our lives and it is up to us to be the best
companions we can be for them – the end result is that they become OUR best
companions.