- About Vices : Parrot Training Methods Are Useful 4 Raptors To Re-Shape Behaviours??

[TiercelR]

- Hello, you know, parrot-trainers have proved methods for to re-shape bad manners on their birds as are screaming, mantling, bit the fingers of the trainer, etc etc, and could be interesting if the same methods works with training raptor-birds.

- Outhere are some books about training parrots which deals with proved hints about re-shape these behaviour-problems.

- Please thoughts about that??

- Best regards. Roberto.

[Little Joe]

I dont see myself going out and buying a book on parrot training in the near future. Could you maybe give examples of how they get birds to stop screaming and biting?

[Paul64]

There are similarities between training parrots and birds of prey.

The basis of training parrots is to keep them slightly hungry all the time and give them titbits/reward when they do a 'trick' right.

For training, parrots are not weighed but their food is so you know how much it will eat on a daily basis then start dropping down the amount of food so they begin to get hungry.

I

[Miguel]

The principle which a parrot is trained, it's the same as any other animal is (or at least should be)...

It works through positive reinforcement, that means when the birds does something you like you reinforce it with a treat. Just like you can do with bops, they fly to your glove you get them a tidbit and many other examples.
I don't think the birds need to be really hungry for the reinforcement value to work. Specially parrots, which are much more social then raptors...

There are a lot of different strategies, using positive reinforcement to solve problems or vices (training incompatible behaviors for instance, capturing better behaviors, etc.).

So, basically answering to your question, I think some parrot (or any other animal) training techniques are useful to raptor training!

[CH_Rtail]

well said miguel
essentially training all animals is based on cue and reward. the techniques would be interesting though i got bop and parrots yet never weighed my parrots food, i weighed the bird

[Little Joe]

The above posts mainly deal with rewarding good behaviour. Thats fairly straightforward. The challenge with any animal training scenario is how to cure vices.

So I ask again, how would one stop a parrot from biting and screaming?

[Paul64]

Hi Joe,

I have some parrot behavioral cd's, I'll have a listen to them to see what they suggest.

[Little Joe]

Hi Joe,

I have some parrot behavioral cd's, I'll have a listen to them to see what they suggest.

Thanks Paul :)

[Gil]

interesting
there was a thead here about how scientists discovered that parrots are more closely related (genetically) to falcons than falcons are to hawks and eagles.
so this might should be really taken seriously at it might have an answer for bad imprints.

[TiercelR]

I dont see myself going out and buying a book on parrot training in the near future. Could you maybe give examples of how they get birds to stop screaming and biting?
- Hello Joe, the next link have a few of info:
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Stop-Your-Parrots-Biting-In-7-Days&id=320817

There are similarities between training parrots and birds of prey.

The basis of training parrots is to keep them slightly hungry all the time and give them titbits/reward when they do a 'trick' right.

For training, parrots are not weighed but their food is so you know how much it will eat on a daily basis then start dropping down the amount of food so they begin to get hungry.

I
- Hello Paul, this point for to bring behaviours its a good starting point for to understand better how the shape-behaviours methods go.

The principle which a parrot is trained, it's the same as any other animal is (or at least should be)...

It works through positive reinforcement, that means when the birds does something you like you reinforce it with a treat. Just like you can do with bops, they fly to your glove you get them a tidbit and many other examples.

I don't think the birds need to be really hungry for the reinforcement value to work. Specially parrots, which are much more social then raptors...

There are a lot of different strategies, using positive reinforcement to solve problems or vices (training incompatible behaviors for instance, capturing better behaviors, etc.).

So, basically answering to your question, I think some parrot (or any other animal) training techniques are useful to raptor training!
- Hello Miguel, maybe parrot-trainers do have training methods which can be useful for raptor-trainers, which we don´t considere them before, but them can improve the falconry-experience.

well said miguel
essentially training all animals is based on cue and reward. the techniques would be interesting though i got bop and parrots yet never weighed my parrots food, i weighed the bird
- Hello CH-rtail, this is a strong compativility of ways for go on the re-shape behaviours.

The above posts mainly deal with rewarding good behaviour. Thats fairly straightforward. The challenge with any animal training scenario is how to cure vices.

So I ask again, how would one stop a parrot from biting and screaming?
- Hello Joe, appart of trhe link i posted above, i fund more links where this problem is discussed by parrot-trainers. Maybe parrot-trainers do have training methods which can be useful for raptor-trainers, which we don´t considere them before, but them can improve the falconry-experience. I´m not a parrot-owner, but actually i´m very interesting in to read all about parrot-training-methods because there sure are keys which can be applied on BOPs with some level of success.

Hi Joe,

I have some parrot behavioral cd's, I'll have a listen to them to see what they suggest.
- Hello Paul, please give us the names of these cd´s, thanks.

interesting
there was a thead here about how scientists discovered that parrots are more closely related (genetically) to falcons than falcons are to hawks and eagles.
so this might should be really taken seriously at it might have an answer for bad imprints.
- Hello Gil, yes it is! their main application of these methods are on imprinted-BOPs which do have vary vices.

[MattSpar]

- Hello, you know, parrot-trainers have proved methods for to re-shape bad manners on their birds as are screaming, mantling, bit the fingers of the trainer, etc etc,


I wish someone would tell my friend, whom I visited a short while ago. His Amazon landed on my shoulder and when I lifted him onto my hand, he bit my wrist very hard indeed, something akin to what it must feel like to have one's wrist siezed in a pair of pliers. The damned bird seemed to enjoy it immensely. More than I can say for myself.

My friend seemed pleased also.

[It's Alright Ma]

Be good to have a goshawk say 'I'll be off then, pretty boy' before I slip her on a bad conditioning day.

[TiercelR]

I wish someone would tell my friend, whom I visited a short while ago. His Amazon landed on my shoulder and when I lifted him onto my hand, he bit my wrist very hard indeed, something akin to what it must feel like to have one's wrist siezed in a pair of pliers. The damned bird seemed to enjoy it immensely. More than I can say for myself.

My friend seemed pleased also.

- Hello Matt, that was a very bad experience, maybe the trainer was incapable in these times about how to deal with the re-shape of this bad-behaviour.

- Also, serious parrot-trainers appear to be in perpetual experimentation of training methods ((as same manner as falconers)) for to improve their own experience with their birds. So, that parrot-trainer only ignored so much of the information available for parrot-trainers, and him compensated their own ignorance with a false pleased-sense about the faults of behaviour of their own amazon.

[TiercelR]

Be good to have a goshawk say 'I'll be off then, pretty boy' before I slip her on a bad conditioning day.

- Hello Johny, sure there must be a cure for to re-shape these faults of behaviour in accipiters, mainly on imprinted-ones.

- Parrot-trainers deal the most of the times with imprinted-birds, so their experience must be useful for falconers too.

[Blondi]

Ive free flown parrots for yrs now, I always weigh the bird daily .
Basicly i give ad lib fruit to the bird and control weight with seed.,which is weighed to maintain an optimum flying weight,
Once youve got the flying weight figured, its amazing what they will do for an un shelled peanut.

[Aman]

STOP SCREAMING

Tell me how please i will pay good money, You could write a book that would make all other books on imprinting irrelavent :supz::supz::supz:

[Paul64]

Hi,

The original dvd's that I have are from these guys
www.birdtricks.com (http://www.birdtricks.com)

I have found a small video of them training parrots not to bite.

http://www.birdtricks.com/PowerPause/

They use a 'clicker' a lot when training parrots which I don't think will be practical for birds of prey.
It is basically a noise that the parrots recognise when they have done something good and normally get rewarded when doing tricks. On the video however, they don't reward the parrot/s this time.
A lot of it seems to be 'reading' the body language of the bird/s i.e. knowing how far/near to approach the bird and when to retreat.

[Paul64]

Before you can solve a problem you need to understand where it comes from.

If the bird is biting it could be because it is trying to dominate or that it is scared.

[TiercelR]

STOP SCREAMING

Tell me how please i will pay good money, You could write a book that would make all other books on imprinting irrelavent :supz::supz::supz:

- Hello Aman, here is a link with promise true effective info about solve at once this problem with imprinted birds :

http://www.birdtricks.com/StopScreaming/

- I want to know more about this info too.

[TiercelR]

Ive free flown parrots for yrs now, I always weigh the bird daily .
Basicly i give ad lib fruit to the bird and control weight with seed.,which is weighed to maintain an optimum flying weight,
Once youve got the flying weight figured, its amazing what they will do for an un shelled peanut.

- Hello Blondi, dealed you with troubles about screaming and biting with your parrots sometime? and if yes, doed you applied some method for to re-shape these bad manners in them?

[TiercelR]

Hi,

The original dvd's that I have are from these guys
www.birdtricks.com (http://www.birdtricks.com)

I have found a small video of them training parrots not to bite.

http://www.birdtricks.com/PowerPause/

They use a 'clicker' a lot when training parrots which I don't think will be practical for birds of prey.
It is basically a noise that the parrots recognise when they have done something good and normally get rewarded when doing tricks. On the video however, they don't reward the parrot/s this time.
A lot of it seems to be 'reading' the body language of the bird/s i.e. knowing how far/near to approach the bird and when to retreat.
- Hello Paul, i have a clicker ordered from the Pryor´s website, but i never has haved a chance for to use it. But i want to try some day their use on raptor-birds for experimentation. I do believe that the clicker could work fine with raptors if is used in the just right moment.

Before you can solve a problem you need to understand where it comes from.

If the bird is biting it could be because it is trying to dominate or that it is scared.

- Hello Paul, its very true what you said.

[Little Joe]

- Hello Joe, the next link have a few of info:
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Stop-Your-Parrots-Biting-In-7-Days&id=320817



- Hello Joe, appart of trhe link i posted above, i fund more links where this problem is discussed by parrot-trainers. Maybe parrot-trainers do have training methods which can be useful for raptor-trainers, which we don´t considere them before, but them can improve the falconry-experience. I´m not a parrot-owner, but actually i´m very interesting in to read all about parrot-training-methods because there sure are keys which can be applied on BOPs with some level of success.


Thanks for the link.

Sorry if I sounded half sceptical. That wasnt the intention at all. I am deeply interested in animal behaviour and training and I agree with you 100% that we can all learn from different "disciplines", like parrot training methods, etc.

I have already learned something very valuable from the link you posted above.

Let me share briefly my experience: My usual approach was to let a falcon bite me and just persist with touching it or whatever I was doing. It certainly worked in the end - they all stop biting you eventually when they figure out it doesnt work. But there is a very difficult stage of tantrums and fear and anger (on the falcon's part) - and pain and bleeding (on my part) :evil:

I decided to take a different approach with particularly fiesty Rednape female recently. During manning I would wait till she looks away and then touch her chest or feet gently - taking my hand away immediately when she looked at it. I persisted with this sneaky touching for a week or so. She eventually started to figure out I dont intend to hurt her and wouldnt even look at my hand touching her anymore. All of this without any stress for me or the falcon. There was no regular rewards involved for not biting me, but I did touch her a lot while she was eating from the fist as well.

She is now a very gentle and friendly falcon and will often nibble my fingers and take tidbits from me without ever hurting me. I think its definately a result of patient communication, instead of forcing the bird to my will as I have done in the past.

[TiercelR]

Thanks for the link.

Sorry if I sounded half sceptical. That wasnt the intention at all. I am deeply interested in animal behaviour and training and I agree with you 100% that we can all learn from different "disciplines", like parrot training methods, etc.

I have already learned something very valuable from the link you posted above.

Let me share briefly my experience: My usual approach was to let a falcon bite me and just persist with touching it or whatever I was doing. It certainly worked in the end - they all stop biting you eventually when they figure out it doesnt work. But there is a very difficult stage of tantrums and fear and anger (on the falcon's part) - and pain and bleeding (on my part) :evil:

I decided to take a different approach with particularly fiesty Rednape female recently. During manning I would wait till she looks away and then touch her chest or feet gently - taking my hand away immediately when she looked at it. I persisted with this sneaky touching for a week or so. She eventually started to figure out I dont intend to hurt her and wouldnt even look at my hand touching her anymore. All of this without any stress for me or the falcon. There was no regular rewards involved for not biting me, but I did touch her a lot while she was eating from the fist as well.

She is now a very gentle and friendly falcon and will often nibble my fingers and take tidbits from me without ever hurting me. I think its definately a result of patient communication, instead of forcing the bird to my will as I have done in the past.

- Hello Joe, it was a very good experience you haved it, and leaved a good learning-lesson, thank you for share it ! your red-nape shaheen was taken in sore-stage or was parent-reared? i said that because imprinted falcons shows more frequently these bit-manners when food is keeped onto the glove. While non-imprinted may shows these manners by angry without relation about food onto the glove.

[Little Joe]

- Hello Joe, it was a very good experience you haved it, and leaved a good learning-lesson, thank you for share it ! your red-nape shaheen was taken in sore-stage or was parent-reared? i said that because imprinted falcons shows more frequently these bit-manners when food is keeped onto the glove. While non-imprinted may shows these manners by angry without relation about food onto the glove.

She was captive bred, parent reared, and wild hacked. I will not touch an imprinted longwing even if you pay me to take it! ;)

[FalconGriff]

She was captive bred, parent reared, and wild hacked. I will not touch an imprinted longwing even if you pay me to take it! ;)

Just wait till we meet and I tell you all the advantages!!:box:

[Little Joe]

Just wait till we meet and I tell you all the advantages!!

:lol::lol::lol: I knew that statement would turn around and bite me in the ***s.

[BeetleBasher]

I don't know anything about parrots, never have traind or kept one in my life - but I know they are social, so they must have a sort of conscience like a dog - if you tell a parrot it is being bad then it will stop. Birds of prey however will say "Oh I'm being bad, am I? Just who the hell do you think you're talking to!!"

I know a guy who trained his African grey not to squawk by putting her in her cage every time she squawked. I don't think this work work for a bird of prey.

It would be interesting to know if another method worked though.

Joe, what a great story!!! I always thought if I did that, the hawk would just stare at me constantly, but I guess not. Will definitely try that in the future!

[Paul64]

In the video I posted it showed them approaching the parrot using the back of the hand so if it did try to bite then the fingers were hidden and like it was explained, it is hard for the beak to find anything to grab onto.............a useful tip which could easily be incorporated for raptors.

[MaltaMat]

As a Falconer and Parrot Trainer I feel I might be able to add something to this thread. I have been experimenting with various techniques that I use on parrots to help cure raptor vices with varying degrees of success.

Raptors are more simplistic than parrots and even more intelligent species such as vultures, eagles and harris' take longer to learn a trained behaviour than any of the medium to large parrot species.

Firstly, we have used clickers to train behaviours in birds of prey but I feel that a whistle is far more effective as the bird can hear it over a longer distance. Most people use a whistle as a 'cue' i.e whistle equals come back to glove or lure.
I prefer to use it as a 'bridge' which tells the bird it is doing the correct behaviour at the exact time. This is exactly what the clicker does although it requires good timing by the trainer so that the correct behaviour is rewarded.

We have 2, 6 month old creche reared harris' here at the centre and are using two different techniques to cure the screaming. The female has been in a seclusion aviary with an older female for the last 3 weeks basically getting as much food as she wants and doing a bit of growing up. The male is being flown regularly but he is the noisier of the two. We took the female out yesterday at a high weight and she has screamed a bit but nothing like before.
We are aiming to keep her at a high weight and encourage flying response on appetite rather than hunger. So far so good.

The male is being flown at higher and higher weights although he screams simply because it has become routine for him. His training sessions consist of changing his routine regularly. We do calming sessions with him whereby we sit with him and keep very tiny tidbits of food hidden. Usually he will scream on and off. The moment he stops screaming we blow the whistle and he gets a tidbit. Effectively if he understands the whistle means that he has done the right thing, long term this can be very effective. He is not silent yet but we have considerable improvement. This technique works very well with parrots.

It's been a while since i've been on the forum as I usually get slated for using 'non-falconry techniques' but if they work I don't see why we can't try new things to make life better for us and our birds.

[Jan1]

As a Falconer and Parrot Trainer I feel I might be able to add something to this thread. I have been experimenting with various techniques that I use on parrots to help cure raptor vices with varying degrees of success.

Raptors are more simplistic than parrots and even more intelligent species such as vultures, eagles and harris' take longer to learn a trained behaviour than any of the medium to large parrot species.

Firstly, we have used clickers to train behaviours in birds of prey but I feel that a whistle is far more effective as the bird can hear it over a longer distance. Most people use a whistle as a 'cue' i.e whistle equals come back to glove or lure.
I prefer to use it as a 'bridge' which tells the bird it is doing the correct behaviour at the exact time. This is exactly what the clicker does although it requires good timing by the trainer so that the correct behaviour is rewarded.

We have 2, 6 month old creche reared harris' here at the centre and are using two different techniques to cure the screaming. The female has been in a seclusion aviary with an older female for the last 3 weeks basically getting as much food as she wants and doing a bit of growing up. The male is being flown regularly but he is the noisier of the two. We took the female out yesterday at a high weight and she has screamed a bit but nothing like before.
We are aiming to keep her at a high weight and encourage flying response on appetite rather than hunger. So far so good.

The male is being flown at higher and higher weights although he screams simply because it has become routine for him. His training sessions consist of changing his routine regularly. We do calming sessions with him whereby we sit with him and keep very tiny tidbits of food hidden. Usually he will scream on and off. The moment he stops screaming we blow the whistle and he gets a tidbit. Effectively if he understands the whistle means that he has done the right thing, long term this can be very effective. He is not silent yet but we have considerable improvement. This technique works very well with parrots.

It's been a while since i've been on the forum as I usually get slated for using 'non-falconry techniques' but if they work I don't see why we can't try new things to make life better for us and our birds.

Great post. We never stop learning about these things & should be constantly looking for better ways of training bop's & their management. A while ago, Matthew Patching started a similar thread re training using variable reinforcements. There are also videos on The Modern Apprentice showing how behaviour can be manipulated through positive reinforcement. This is a proven science, & although it has some practical limitations, if we can learn something to our benefit from parrot trainers, then that can only be a good thing.