How To Get Your Parrot To Stop Avoiding Other Family Members!
A complaint I’ve noticed coming in email a lot recently is:
“My bird loves me so much if he can’t see me he starts screaming. If I’m not around he will sit on dad’s shoulder very calmly, but as soon as I enter, he starts screaming and flapping and sometimes if I’m close by and my husband wants to take him out the cage, he just drop to the ground like a potato and starts screaming .”
Unfortunately, parrots don’t always like everyone in the home equally. In fact, they tend to bond to one person and it is not necessarily their caregiver. Optimally, you socialize the parrot when you first get him or her, but if you have not done that, you can still help reduce the over-bonding.
This can, to say the least, be a frustrating problem. Often the parrot will bite others in order to be with their favorite person. It thinks that if it runs all others away, their favorite person will be the only one that touches it.
The good news is that there is a solution. Here are the steps you can take to help reduce or resolve this problem:
Step 1: Reduce your time with the parrot: Parrots want attention. They will accept it wherever they get it. If the person who is over-bonded simply reduces the time spent with the parrot, over a period of time, the bird will adjust and become more social with others.
This can be a difficult thing to do because you want to be with your bird a lot. But it is an important step to take in order to reduce the screaming and potential nipping.
Step 2: Never reward, even unconsciously, any act of aggression or screaming when the bird is with others. Never take it back from the person; instead use a stick to make it step onto. Never laugh or be dramatic. Parrots just love drama and will repeat actions which provide drama.
Step 3: Have your parrot’s favorite foods and treats available to allow others to offer them. The over-bonded person should never provide treats during this training.
Step 4: Let others remove the parrot from the cage so that it gets the idea that other people are good and fun.
Step 5: During this training, any actions your parrot objects to but which must be done should be done by the over-bonded person. This will make the over-bonded person seem less fun. The idea is to get the parrot liking others more and the over-bonded person less, but it will still love everyone in the home in the end.
Step 6: When the parrot is interacting with the over-bonded person, keep the parrot BELOW eye level. This reinforces that the humans are the heads of the flock and is called “nurturing dominance”. In fact, ask everyone to keep the parrot below eye level.
Step 7: When the parrot screams for the over-bonded person, simply ignore it totally. Then, when it quiets down, have another person provide a treat. Make the period between becoming quiet and the treat become longer and longer as the parrot gets the idea that quiet = treat, noise = no attention. When the treat is given, the person should make a great, dramatic display of giving it and create lots of the well-loved drama.
If you practice this training for a period of time, the problem will improve and likely end. While parrots will use their voices to “contact call” their people, they should not endlessly scream. Any simple contact call should simply be ignored or, if you wish, answered once the training has worked. Until then, ignore all screaming.
Once you’ve solved the problem, be sure not to recreate it by going back to old habits. Keep the parrot interacting with the entire family and your friends. As soon as you go back to being the main person in the parrot’s life, it will return to its old habits too.
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About the Author: Nora Caterino, known as the Mississippi Bird Lady,or just Bird Lady for short, has trained, raised, and lived with birds for over 30 years. You can subscribe to access videos, audios, articles and receive unlimited one-on-one advice via email for one full year at:
==> http://www.eliteparrotsclub.com/talking.php
