Guest Post: Andrew Hall
Andrew Hall is a trainer and director of the Northern Colorado Bird Center. A former employee at Natural Encounters, he now presents free flight shows and other avian educational programs at the bird center. The following is another post reprinted by permission from Barbara Heidenreich’s Good Bird Group. It is short, but I think it’s extremely important and an easy point to miss.
Thoughts on Learning How to Train
You get out what you put in. If you are willing to not only attend
seminars and workshops, but then think about, categorize, anylize,
talk about it with others and practice what you have learned, you
will be *more likely* to be successfull in anything you would like to
train. You also must practice all of these concepts just as you
would train a bird, in small steps.
Working on any training and training anything will help improve your
abilities and “qualifications” (whatever they may be) to be a better
trainer. Most of use who do feel comfortable training free flying
birds have worked for many years (decades) training non-free flying
birds and worked on many other behaviors. We have made mistakes
(some early in the “industry” lost birds and unfortunely some still
do) I didn’t start working with flighted birds for a good 7 or 8
years as I trained raptors, parrots, dogs, alpacas, cats, pigs, and
others for many other purposes. I personally work over 99% of the
time on behaviors that are not directly free flying, but all make
free flying successful. Every interaction I have with a bird is
important for the next time I take it out to fly!
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