Carly Lu’s Flight Blog

Today we are celebrating the 2nd Anniversary of Carly’s first official fledging. Since she was clipped as a young baby, she only really did startle flights until we started to train for recall. We started recall with walking, but the first part of flight training involved learning to take off — by jumping off a countertop onto my arm. It took almost 2 weeks from the time we started for her to work up the courage to voluntarily jump through the air that short 12 inches or so. Lots of strrreetching and plotting to find, other ways around it to get to me. But she always tried. And when we didn’t get the jump, we’d end with some long stretching step-ups to keep things positive. But on July 26, 2006, at 18 months and 6 days old, she finally made the big breakthrough! After that there was no stopping her and she became a jumping and flapping fool — even with only a few flight feathers grown in. She clearly liked the activity, and would even leave her dinner after training to come do some more jumps.

The process we followed and resources we used are described in the Indoor Recall Training article on the Recall Training page.

Here are some shots from today, at age 3 yrs 6 months & 6 days. Lots of diving and screaming. But her enthusiasm was just as great on those first hops.

With Gizmo….

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The Summer 2008 issue of Good Bird magazine is out, and there are some great articles including teaching an emergency recall; how to prepare for, prevent, and deal with a lost parrot situation; and how to use training logs. There are also sample training logs available for download at the website. I highly recommend keeping a weight and behavior log, whether training or not. It’s so hard to remember details of what was happening months later, and very hard to detect patterns of behavior without a good log.

Purchase downloadable PDF issues here, and download free training logs: Good Bird Magazine .

Well, we know one thing — they like sprouts! Here’s the little guy is eating sprouted tiel seed and the small sprouts from our big guys’ mix.

Carly’s Blueberry Mango Parrot Pie is also a favorite. Recipe here. (Many variations — add zucchini, cooked yams, carrots, pumpkin — all yummy.)

More Rocco photos….