Carly Lu’s Flight Blog

The last two days we have had no feather snipping. What’s changed? A few things, though I don’t know if any of them are related.

• Moisture: I’ve been using the new humidifier a lot this week, including right next to the Grey’s perch at night. Last night we had thick fog — which means we had a relative humidity swing from around 20% to 100% and back again within 24 hours. But at least part of that time was moist.
• Exercise: We’ve flown 3 days in a row, with very good behavior every time. Though flying well may not be directly related to decreased snipping at all, it has resulted in longer outings, which in turn has made her calmer and sleepier in the evening. It also makes me happier and more relaxed being able to allow her more exercise again.
• Even more foraging! I stocked up yesterday at Whole Foods with fun greens like parsley, kale, dandelion greens, whole topped carrots, and have been stuffing them in more places around their cage, toys, and rope net, along with tissue paper for shredding, and a few treats hidden inside. Here’s a new foraging toy I found at Parrot Festival that’s a big hit.



• Preening: more vigorous! Yeah, sounds counter-intuitive. Carly used to preen so rambunctiously that she’d occasionally break feathers. But she does far more damage with the focused, careful preening which often ends with a snip at the end lately. If I encourage her verbally or with physical roughhousing, she can get very excited preening: fluffing and shaking and hanging upside down. So now instead of pleading “pleeeease be careful with your feathers” I ruffle her up or tease her, “careful with those pretty feathers!” The occasional broken feather sure beats going bald.
• Diet change. While providing more intersting foraging, I’ve changed to a less varied base diet of Lafebre’s pellets, which she used to get in small amounts. This was motivated by wanting to increase the value of some of her training treats (see previous post). Again, I don’t know if this is causally related to her snipping. But it does seem to increase her interest in other foods, both those used as treats, and those used for foraging. Both she and Piper are shredding their veggies with gusto, and spending even more time playing in and around their cage and gyms.

So, while I’ve been writing several posts, Carly and Piper have been sitting on me preening for a long time, and not a single feather tip has come floating down. (Though my head is covered in Piper dandruff.) Hoping this continues.





Toys shown in pictures are the refillable Foraging Surprise and Star Bird’s Lovely Bunch of Coconuts. Here is a good sample of the many foraging toys available. But remember, even the good ones are only as good as you make them by filling them up daily!

For background see Carly’s Super-Generalizing Recall Training.

We’ve been continuing to practice regularly before meals indoors, including “emergency recalls” using a whistle and super-treats. We took a beach outings several days this week, each one a bit longer than the last. We’re up to our usual 30-40 min session that we typically have done during the week.

Set-up: We’ve been going out before her first meal, and using sprouts and nuts for rewards, and peanut butter for the super-treat.

Some new changes we’ve made, which seemed a bit counter-intuitive to me at first:

1. I’m letting Carly and Piper stay at home in their cage several days per week instead of bringing them to work. Seems odd, but I get the impression that they often prefer to not be carted back and forth; it’s a lot of moving from place to place, often when they are already content where they are, and which can require visible treat rewards to keep it voluntary. They also seem to be finding their cage a more interesting environment than the office (I’ve been working a lot on their cage activities). And when I’m very busy at work, they are not getting much interaction from me anyway, and certainly not whenever they want it. I was also wondering if Carly might be more likely to stray off for social visits if she is fairly well saturated on being with me so much of the time. (I would be!) So they now get some quiet, private time for 6-8 hrs a few days per week.
2. I’ve switched to feeding a base diet of pellets. Formerly I fed a small amount of pellets to both greys, just because they like them, with a base diet of sprouts and veggies. But sprouts are also a very favored training treat, so to increase their value I am now using the pellets (Lafebre’s) and veggies as the base, and reserving sprouts, nuts and fruit as rewards. We do enough work each day that she will still get a good balance of everything.

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Behavior: Most days she did medium length flights, staying fairly close, with one or two longer ones playing with gulls. On all of them she came directly back to me when finished. Weather has been warm so there have been somewhat more people around. If they stop to talk I let her do her meet-n-greet (fly to them on cue, fly back for treat, repeat). Her body language has remained normal, and it didn’t change her subsequent flying. Yesterday we met a RHG only 2 minutes into our session. She predictably showed interest but didn’t fly to him until cued. I let her do some A-B’s back and forth, and she was fine when we left.

Tried the emergency recall whistle today on a longer flight and she turned immediately and headed back in. But I’ll need to see many more repetitions before I’m confident it’s trained solidly.

Continuing use of jackpot treats at the end of session and while walking back to the car (larger nuts, additional sprouts).

Other notes:

It’s getting fun again, and more relaxing, as she gets back into her old groove!