Carly Lu’s Flight Blog

The idea that one has to work on either flight skills or recall skills with a new flyer is an odd one. The two training tasks are so complementary. Doing controlled flights under your cue is how a bird can build up confidence along with skill, and those three elements — good recall, skill, and confidence — are what makes a good outdoor or indoor flyer.

They need all three to fly safely, and it doesn’t make sense to ignore one to work on another. If you neglect the recall training, every time you allow latency you are training the bird that it’s OK to ignore your cue. If you don’t gradually increase the skill level of the recalls, you risk the bird becoming bored with the training and not progressing physically.

The only time these elements come into conflict is if you’re trying to move too fast. If recall needs work, you can do that at whatever the bird’s skill level is, and do lots of repetitions. The reps improve recall, increase overall confidence, and can be done while gradually pushing the skill level. Carly’s first outdoor flying consisted of A-B flights between me and a perch, increasing in distance; short loops away and back to me, increasing the diameter; A-B recalls flying down from tree branches, increasing in height; and targeting to me through a tree (combination of climbing, hanging, dropping, flying) to learn how to descend if she landed too high for her flying skills. These can be done in a systematic way if the bird has a good recall and the confidence with it’s skill level that you can maintain an outdoor training session without flyoffs, refusing to come down from trees, or panicking.

For a companion parrot, being outside with poor recall and/or low confidence just increases the probability that it will panic or get into a situation that is beyond its skill level. These are not parrots who were raised outdoors by parents in a nest in the wild. They are not used to everything the outdoors presents.

Putting a bird in a situation that is beyond its abilities and forcing it to essentially “learn or else” and become desensitized to its own fear is one of the worst training strategies there is if you are trying to base the relationship on trust and positive interactions. It’s called flooding.

UPDATE: Apparently those claiming it was necessary to make a choice between training flight skills and recall agree with my point (from public Freeflight group):

Yes doing controlled flights is ONE way to build up the birds confidence and flight skills.

So, if you can do it that way, why encourage an unnecessary choice between recall and skills, which is more risky for the bird?

I urge anyone considering freeflying their companion parrot to consider this subsequent statement as well, before using the unfledged baby or “just let ‘em fly” approach:

Recall is extremely useful but is not required to fly birds out doors. — Chris Biro

and ask yourself if you’re comfortable taking this attitude with a valued companion.

That statement alone says enough for me to close the book on anything coming from this source.

It was exactly 3 years ago today that Carly did her first jump-flap off the counter onto my arm. Even with all our other flying adventures, it’s still the most memorable event. I don’t know who was more excited, me or her!

Here she is a couple weeks later (and a few cell phone cameras ago!) practicing. You can barely see here, but she has only 2 or 3 flight feathers on each side.

She was so eager to practice every day that when we were finished she’d often leave her dinner to come back and do more. Contrafreeloading in action!

I think she likes this stuff.

Carly doing a vertical “paratrooper drop” landing at the beach. Photo © Hillary Hankey 2009.

Of course we’re celebrating this afternoon by…. going to the beach.

For an article on techniques to try to help previously clipped birds take this first step, see the current issue (Summer 2009) of Good Bird Magazine where Mandy Andrea has an article on teaching the mature bird.

I had an unexpected breakthrough tonight with Piper on the harness. If you’ve been following the blog you know that Piper developed a dislike of his previous harness which had an over-the-head loop. So we stopped using it and have been training a new design (shown here). It’s been slow going, but we were to the point where he would walk up to the end of his perch, have me put the strap around his neck and fasten it, and put the belly strap under one wing and through the back strap. We’ve been doing this for awhile, and whenever he showed any sign of wanting it off, off it came. So tonight, after a very lazy day, I went to do our usual short session before our dinner time recall training, and we got to the usual point. He seemed very keen on his sprouted sunflower seed treats, and not paying much attention to the harness, so I decided to take it a step further and go for the strap under his other wing. That went fine. So I gave him big bonuses — handful of sprouted seeds, and he still was fine. So then I fastened the belly strap also, and gave him another handful of sprouts. Still fine! I kept feeding him his sprouts for several minutes, while carrying him around on his harness.

This surprised me but it shows how you just have to go with the flow of what the bird is presenting you. If an opportunity shows itself, take it. And if you are making big breakthroughs, give big bonuses! (Heck, even on little breakthroughs I give big bonuses.) But tonight I gave him almost his whole dinner while on the harness. My plan is to keep doing this for the next week or so: harness training combined with his whole dinner.

Here he is while eating dinner out of my hand (sorry for the blur — trying to work iPhone with one hand while feeding!)

This comes at a very good time, because he has become very interested in exploring the outdoors now (trying to follow me out the front door) and getting quite relaxed walking at the beach. So I was planning to start working A-B recalls on the harness at the beach this week.

So of course this warranted a celebration. Witness the fate of probably the last surviving blood orange of the season in southern California:

Training note: Piper is being trained at at-lib weight. His indoor recall is excellent, more reliable even than Carly’s. He is just over one year old, and it is not recommended to restrict weight on parrots less than a year old. His weight range now is only slightly higher than when he arrived at 4 months old, and he is in good condition from flying a lot indoors, so this is a good range to work with. His response to training does not warrant any change. Acclimation to the outdoor environment is something that can be done without weight reduction, as it is an entirely separate issue than food motivation. Comfort with the environment is one of the major elements in the list of factors that should be considered when training a new behavior, and it is far up the list from weight reduction.

My position with regards to outdoor training is that you go at the pace the bird himself sets, whether that is a matter of flight skills, recall response, comfort with the environment, or eagerness to fly in the first place. I am doing this for the enrichment and benefit of Piper. I’m sure Carly would love to have him as a flying companion, but first and foremost, they enjoy each other as indoor companions, which is where they spend the vast majority of their time. I feel no need at all to push the pace of training. African Greys can live to be 40-70 years old. Piper is 16 months!

Complete Harness Training Series.

As a follow up to my post on freeflight training for companion parrots, I would like to share links to a couple of articles that describe the process NEI uses for their birds. The first is an article by Deb Stambul, who attended the second level NEI workshop where they learn hands-on with new NEI birds. It should be stressed that although they are new freeflyers, they have been in the program working with professional trainers for a long time before this one-week workshop, have excellent flight skills in huge aviaries, and have already worked on recall training in those protected environments. This is the part where they make the transition to the open outdoors.

Learning How Professionals at NEI Train Birds to Fly Outdoors Safely

The second is an article that appeared in World Parrot Trust’s Psittascene magazine a few years ago, in which Steve Martin of NEI describes how involved the process is and what he expects from trainers.

To Fly or Not to Fly?

Fanny Schutte training a Scarlet Macaw at NEI’s 2009 workshop.

Chris Shank also does freeflight workshops at Cockatoo Downs every year or so, demonstrating recall training and also featuring guest speakers like Susan Friedman. I’ll try to write about that in an future post.

One of the nice things about warm summer evenings here are the beach sunsets. I noticed a woman photographing us for quite a while yesterday, and it turns out she’s a travel photographer, Diane Marinos, who lives nearby and is doing a personal series on Scripps Pier in all of the varying light and weather conditions. Should be a great series — its so changeable here with the fog and cloud banks, crystal clear Santa Ana winds, etc.

I had been only training Piper up above the beach where he was more comfortable. He got spooked too much down below when on his harness, so I decided to take it more slowly. Now he sits on top of my head and sings and whistles and gets treats, while Carly goes on flights. Yesterday she was mostly interested in hanging out and watching the sunset. Very relaxing for all of us.

I started flying Carly at the beach once she started to show an interest — by spreading out her wings and kind of bouncing back and forth. The behavior I observed from Piper earlier this year was entirely different — neck outstretched, occasionally attempting to do a startle flight. This is not the behavior of a bird that wants to fly for the fun of it; it’s the behavior of a bird who is afraid. So now that he’s getting more acclimated I’ll start doing some harness training down on the beach and take it from there.

I was talking to Wendy last week about something I’ve been pondering while Piper is in training. And that is, if he’s not eager to go outside, gets spooked, and on top of that there are lots of risks inherent in outdoor flying — why push it? I haven’t been, but occasionally I think about what our long term plan should be. And really, it’s the same as it was with Carly: I’ll take it as far as he’s comfortable with. He doesn’t like to be left in the office when we go out to the beach, so I thought it was worthwhile to give him the opportunity to acclimate to being out there on a harness. He flies to the door often when I have the leash in hand now, so it’s clear he isn’t reluctant to go outside. And if whistling and talking are any indication of being relaxed and happy, I’d say it was worth it. Now we’ll just see where to go next.

The second photo looks like Piper and I have smoke streaming out of our heads. LOL. Carly must be off flying in this one.

Photographs © 2009 Diane Marinos.

There is a lot of good information on the web about parrot behavior, training and care. I’m going to try to give a shout-out to a site or blog that people may not know about every so often. The more we can learn from each other the better!

This is one I just discovered myself recently (thanks Sid) and it is full of well thought out posts that are grounded in a background of Applied Behavior Analysis, focusing on providing enrichment, empowerment and choice in our relationship with our birds. The author, Robin Cherkas, features her own flock and their amazing “fort” set-up in her blog.

Living with Parrots Cage Free

The most recent entry, Deal or No Deal, starts, “Each day I contemplate ways to give Coco choices, whether seemingly small or large. . . .” How cool is that?

I’m trying to figure out a way to upscale Fort Coco into a full size Fort Raz. People need forts too. Yep.

This should be easier.   http://CarlyLusFightBlog.com

I think all the old links are redirecting to the new address.  You may have to renew the RSS feed if you have one.

(For those who never knew, “likambo” is the word in the Congo language of Lingala for “trouble.”)

I have been asked by the photographer to remove his photos of Carly from my sites.

So, as a start (until our family wedding shenanigans are over and I can get everything else removed)…. introducing our new blog banner: Carly mid-flip, taken by Hillary Hankey in April 2008. I love this photo because it so captures the exuberance of her flying.

There are major web site collaborations and improvements in the works anyway, so hopefully this will be extra incentive to getting that finished!

Carly, mid-flip, eyes closed! © Hillary Hankey 2007.

. . .
NOTE: the new blog banner may not show up if you have visited this site recently and the image is cached on your computer. Refreshing the page or closing and reopening the web browser may be needed.

This is officially a Pout Free Zone. I write about positive influences on my training. As in my professional life, personalities are not the topic. We don’t omit referencing important publications based on our personal feelings about the authors, and I have the same standards here.

The “Freeflight for Companion Parrots” post is a warning, not a publicity campaign.

I’d like to address the topic of freeflight training for pet birds in a bit broader context than “how to.” After thinking about this for some time, I want to elaborate on a stance that seems contradictory to this blog, even hypocritical. And that is that I don’t advocate it except under very rare circumstances. I have been saying since the beginning of this blog that I feel it’s necessary to have a professional mentor one on one, in person, before attempting outdoor training, even though I didn’t have that kind of mentoring before I started flying Carly outside. But I think I need to clarify why that is my position.

In brief, what it boils down to is that it is much, much more complicated than it first appears, and it is almost impossible for someone to evaluate a trainer’s level of skill, or the bird’s level of skill, without being there in person and having a lot of interaction with both.

As well as the challenges of starting out (making the indoor-outdoor transition is a BIG one), there are continuing challenges when freeflying, especially when dealing with a very uncontrolled environment where the bird is not doing strictly cued A-B type flying. My goal has always been to let Carly fly as long as I can do it without excessive risk. That means having an excellent recall, so she can be called back if she gets too far away or if I see a predator or other danger before she does. (Yes, sometimes I do see it first, and she can be called back.)

These challenges have required using different training concepts, many of which I was completely unaware when I started out. Freeflight requires taking the training mindset into every single daily behavior, not just during recall practice. Flying to you – instead of sitting in a tree, flying somewhere else, exploring, etc. – is one of the most basic trust-requiring behaviors. Without that background of trust and self-empowerment in all daily interactions, it’s much more likely you will have a bird literally avoiding you when outdoors, either by taking “unapproved” excursions, sitting in trees and refusing to come down, or having actual flyoffs. You have to be THE most positive thing in their environment, every time you go outside, no matter what you encounter. Building this trust involves everything from seemingly tiny things (not compelling a bird to step up in your home) to much more obvious ones (not tossing the bird or refusing to let it land when outdoors.)

Here are some of the things I think were critical in allowing me to begin and continue to freefly, so far. And I say “so far” because there are always new challenges that can present themselves, or unexpected dangers that occur. And they will be different for every single bird.

This is long, and I’m not going to try to pare it down, because the point is, this is not simple!

• Time I was fortunate to have a bird that was not already fledged. This may seem counterintuitive, but in my case it gave me time to get my training and behavior skills up to speed. I spent 9 months training Carly before her flight feathers had grown in enough for outdoor flight to be safe. (Note: her lack of fledging was more than compensated for by an eagerness to learn new skills, something that may not be true for all birds.)
• Repetition During those 9 months we practiced recall twice daily, every day, for about 10-20 minutes per session. Talk about repetition! By the time we went outside she was a recall machine.
• Confidence The repetitions from 9 months of training gave us a lot of mutual confidence, so much that Carly has really never done a panic flight from being startled. At most, it is just up a short distance and back to me. The same applies to when she has been involved in bad chases, such as the one with a huge flock of ravens. She did not fly away, she flew fast and evasively, and got back to me as soon as she possibly could.
• Food management, not food deprivation All Carly’s indoor training was done with scheduled meals, with no weight reduction. When we transitioned outdoors I brought her weight down very slightly (2-3%) for a short time. I usually now fly within a small range of her at-lib weight (455-462 g). There are those who advocate no food or weight management, and those who advocate overly extreme food/weight management. I was fortunate to find information about how to use it intelligently and appropriately.
• Applied Behavior Analysis Dr. Susan Friedman’s Living and Learning with Parrots class and other writings have been incredibly valuable, even more so than I could have imagined when I started. I didn’t take LLP until the summer when I was first training Carly outdoors, and frankly much of it didn’t seem “new” or all that important to that training at first. But with each passing month, and the more I learned about ABA, the more I have used it. I credit that knowledge with single-handedly enabling me to continue to free fly Carly despite some very tough training challenges.
• Behavior is Science! See above. There is a right and wrong way to train and interact with our birds, if our goal is well-adjusted, confident animals.
• Input from mentors & experts I did not have the luxury of a local professional for advice and evaluation, but I made use of every contact I could, every group, blog, seminar, workshop, or even just the chance to observe expert trainers in action (as I’ve been taking ample advantage of with NEI at the San Diego Zoo recently). It’s not just at the beginning, but continuously, and not just reading or watching, but thinking and asking “how does this apply to situations I’ve encountered?” These are worth mentioning by name:
  • Dr Susan Friedman, Utah State University. Always asks the hard questions and teaches that what we do with our birds every minute of every day is training. It is important to understand behavior and work with it on that level for our relationship with our birds, and with outdoor flight it’s critical. Web site: BehaviorWorks.org
  • Barbara Heidenreich, of Good Bird Inc. Seeing her work with birds at a seminar concurrent with taking Susan’s LLP class was like seeing a live demonstration of ABA in action. A pivotal moment for me. Her Good Bird Magazine is a storehouse of good training info.
  • Sid Price, of Avian Ambassadors. Sid has become a good friend and his input and observations on training questions has been insightful. He has also taken an interest in the companion parrot world, which he advises through his Bird Behavior Blog with thoughtful posts on a variety of topics.
  • Steve Martin & Natural Encounters Inc. I have not had much direct interaction with Steve, but his talks and articles, and those of the other NEI trainers, have been an invaluable resource. Articles are posted on the NEI web site that are must-reads for understanding parrot-human interaction, as well as training techniques. What’s in It For Me is something we should all be asking ourselves (on behalf of our parrots) all the time. Watching training for their current show is also like a live ABA demo.
  • Various friends who freefly well: Hillary Hankey, Wendy Craig, and Ellen Aparacio were all influences for the better, just by watching how sensitively they interact with their birds and how they think through behavioral issues.
• The right bird for the job Although Carly was clipped as a baby, she has always been assertive and calm, which are two wonderful qualities in an outdoor freeflyer. I always think of the word “unflappable” which seems odd to use with a bird. I don’t know if it is an innate personality trait, or if her early upbringing played a role too. I made sure to keep her well socialized and always used to encountering new things, well before we flew outdoors.
• Keeping records It’s important not to rely just on memory for details like daily weights, training outcomes and other things that might be influencing behavior each day. Sometimes it’s only by writing things down that you can see patterns evolve. –> sample logs
• Harness training I believe part of her calm outdoors is from being taken outside daily from the age of 4 months onward. By the time we started freeflying, she had been exposed to just about everything she ever would be: traffic, people, noise, crowds, construction, blimps, planes, helicopters, paragliders, kids, dogs. The one exception was other birds (seagulls, ravens, falcons) and she reacted calmly thanks to lots of practice with new things, and lots of repetition of our training. –> harness training
• Tree practice I trained her to target by crawling through and down trees. This was a very useful skill when she first started learning to fly down from large trees because she could use a combination of crawling, swinging, dropping and flying if she got up too high, and it allowed her to learn flying down at her own pace. Many birds who are lost during the indoor/outdoor transition are lost because they can’t fly down and panic.
• Emergency recall Training a super reliable and fast recall for situations where there is danger or the bird is flying fast and getting too far away. It employs “super bonus” treats, which makes it more strongly motivated than a normal recall in the face of distractions, and to be effective it can’t be overused.–>emergency recall
• Luck When we first encountered our biggest training challenge, her tendency to go visit other people while flying, we were extremely lucky that the people she chose were honest and made an effort to find her owner. When she flew behind some trees and was attacked by a hawk we were very lucky that it was only a shallow talon wound.
• Not relying on luck Any time we had a challenge with freeflying I tried to think through it using the tools I’d learned in ABA. Just a sampling of what some of the solutions involved:
  • recognizing very subtle “forcing” of behavior and applying positive reinforcement in more of our daily interactions
  • stopping freeflying to develop and implement a new training routine when her behavior regressed (more difficult than you might think to stop these outings)
  • watching her body language more carefully for signs of potential problem behavior outdoors
  • using bonuses strategically
  • using a “heirarchy” of treats
  • recognizing when food or weight is not the problem
  • “changing the antecedent” by not flying if I saw any warning sign that it was not a good day (also harder than you can imagine)
  • generalizing behavior so it is maintained in the face of distractions
  • “super-generalizing” behavior so it is maintained in the face of competing external reinforcers. –>generalizing
  • using small approximations to train flying in the dark
  • recognizing the “study of one” principle and taking much smaller approximations in outdoor acclimation with new flyer Piper –>acclimation
  • recognizing that every time I make a mistake outdoors (usually by setting up antecedents wrong) I am training Carly to do the wrong thing, and there are no “do-overs”.

. . .
I’m sure I’ve missed a lot here, but you get the idea. It isn’t just a matter of teaching recall in isolation of other behavior and the daily life of the bird.

I never like to discourage someone from a challenge, but I feel that some people who freefly minimize the work involved, and/or have lower standards for recall or safe flying. And on the other extreme some rely on weight control almost to the exclusion of other strategies. It’s always up to the individual how they want to proceed: how much latency is acceptable (sitting in trees), how much of a flyoff is acceptable, whether or not staying out overnight is acceptable, or if witholding food for one or more meals is acceptable. For me, any of those is a sign that we need to revisit and reevaluate our training routine.

I have had problems with sitting in trees during Carly’s first year flying. I have had times when Carly flew out of sight and landed on a stranger who took her home. Twice she has been out overnight (once when a huge truck pulled up its rear elevator as we were passing by right after dark and she spent the night in a tree outside my office – with me underneath it – and once when she was attacked by a hawk at sunset and hunkered down in a tree until morning. Both times she flew right down to me at the crack of dawn.) All of these were problems that could be dealt with through additional training for her (generalizing recall in the presence of competing reinforcers) or by training me (knowing when it’s not a good time to fly, and being aware of the environment). None of these has occurred this year, and I like to think I’m growing as a trainer. But I’m always ready for that next unexpected challenge because I haven’t been doing this for years and years. And from what I’ve seen, even the best, most experienced trainers are continually learning and open to input from others.

To close, here are some of my favorite pieces of writing about freeflight or training in general that I think are applicable to this discussion.
. . .

What’s in It For Me by Steve Martin of Natural Encounters Inc. Looking at things from your bird’s point of view.

Straight Talk About Behavior by Susan Friedman.

Food and Weight Management and follow-up article in Sid Price’s Bird Training Blog

The Mouse Went Down the Hole: Psychological Appetite, Nature’s Training Tool by Cassie Malina of NEI.

Strong Foundations & Adjustments: Keys to Training Success by Sid Price.

Don’t Shoot the Dog , by Karen Pryor. A bible of training and behavior for all species that can be read over and over.

Good Bird Magazine, edited by Barbara Heidenreich. A must-have subscription.

BehaviorWorks.org, Dr Susan Friedman’s website, has links to all of her articles. Her Parrot Behavior Analysis Solutions group (http://yahoo.groups.com/parrotBAS) offers free one-on-one behavior problem solving and lessons on Applied Behavior Analysis with trained tutors, and her internet or workshop course Living and Learning with Parrots (LLP) is the gold standard for parrot behavioral science.

Behavior.org, the web site of Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. The Behavior Analysis Glossary alone is worth browsing and rebrowsing.

Where to learn one-on-one about free flight training for parrots?
The Art and Science of Training Companion Parrots, level 2, at Natural Encounters. This is only an introduction to their methods so people get some experience with what is involved. (Part of the purpose of this workshop is to show people how easy it isn’t.)

Chris Shank’s Cockatoo Downs. Chris is a very experienced trainer with many different animals, and has a flock of free-flighted cockatoos in Oregon. There are annual workshops on a variety of topics, and Chris is also available for individual consulation.

There are many very qualified professional trainers, but none of them offer anything similar, generally because it is such a high-risk endeavor, and not one that can be taught in a short workshop. Some others offer freeflight instruction that I do not recommend for a variety of reasons. I do not support anything that’s offered by internet or video.

. . .

My non-professional* training models. These guys have that magic touch, and also the thirst for continued learning. (*At the time. Hillary is now an NEI trainer. Wendy has completed both levels of the NEI workshops.)

Hillary Hankey & Juice


Ellen Aparacio & Inca


Wendy Craig with Samantha, Fifer and Rubidew

UPDATE: I have been asked about people who may have been influences on my training that I do not mention here. All I will say is those I have mentioned are those whose training methods and philosophy are in keeping with the “most positive, least intrusive” principle that I believe in. I’ve been exposed to other trainers, but they use methods or strategies that I prefer not to follow, and they are aware of those differences.

Links to some other articles on freeflight training:
Recommended Articles on Freeflight Training