Carly Lu’s Flight Blog

The new Good Bird magazine looks like a conspiracy among friends. Hillary Hankey writes about kitchen manners (ho boy — I just realized what an odd juxtaposition of words that is), Mandy Andrea writes about getting an adult bird to make those first steps toward flying, Grace Innemee talks about training a Jackdaw (and is also the “Animal Lover” profiled), and I adapted the recall article on my web site for the magazine. Carly snuck in to one of the photos of Grace as well.

Since I have almost no photos of Carly’s indoor training, we had hoped to feature photos of Barb Saunders doing recall training with some adult birds she has taken in, many of whom were unable to fly and/or had severely damaged feathers. Unfortunately we weren’t able to locate the high-resolution versions quickly enough to meet a tight deadline before it went to press in June.

So here are the photos of Barb’s birds learning recall in her aviary and looking spectacular compared to when they arrived.

Phil the Philippine Blue-Naped Parrot doing the famous “big lean” while working on getting the first jump-flap. (For hints on that, see Mandy’s article.) Phil’s was so scraggly when he arrived that he almost had no usable wings at all.

Peaches the Moluccan doing a recall in the aviary to Barb’s hand.

Ronnie the Galah flying to Barb, just learning and on a roll that day!

Fred the Bare-eyed Corella learning to fly down. One of my favorite all-time photos. He was a wild man when Barb first got him and he’s become a great trained flyer.

The article is here, but you should really go get the whole magazine at Good Bird Inc. if you aren’t already a subscriber. (It may be a day or two before the new issue is linked.)

This is from the recall article, and very funny in light of the recent posts about recall vs flight skills:

Also, when teaching flight skills and recall (they’re not the same thing), sometimes it can be necessary to work on each separately. You can do one whole session of easy recalls, just to get and keep that behavior well trained. Then do another later when you work some of the more difficult skills.

Notice I didn’t say you can train one but not the other, or “decide which one you want NOW.” You can use one daily recall training session to really push the skills, and another at slightly lower difficulty to work on the very fast snappy response. The two complement each other very well. There is absolutely no need to neglect recall training to teach flight skills, or vice versa.

Barb and her birds and aviary will be featured in an upcoming blog post.

(Note: the photo in the article of Daphne should read Ducorps Cockatoo, and credited just to Barb.)

Since comments about my recall blog post on chat lists have descended to criticism by insinuation, here are a few clarifications.

Annie

What Annie has to do with anything is beyond me. Annie was Hugh’s bird, not “ours”, and he did the training with her, not me. We never trained each others’ birds for freeflying. Ever. We felt it was best when flying where it was very crowded if they were totally focused on one person. We also had different training styles, and disagreed on some things, including some aspects of Annie’s training.

If anyone really cares about what happened to her, why has no one ever asked any of the people directly involved? What I can say is that she was returned to Wendy Craig not because of problems flying, but because with 5 large birds in a 1-BR apt, her presence was very disruptive. She was aggressive to Gizmo and Carly, and Otis was plucking her head bare. She loves Wendy more than anyone else in the world, and the three of us struggled discussing that decision for a long time. I think she is where she is happiest, and that was really the bottom line. In the end it was Hugh’s decision, and I think he made the right one under the circumstances.

Personally, it makes no difference to me if my birds learn to free fly or not. I take it on their own terms, and help them learn as much as they can. I just want the best life for them, and want them to be able to enjoy being outdoors. Unlike Carly and Otis, who are avid flyers, from what I observed Annie was actually the most animated and relaxed when at home eating and chatting. The bird’s welfare is the most important factor, not the freeflyer’s desire for sport. That is why I say, “train the bird you have.” Not necessarily for freeflight, unless you and the bird are both well prepared for it, but for exercise and enjoyment in general, whether it’s at home, in an aviary, or on an outing in a harness.

The obsession with free-flying I think misses the main point of why most parrot owners want to look into allowing flight: to enrich their birds’ lives. Companion parrot owners don’t dismiss birds to live on the back lot because they don’t live up to their sporting expectations.

Comments

Blog comments are were* indeed moderated. Anyone who has ever had a blog knows how many dozen spam comments sometimes come in daily, advertising everything from viagra to porn sites. Moderating is the only way to prevent everything from going directly onto my site. Most blog sites are moderated specifically for this reason. I will look into improved spam-filtering products.

ALL comments submitted to my blog that are not spam or sales pitches are posted and/or replied to unless the author is actively promoting a dangerous or fraudulent product. In some cases the comments become a new blog post of their own. Some chat list comments on my blog and the silliness over “peer review” are so laughable I have quoted them on my blog myself.

What I do not welcome, and why I do not participate in the FF list, is the endless, circular, rehashed arguments month after month, and year after year, and the very low remarks made even by the moderator to very reasonable, seasoned trainers like Chris Shank (he levels the accusation that killing birds is one of her training alternatives if they don’t “cooperate.”) I submit many of my ideas and posts to professional trainers for review, but I am selective about whose advice I seek. It is a waste of my time to solicit comments from fringe trainers whose ideas almost the entire professional training community rejects. That’s also why I don’t solicit input from Joe Krathwohl. Professionally that’s why I don’t put ads up on Craigslist to get advice on interpreting ocean currents.

As for peer review, any scientist knows that a conference presentation is not peer reviewed. The conference organizers look at ideas on abstracts and decide if it looks interesting enough to warrant including. IAATE does not endorse presenters or presentation material at their conferences, the same as any scientific conference, and they state that on their web site.

I rarely comment on anything from chat lists, but because my blog feed is linked on a site of someone who was following “recall optional” advice and coming very close to losing a bird, I made an exception.

We will now resume our normally broadcast blogging.

*UPDATE: Moderation has been turned off, spam filters on, we’ll see how it goes.