Carly Lu’s Flight Blog

Robin Cherkas in her Living with Parrots Cage Free blog has a very nice post this week:
Signs of the Old Coco. It resonates so much with what I have been experiencing with Carly recently, and with how I am stumbling my way through dealing with it.

And I don’t mean stumbling in a bad way necessarily. Behavior is often not black and white and I think it’s necessary to step back and just observe sometimes. And let what we observe guide what we do, even if we don’t know exactly what the plan is all the time. It’s easy to overlook just being with your bird, when busy training new behaviors or maintaining old ones, plus juggling several birds, taking care of daily routines. With our pets, most often we set the agenda. I was beginning to feel a bit out of touch with my own birds, even though I am very conscientious about paying attention to their body language, moods, etc. But it seemed as though it was always in the context of something I was doing, or wanting them to do.

Robin’s Amazon Coco had been showing the aggressive and unpredictable type behavior that sometimes comes with adolescence, and her behavior was very different than what Robin was used to. Instead of fighting it, Robin looked for ways to adapt, through changes in her own interactions and the environment, in order to make a stressful time easier for both of them. Carly has gone through many changes in the past 2 years also, as she comes into breeding age; with her the behavior changes have been intense nest-making, less interest in food, a lack of focus when training (even when she hasn’t eaten or her weight is down), and less playing.

So for a little while here I am taking a step back and observing. What does SHE want to do? (Besides make nests!) I am discovering there are things she likes to do that I didn’t recognize or had forgotten about. One of them is having me pick her up from under the wings, hold her upside down, shake her and give sloppy loud kisses. (Piper looks horrified.) But it’s butt-wiggling fun for Carly. How did I forget that? Once before I forgot how much she likes to play rough and play-fight. What finally clued me in? She started biting me! Sometimes when she is “being a pest,” in any of the many ways possible, what she appears to want is “to tawk.” This means sitting on my hand, close to my face, while I talk to her and she just stares intently. This can go on for a minute or ten. Then she’s off to go play!

I am taking the time to learn in the same way from Piper now too. (No roughhousing please!) It is very rewarding to step back and see what these guys come up with for interaction all on their own, with no training session in progress, no juggling with other activities like cleaning or cooking, no half-interactions while on the computer or watching TV.

I guess this is relationship building at its most basic. We still keep the basics of our usual routine, with a training session (or “treat earning” session) once a day, foraging activities, going outside. Flying is limited to days when Carly isn’t displaying a lot of nestiness (and is on hold temporarily while I figure out what to do about the crow situation).

But I am focusing my energy on learning from them right now, not the other way around. What do they really find reinforcing? When they come over to bug me when I’m busy at the computer, what do they really want to do?

Peter Topping has an activity he likes to do with his birds called “Sapien Driving.” The idea is that the bird is the driver, and we are the vehicle responding to their cues of where to go. It’s an exercise in watching body language and a fun empowerment and bonding game. I do it with my cat outside now (he is big on walks and exploring) and I have been amazed at where he takes me when I let him set the agenda.

What I’m doing with the birds is kind of like that, just seeing where our interaction takes us. It is really interesting!

Seeing how the ages old argument about flight skills in baby-fledged vs unfledged birds is being beaten to death debated again, with the assertion that said skills can be determined through still photos [ed. comment: ?!] Carly and I have decided to assist the experts.

Clearly what the bird is in the process of doing, and what its intent is, is a key component to determining the skill of the flyer from the photo. To that end, we offer these photos to which thought bubbles have been helpfully added. I assure you, the utmost care was taken in conferring with the subject so as not to introduce observer bias into ascertaining the private behavior (thoughts) of the subject.

Oh, and Carly would like to invite y’all over to dis joint she knows at the beach where they pour the killer margs. Only wait til after flying, cuz it makes ya go kinda goofy.

Photographs © Hillary Hankey (top 3) and Grace Innemee/CityParrots.org

A package arrived today from afar: genuine Omani Tinkwear. After custom tailoring to Piper’s size, we attempted the first modeling session. The dreaded head loop that he grew to despise on a previous harness took about 5 minutes to train. I think ShanLung laces his harnesses with drugs.

We’ll see how it goes from here. Definitely is soft and light. Many thanks ShanLung.

There was an interesting comment on the earlier discussion about acclimating Piper. Erin wrote:

I’ ve trained working dogs for ages and some of your story of Piper reminds me of this one pup I started up a few years back. Keen little dog , but unfortunately the first time I turned her loose on sheep it was a wreck by pure act of fate. Turned the pup off by sucking the confidence out of her and made her real up tight about sheep. I tried and tried to get her back interested with miserable out comes. Finally, I gave up in a way I’d tie her inside the 10 acre field to the fence line where she could see me and watch me work all the other dogs. After months of this one day I looked over there and noticed she was finally looking at the sheep with her pre wreck intensity, ok she was practicality foaming at the mouth to work. So I cut her loose and she was on those sheep and never looked back. So perhaps “forgetting” about Piper and let him just kick back and watch Carly be comfortable outside flying and you work with her while out there may get his little mind thinking it is ok. I know too from decades of starting young horses sometimes if training just wasn’t going the way I’d like I’d just shelve the horse for a length of time to give his young mind a chance to working things out. Physical maturity doesn’t alway denote mental maturity, also my female horses and dogs have always been faster to mentally mature and much more focused work ethic right off the start. Looking forward to see how this shapes up for you.

I’ve been thinking along these lines myself, having seen Carly go through similar phases. When we started flying outdoors she had no inclination to fly at the beach, never gave a single signal that she wanted to do anything other than sit on my shoulder, even though the macaws were flying. Then after about 6 months, one week she started doing her “wanna fly” motions that I’d become familiar with at the park and she was good to go. (We started small of course, with short recalls.) But I think it was much better for her to make the decision herself.

Piper comes out to the beach with us on a leash and rides on my head quite contentedly. Same around the park/pool where we live. When we’re able to generalize the locations so that he is calm in many more situations, and when it is clear he wants to be outdoors, we’ll start thinking about doing some outdoor flying. In the meantime, let’s hope he likes his exotic new duds.

Before restarting outside with the harness on Piper I want to build up a strong history of positive experiences. So in this phase I’m doing our usual indoor recalls with it on, giving bonus treats, and giving him dinner while wearing it.

If he happens to have a bad experience outside or gets spooked, I don’t want there to be such a strong association between outdoors and harness that he doesn’t want to put it back on.

A very different training experience than with Carly. She was calmer outside from day one, so there was very little risk of anything associated with the outdoors becoming an aversive.

This is not from day one, but day two, after coming home at age 4 months. In the background is the rest of the gang, Fergus the cat at right, Moby my homing pigeon walking on the path at the left, and Ripley the dog in the center (over Carly’s head).

* No, she is not on any kind of restraint here. She was always so calm and stuck to me it never even occurred to me that she should be on a harness (at the time I didn’t even know such a thing existed). She was also given an extremely severe clip at the store, so she literally couldn’t fly, period. In a very stiff wind it might have been possible, but we don’t get much of that here so it was easy to avoid. As her wings started to grow out, and before I learned about training, I was very fortunate that she was never inclined to take off.

For more information about using a harness, see the Complete Harness Training Series of blog posts.

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.)

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.

NEI’s new show at the San Diego Zoo, SOAR: A Symphony in Flight, is in the last few days of training before the opening Saturday night.

I’m glad I watched the training last Saturday as well (blog post About to SOAR). There were far fewer opportunities to learn from birds who were giving them training challenges with new behaviors, in a new environment, at night. Everyone’s getting their part down. The teamwork of the trainers and staff is equally impressive. There are a lot of birds in this show, and almost all are cued off stage for behaviors they perform on the set or in the amphitheater. Right now there are no mechanized release cages, so all the entries and exits involve trainers as well.

One thing that struck me, which may seem trivial on its face, is how readily the birds enter their carriers. They are never shooed in, never forced in; it’s always a choice to walk in on their own. Clearly lots and lots of positive reinforcement there on a regular basis. Cool to see with such a tightly orchestrated show.

The other thing that’s very noticeable is how little voracity the birds show for their food rewards. With everything synced to music, video, sound and lighting effects, there isn’t much leeway for birds being reluctant to perform or wandering off script. Their diets are carefully designed to keep their weight in a good range for health and training, but when you see the birds working they don’t go after the food rewards all that rapidly when they’re offered, and their attention is definitely not focused on looking for it from the trainers. Many of them seem almost nonchalant about it. Also very cool to see in a show that demands such precise timing and which is on such a tight schedule for the opening. (Some of these birds only arrived from NEI’s Florida base two weeks ago.) It’s a wonderful demonstration of how weight is just one factor, and hunger doesn’t need to be very strong when there is a trusting relationship based on choice and not force.

The Green Winged Macaw at one of his stations on the set:


Pair of macaw butts stretching for treats:


Worker bees swarming the set:


Pair of very tired trainers waiting for Eurasian Eagle Owl to get set up.
[Hillary (standing) and Cari (collapsing).]

Many more photos in the Facebook album.

UPDATE: Show performance

I finally got over to see the show a week after its opening. It went very well and the audience loved it. They are combining parts of the planned night show (SOAR) and using parts of the day show in sections where the birds are still in training for the full SOAR program. It works seamlessly though, and if you didn’t know before hand which was which it would be very hard to tell.

After the show they let people stay if they want to watch them train, which is good for them (birds get more practice doing their routine in front of an audience) and pretty educational for the audience too. He explains what they’re doing as they train, and really stresses that they never make a bird do anything it doesn’t want to do, all R+. I wish more parrot owners could see that in action!

Sometime last year, I was concerned about times when Carly would fly so fast down the beach that she’d be out of hearing distance before I could call her back. Barbara Heidenreich suggested training an emergency recall. Zoos use this with some animals in case there is an incident with a trainer or an animal has to be moved quickly to another location. The idea is that the cue is different than a normal recall, and the reward is a huge jackpot, so there is a much higher probability of a response, even in the face of external distractions or competing reinforcers. It’s also a very useful behavior to have trained in case of an accidental escape outdoors.

I practice this once daily at home with both Carly and Piper to keep it fresh, using a referee’s whistle as the cue and usually a whole almond in the shell as their jackpot (highly, highly desired by my guys, as both toys and food). I use it at the beach when Carly is getting too far away, but not every time we go. Typically her flights are large loops, but within visual and hearing range. I am careful not to overuse it, otherwise the jackpot isn’t a jackpot any longer, and the emergency recall loses its extra incentive.

Jackpot!

Today I had the first opportunity to test it with Piper. He is about 15 months old, and has never been especially keen on going outdoors. He simply hasn’t shown the curiosity or ease with things and events outdoors that Carly did, even when very young. When he’s outside I try to take it very easy, going to familiar places routinely, doing a little training there, providing lots of opportunity for calm behavior and lots of reinforcement. We use a harness outside because I want to see far fewer startle responses before free-flying. Today he surprised me by flying out to me as I walked out the front door, then landing on the roof next to the entry. He sat there and looked around, and I wondered how this would play out. I called him a couple times and he stayed where he was, looking at the trees around us. Then I remembered the whistle on my key chain. Gave the double-toot that’s our cue and he looked back at me for a second, then flew right down. I took him inside and got an almond pronto! (Carly got one too, for not flying out the door. )

To get started training the emergency recall I shortened our daily recall training sessions a bit, and switched to the ref’s whistle at the end. At first they had no idea what I was asking for (and were a little startled by the loud sound) so I followed the whistle with our usual recall cue. When they came they got the big jackpot. I did this at the end of every recall session for a few days. Next I moved to different positions in the house, while still in sight, before giving the cue, and then out of sight in a different room. When that was working well, I stopped doing it at the end of our usual training sessions and started those steps over (whistle cue close by, then further away, then from another room) at random times. This is how I keep it in practice now. It’s quite funny to see them come racing in from wherever they are to get their jackpot.

The first time I tested it outside with Carly at the beach, I did it when she was not too far away. I had no idea if she’d respond out there. She turned around so quickly it was as if she skidded and made a u-turn in mid air.

It is not a 100% solution by itself. I still have to keep up all the regular training and practice routines or both kinds of recall get unreliable. In environments where there are a multitude of competing reinforcers (seagulls, people, trees, etc) the regular practice is especially important, so that the whistle works even when other reinforcers are present.

I was very pleased with the response from Piper today on his first escape outside ever. And also pleased that he was eager to go outside to begin with. We took a nice walk outside later so he could explore more, and did our usual training out by the pool.

Next up: competing reinforcers!

For more information, Barbara Heidenreich describes training an emergency recall in Good Bird Magazine

Carly Lu’s Flight Blog
http://likambo.com/flyblog

Sheira is 1 year old today (give or take a few days — her previous owner, who she is named after, did not know the exact day).

She was clipped from wingtip to “armpit” when I brought her home, and yet she was a fearless skydiver. She is all grown in now and flies around the house like a flutterbee (butterfly x bumblebee!)