Carly Lu’s Flight Blog

Shiera has settled back in again after her adventures (Shiera’s Travels), but her behavior has some distinct differences since before the world tour.

Most notable at first was that she does more things independently, like playing with toys, foraging around their gyms, or just hanging out. She wanted to be on someone much of the time before, riding around, preening, singing. She didn’t hang out with Rocco all that much except when eating. Now they are usually together, and if she can’t get up to their usual bed on the rope net (sans wings) he will sleep with her in one of her “handicapped accessible” areas. Rocco also became more outgoing and interactive when she was away, and I’m happy to report that has continued! I guess the kids just needed a little time apart before they were ready to settle down. (No chicks on the horizon though. You’ll have to talk to Carly and Piper about that.)

The other thing is that after being out and around the whole town for a couple days, instead of being afraid of the outdoors she is much more relaxed in new environments in general. (Piper, by contrast, was very reluctant to be outside after his first adventure; his included crow chases.) She was antsy in the office before and now she goes with me when I don’t have the big guys. She is great in the car and in public places. Shiera has always been unafraid of new people or animals, and was bold when she was first learning to fly. She adapts to new things very rapidly. So I guess it should be no surprise that she took this adventure in stride.

Her clip is so severe that she drops right down to the ground, and she can’t take off again. I have tall ladders propped up so she can get around. She will jump off of just about anything in order to travel by the land route. She doesn’t appear to be stressed by the change. She’s unafraid to hop from place to place if it’s a foot or less.

I realized today that we now have a perfect setup for doing some outdoor work to make sure if this happens again, she will be better equipped to handle it. First, I’m taking her out with me often. Conditions: no wind, sheltered locations, no traffic (if she’s outside her carrier). She’s already quite composed outdoors — she goes on alert when she sees something unusual, but relaxes back again fairly quickly.

Second, we’re going to do treecrawls! I hadn’t started them with her before because I hadn’t had time to train her with a harness. For a couple of months, before her flights start to molt in, a harness won’t be necessary under the trees. So we’re going to start doing targeting along the branches (walk over and touch a stick, get a treat), then along branches with obstacles like sticks or leaves in the way, then down from higher to lower branches. We’ll also do very short flying recalls (she can only stay in the air for less than a foot). The goal is to give her some confidence outdoors and in trees, practice coming when called in different environments, and an exit strategy for getting down if needed.

I’m looking forward to it, and I think she’ll enjoy it too. And it’s the perfect enrichment for the totally land-bound bird!

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!

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.

Continuing on from the last post, it has been a very uneven path with Piper acclimating outdoors. At times he has become very relaxed, and at one point was flying to the door when I was getting ready to go out, so he could come along. But it takes very little to cause a setback — anything from a new spook outdoors to not having had the opportunity to take excursions for a week or so.

I have heard comments from some that the reason I was not freeflying Piper sooner is because I don’t use weight management (although you are never supposed to control weight on a bird under 1 year old!) Piper’s recall is excellent indoors, as well as outdoors in our routine locations when he is on a harness (short 8-10 ft recalls). His focus is usually better than Carly’s, and as with her we time training sessions before meals to optimize food motivation. (Actually, I’ve rarely seen Piper NOT motivated by food, dinner or not!)

Acclimation is one part of training, and for us this is the hardest part. One of his early freeflights resulted in an extended chase by crows (off and on for hours) and that didn’t set us up for quick success for sure. His manner of flying after that was not relaxed, and seeing him flying with Carly was a huge contrast; one was a bird relaxed and aware of her surroundings, the other was a bird in a state of fear, flying straight and fast with unpredictable turns. Increasing his comfort level outdoors became a primary concern.

I’m reminded of a list that Sid Price presented once, in a talk entitled “It’s Not the Scale, It’s the Balance.” It’s also in his blog article on Food and Weight Management. On one side you have a training challenge, things that work against a bird’s motivation. On the other side you have a set of tools you can use to accomplish the goal, that increase a bird’s motivation.

Things that affect the motivation of the bird include not only its desire for food (its degree of hunger) but also:

• The reinforcement history of the bird.

– Does the bird fully understand that the executing the cued behavior will result in a desired reward?

— Has the trainer always been honest in their reinforcement of behavior in the past or for example was a large visible reward offered by the trainer to elicit a behavior switched out for a small treat when the behavior was completed?

• What is the relationship like between the trainer and the bird?
• Does the trainer have a history of positive rewarding experiences with the bird?

…
These are just a couple of the things that contribute to the “will perform” side of the balance. Meanwhile on the other side of our imaginary balance are all the things that are telling the bird not to perform the behavior.

• Is this a new or poorly trained behavior?
• Is the bird physically capable of performing the behavior?
• Is the trainer being clear communicating what they are expecting of the bird? Clear, concise, consistent cues are essential components of this clear communication.
• Is the bird in good health and not exhausted by behaviors performed earlier in the training session?
• Is the bird in a novel environment with new distracting noises and/or sights?
  Generalization of behaviors in varied situations is an essential step in training any bird. When entering novel situations a trainer should relax their criteria for the behavior and build the bird’s confidence.

The key is to use the right tool for the job. That first involves identifying the problem by looking beyond weight as the only option. If the real problem is environmental distractions, lowering weight is a very inefficient (or even ineffective) way to solve it; it could take a very large reduction to overcome the problem when it could more directly and ethically be solved by eliminating and then gradually increasing the distractions. If the problem is an unreliable new behavior, repetition is by far the most effective solution.

Another ethical consideration I have pondered also concerns Piper’s acclimation outdoors. Even after a year of going outside regularly he is still much more relaxed, animated, and playful indoors. He is rarely eager to go out, though once we are walking on the beach or sitting at the pool he sings and whistles. When we come home from work, he gets animated and sings when we turn into our driveway, and increasingly so as we park the car and walk up the path to our apartment. He’s the only animal I’ve ever had who actually appears to get excited about going home.

So I have had to ask myself, with all the risks, why train him to freefly? With Carly I decided early on I would go as far with flight and recall training as her skill and comfort level allowed, and I would do everything possible to minimize the risks. It was always about her enrichment, not about me wanting to do this as a sport. With the inherent risks of freeflying, should it be encouraged in a bird who seems to be just fine without it? I don’t have an answer to that yet. I believe it is certainly wrong to push a bird in that direction if it’s a poor candidate for freeflying, whether that’s because of poor skills, an unsuitable temperament, or whatever. So like with Carly — initially NO skills — I’m going to take this at Piper’s pace and see what happens. (Another post from Sid related to this is The Right Bird for the Job — The Right Job for the Bird. I have seen these decisions in play with the birds in the San Diego Zoo show, with everything from performing talkers to flying behaviors.)

The first few months Carly took walks with me on the beach (while still young) she was only relaxed if she was on my “shore side.” Now she dives over the waves, chases seagulls, and buzzes surfers in the water. As long as we can do this without undue risk I think it’s definitely worth it. (Much of our training is about minimizing risk — responding to an emergency recall whistle, not flying to strangers — and though the latter was especially challenging it’s no longer something she seeks out.)

With Piper I’ll see how he adapts to being outdoors in general, and how the manner of his startle response develops over time. The training routine is the same as with Carly, just with less attention to flight skills and more to acclimation. He joined the family first and foremost to be a companion with Carly. If that includes flying, wonderful. If not, they enjoy each other immensely many more hours each day than we’d ever be spending out on the beach. I won’t risk that just because it would be cool to have another freeflyer. But I’ll give him every opportunity to progress as far as he wants to.

I am training Piper for recall with the same general methods as I did with Carly, but whereas with Carly I had to take quite a lot of time training flight skills because she was never fledged, Piper came ready to launch. However his disposition is entirely different than hers and he spooks very easily and often outdoors (and indoors some also). It has taken time to acclimate him to specific locations so his behavior is relaxed, but he still becomes alarmed by a variety of things. Carly is an extremely calm bird outdoors, so spook flights were never an issue. Her alarm response is typically just an alert posture, or at most flying up and doing a short loop (5-15 feet) then back down to me. Having seen several losses and near-losses of free flighted Greys after spooking, it’s a very high priority of mine to ensure Piper is confident and secure outside before flying with Carly.

This puts us in a bit of a catch-22 however: the biggest reinforcer, normally, for wearing a harness is not there. Going outside isn’t a reinforcer but instead needs to be trained systematically. But he needs to wear a harness for that acclimation. (I don’t think th experience of being outdoors in a carrier or aviary is the same at all; they are quite protected spaces. Piper does fine on our enclosed balcony that is up in the trees with an open view of the sky.)

Piper puts on a harness well, but does not like to keep it on long. I just can’t seem to find reinforcers big enough, and can’t use going outside as a reward. When reading one of ShanLung’s recent blog posts I was reminded how his Grey Tinkerbell was so prone to spooks, indoors as well as outdoors, which was his main motivation for flying her on a harness with a long line (with a controlled recall). To do that he designed his own harness that is very soft, light, and a bit stretchy, so it can be felt as little as possible when on. I already use a hand made custom design, but it is still more bulky than the Tink harness.

When emailing about some of our experiences with acclimation and spook flights, ShanLung generously offered to make me a nice comfy Tink harness for Piper. I’m hoping the Tinkerbell UltraLite will be more comfortable and make the acclimation process easier. I’m also going to begin training flying up in a small loop (like Carly does) so he may perhaps learn there is a controlled way to respond to something startling.

So when our package from Oman arrives, we will try the Tinkerbell UltraLite model of harness (sans the long line). And I think I owe a parrot conservation organization a nice donation

More thoughts on the subject of outdoor acclimation, as well as weight management and training ethics are in the next post, The Right Training Tool.

The Part with the Caveats:

ShanLung and I are always stressing ATTACH THE HARNESS TO YOUR BODY, and that the bird must be well trained in staying with you and recalling before using a harness. I was amused by this post of his, which he calls the Cargo Cult Rant, comparing people who don’t consider the bonding and training part of it to indigenous south Pacific islanders who thought it was the landing strip itself that caused food cargo planes to land during WWII:

‘using’ harness without the understanding and training is like South Pacific islanders building airstrip and wondering why planes do not land with cargo for them.

(The history of cargo cults is a rather fascinating example of magical thinking.)

So to reiterate, harnesses must only be used on birds who are trained to ride on your hand or shoulder, and who have a good trained recall, and have been acclimated on wearing the harness indoors or another familiar place.

See the complete Harness Training series of blog posts and the Recall Training page for more details.

The building where I work has a floor plan like a rectangular ring: offices (36) along the outside walls, labs on the inside, and a wide corridor in between. 422 feet of corridor in fact, in a big loop. Yeah, wow. And by the time I leave at night I’m the only one on the floor.

So the last two nights I’ve started flying Piper there — it’s fantastic! We can do 150 ft straight line recalls, big loops where he’s out of sight 3/4 of the time, and loop around as many times as we want for stamina building. I hadn’t thought about it much because Carly never wanted to fly in the building (except to go visiting neighboring labs); she’s always preferred being outdoors, even as a youngster on walks. But for Piper it’s perfect. He’s already very good at flying down; the very first time he attempted it from a tall eucalyptus tree he did it like a champ. And he’s fearless with maneuvering tight turns. But he still spooks far too often outdoors for my comfort (or his) and his body language can go from relaxed to tense very quickly; it’s a danger that I want to take my time with to avoid, especially in a young flyer. His recall inside and outside is great, but that doesn’t help if there’s a panic flight. So getting lots of flying practice inside, while continuing to mature with handling unfamiliar things outdoors, is a very good combination right now. I have a feeling it will increase his confidence level in general too.

He was panting after two laps last night, so it will be fun to monitor changes in that.

That’s longer than the Infiite Corridor (825 ft)

Since this blog is one of those places that makes flying outdoors look fun, I want to point out, again, that in addition to having a good recall, it’s critical to have good flight skills as well. If you want a bird that can stay alive that is. Good flight skills include: can maneuver well and turn sharply, can fly down from heights, has been flying indoors or in a controlled environment long enough to have developed some muscle strength, and does not have partially clipped or damaged wings. Things a predator will have a field day with (”predators” including dogs, cats, raptors, and cars, not to mention birds like seagulls, ravens and crows who can just be intent on chasing an intruder away): a bird who is not acclimated to being outdoors, has little to no ability to turn or maneuver, has never flown down from heights before, has wings that physically impair its ability to turn or fly fast, has never flown in wind, has little stamina.

No matter what position one takes on training recall, or the method used to train it, it is just supremely irresponsible to put a bird at risk by rushing the move outdoors when basic flight skills are not in place. And yet I see people doing just that, and encouraging others to do so.

I would really like to find a single serious trainer who believes this isn’t true. All it takes is one surprise stiff breeze or startle flight. Even with a bird who is ready with these skills the transition outdoors is a very risky time because it’s a totally new environment. Adding the handicap of poor skills is terribly unfair to the bird.

(Oh, gee, there I go being “negative” again!)

Update:
First, for those who are not familiar with free flight lingo, any flight outdoors without restraints is “free flight.” Just because you’re only asking for 2-4 feet does not mean that’s “recall training” and not free flight. If a bird has a spook flight or gets caught in an unexpected wind, that 4 foot recall you were asking for becomes completely irrelevant. I believe flight skills and recall should be trained together; that doesn’t mean you do the most rudimentary recall with a completely inexperienced, partially clipped bird outdoors. As much as possible should be done indoors — learning how to land, turn, make sharp maneuvers, fly down. The bigger the indoor location (or aviary) the better. For flying in wind I personally like using a harness for that on a windy day so the bird can get the feel of how to deal with it without being blown away. (Here’s Carly on an extremely windy day practicing.)

Secondly, those who want to comment under the guise of a false identity may want to consider methods other than pseudonyms and fake email addresses. The odds that three different commenters on this blog site (say, for example, “Dave,” “Ron,” and “Joe”) would randomly have the same address, even if they were all on AOL and all in the same region of the country, are more than 4 billion to one, going by the way AOL assigns addresses. When you add in the fact that IP addresses are generally recycled back to the same computer whenever possible, the odds are even slimmer. But then I guess 4 billion in one things do happen once every 4 billion times or so.

Comments have been closed on this thread since they are getting very off topic and rambly.

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.)

The following are comments regarding my post about training flight skills vs recall skills. Jim Dawson is an avian biologist at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tuscon. He states that “a trainer overly focused on ‘recall’ will never let a bird truly explore its wings.” He also points out that birds naturally fledge with a type of A-B recall, gradually increasing their flight skills along with their confidence, under the supervision of their parents. It is that type of supervised, controlled skill-building that I prefer to use with my own birds, and which is typically used by professional trainers (ask around).

UPDATE: This discussion originated with someone’s assertion that a new trainer with an adult bird who was just being introduced to outdoor flying had to choose between focusing on allowing the bird to learn flight skills and training recall. My position applies to any bird who was raised by humans indoors, whether newly weaned or adult. I do not condone anyone inexperienced in hand-rearing and weaning baby birds to experiment with replacing a bird’s natural parents or a qualified breeder. Please see the guest post by Wendy Craig for details.

Nicely written — We find ourselves bounded by the ways that we think about flight. Our birds thus end up equally constrained. This blog touches on some of the false labels we put on behaviors.

Instead we need to think about how wild birds fledge and learn to fly competently. With all the written resources and video out there about wild birds, there really is no excuse any longer for not understanding natural fledging (all the way to strong skilled flight outside).

Recall is part of fledging naturally — babies don’t leave the cavity until parents refuse to go to cavity to feed them. Babies’ first flights are to the parents to get food. It’s parallel to recall to a person. It has to be done right away and without much food restriction. They are out for supervised, short periods and are not left at liberty ever. I am very much against any form of at liberty flying, even though people like Chris Shank do it very well.

The youngsters develop quickly and their skills keep pace with the final growth and hard-penning of their sails. Panic flights happen when a bird has the hardware (developed wings and some muscle) to fly high and far but is lacking the software (confidence and learned skills) to handle flight. A young bird fledging doesn’t have the hardware yet to go far. By the time they do, they’ve flown quite a bit and have the mental skills in place.

I agree with you that recall and skills have to happen simultaneously. I don’t agree with a sink-or-swim idea about flight. I don’t agree that putting a bird outside without a solid recall is the way to do it.

A to B recall is only the very start of the process. The point is to increase the skill level of the flights as the bird develops physically and mentally. The practice A-B flights are shaped into loops, and the loops are shaped into larger loops, then higher. Eventually the bird starts exploring dives and other maneuvers, and flights become longer and and require a great deal of stamina. But the goal at all times is to maintain a balance of control and freedom with the bird, so that they can explore their own limits without excessive risk. When dealing with an indoor, human-raised bird, we are the only ones who can provide that balance and allow time for mental growth (confidence outdoors, “thinking on the wing”) as well as physical growth (flight skills).

Note: Chris Shank is a long-time trainer who started out in the marine mammal world, and conducts week long workshops on training and flight at Cockatoo Downs in Oregon. Chris recently stated about at-liberty flying:

I have flown cockatoos in this manner. However, I do NOT promote that form of flying in any way now. It is an unsafe and reckless way to fly one’s companion parrot. (29 July 2009)

When we are dealing with a bird who is going outdoors for the first time, whether as a youngster or an adult, it is a good recall that enables us to maintain control over the pace and difficulty of the skills being practiced.

Regarding a suggestion from a “recall optional” proponent that the method of early training I advocate needs to undergo “peer review”… well … if there even were such a thing for publications in the bird training world, in this case it would kind of be reinventing the wheel. This type of flight/recall training is the industry standard. Descriptions of the process I used with Carly for early flight training can also be found in two articles in Good Bird Magazine (links here), a publication reviewed and edited by Barbara Heidenreich. (Not the same as peer review, but in the companion parrot world it’s the best we have at the moment. Barbara is a past president of IAATE, and training consultant with many zoos, as well as an active advocate for companion parrot training.) Most all of my training strategies that are not routine practice are discussed with one or more professional trainers/behaviorists before and during the process, and well before writing about them. I strongly encourage others to do the same and not rely on internet chat groups as a sole source of information.

In addition, because of such a need for training information to be somehow “vetted,” the newly formed IAATE Companion Parrot Committee was set up for just that purpose. Articles posted at the site will have undergone peer review by members of the committee as well as the IAATE board of directors.

For more information:

• Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and their acclaimed Raptor Free Flight program.
• Chris Shank’s Cockatoo Downs