Carly Lu’s Flight Blog

For most birds — clipped, flighted, or even ones who freefly outdoors — a good deal of their day is spent on their own, whether in their cage, in an aviary, or alongside us as we’re busy doing other things. Enrichment is necessary for all companion birds. In the wild a great deal of their time is spent foraging through trees, bushes and for some species on the ground. As part of making connections to excellent parrot resources, this new feature will showcase some favorite sources for enrichment ideas, examples of interesting foraging setups, and visits to cool aviaries.

The first is Kris Porter’s site, ParrotEnrichment.com. Kris is the author of the enrichment bible, The Parrot Enrichment Activity Book (1st and 2nd editions) which is available there as a free download. Her web site gives many other ideas, both simple and involved, as well as short videos and tips on starting foraging activities with birds.

Enrichment doesn’t have to be complicated or costly, but providing places to climb around and search for food or other things to chew on or explore can occupy parrots happily for hours. I could not believe the difference that including food foraging in my birds’ cages and gyms made in their behavior. Not only are they busier with activities that are not destructive to my own things, but they are also much calmer overall. And it has made keeping them with me in the office at work a more relaxing experience for all involved (including my neighbors along the hall!)

Some previous foraging posts show examples of some of my birds’ favorite items. The more you think like a forager, the more you will find yourself stopping mid-toss to the trash can. Throw-away no-no’s at my house: bottle caps, small plastic bottles, small cardboard boxes, small paper bags, little hardware bags, broken toy bits, paper from the shredder. Some essential items from our local 99-Cent Store or Michael’s: tiny plastic zip-ties, sisal twine, and wooden clothespins for attaching things to toys; coffee filters for hiding things; miniature wooden boxes ($1.00!), mini ziplock bags (used for beads), unpainted wooden ornaments, and many more.

In addition, when you find yourself saying “don’t chew that!” to your little devil, is that another enrichment possibility? Your bird likes your toothbrush but you prefer to keep it to yourself? How about getting a pack of bright colored kids’ toothbrushes (make sure no metal under bristles). Always rushing to save that pen or pencil from certain death? How about saving old pens and removing the innards. Do your birds have a taste for fine literature? Phone books are quite tasteful too.

One of the main principles of applied behavior analysis is to show birds what TO do, instead of telling them what not to do. Providing an enriching environment is one of the most basic pro-active ways to prevent undesirable behaviors and keep both you and your birds more sane.

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.

Carly made a new friend flying today, a Willet. They’re about 16″ high with long legs. She called to him repeatedly with a dog-calling type whistle while they were flying.

By the way, there are some amazing photographs of birds, especially shorebirds, at Morris’ site, Birds As Art

How do you find a source of training advice you can trust? Is the bird training world really as brutal as some make it out to be, wrought with conspiracies against individuals, professional jealousy, and continual arguing over methods? Who do you believe?

No one. That’s right, no one. All the highly respected trainers I have met or seen in action do not work in isolation. It’s not a huge community, and most bird trainers from zoos and shows know each other — the “degree of separation” probably averages 1 or 2. Attending the IAATE meeting in Cincinnati this year, the collegiality among trainers from different parts of the country — and the world — was even greater than I expected, and I learned as much from talking to people as I did from the talks. If there’s a conspiracy out there to shut out particular trainers, it must be super secret, because no one I’ve ever met knows about it. Or perhaps more likely is that you reap what you sow, and those who cultivate sound training practices, professional friendships and sharing of information earn that respect.

Avoid: Sites [trainers] that lack any references or affiliation to other materials and professionals known in the field. Established professionals usually work together in a cooperative and/or collaborative way with other recognized professionals. This usually includes references to other sources of information and products on their sites in addition to their own. — Barbara Heidenreich, Good Bird Blog

Observing the trainers I have learned the most from, it’s also striking that they rarely toot their own horns, claim to be “the best,” or that they are the only one to ever do this or that. They do not make promises about training outcomes, or take ownership of established methods by branding them as their own. Training is a science, and like other sciences, is built on what has come before. Good practitioners recognize this. “Revolutionary” is pretty much reserved for those exercise machines advertised late at night on infomercials. The art and science of training is an ongoing learning process that takes patience. It really is true that “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Anyone who believes they don’t need to learn more is only at the outer layer of a very large onion. (To paraphrase Donkey.)

Continued education, and close mentorship with respected, well-known professionals in the field is paramount. . . . Courtesy, reliability, and accuracy are also trademarks of the “expert”, as is willingness to share freely their knowledge. — Animal Education Foundation

These are some things I ask about trainers:

• Can they give you good references? If not, run, don’t walk. Expert trainers work with others and never stop learning, whether it is through informal relationships or formal collaborations. Any good trainer should be able to provide several names of professional trainers who can vouch for their ability. Talk to them, and ask them about the other references as well. Is this trainer someone who has really made a difference?
• How do they care for their own animals? Do they know about mental and environmental enrichment, and practice it? Do they feed a balanced and varied diet that includes fresh food? A good deal of training is about relationship building and general standards of care — what happens outside the training session does matter.
• Is there a strong emphasis on fast and/or easy? This is typically an indicator of exaggeration, a shallow understanding of training principles, or over-reliance on weight management.
• Who have they learned the most from? Who has had the biggest influence on their training, and why? Can they recommend to you a few other good sources of training information? Every single trainer I know who is respected among their peers can and will refer you to others that you can learn from as well. While it’s good to work with a single trainer on specific problems to avoid giving mixed signals to your birds, any good mentor will encourage learning as much as you can from other sources they trust.

. . .

With the internet there is the possibility of sharing information now as never before, but it also opens up the door to just about anyone who wants to call themselves an expert. The cream of the crop among trainers are those that can convey more than just instructions; they demonstrate the principles they are teaching in every interaction with birds. It’s a rare gift, but well worth seeking out those who have it.

I just got back from a 6 day trip, and when Carly was younger she was so unfazed by me leaving that I seriously wondered if it mattered at all that I was gone.  But since she started seasonal feather snipping at 3 years old she has also been snipping when under stress.   Her seasonal snipping was reduced to almost nothing with the help of lots and lots of foraging (for most all her food) as well as lupron shots every 4-6 weeks during the spring.  Since then her feathers have been growing back in nicely, with just a few exceptions, all of which are stress-related: me leaving town for a week (twice), and the death of another pet in the household.

This is her at her worst, after I was away for a week at the IAATE meeting in February; she stayed at Tex’s house with a pet sitter and did a lot of feather damage, both snipping and plucking.

The next snipping event occurred in mid-April, after she had stopped for about 6 weeks. It lasted 36 hours, starting the evening my vet came to the house to put my cat to sleep (after battle with lymphoma). This was such a short duration and intense bout of snipping it’s hard to see it as coincidental.

When Grace and Roelant visited at the beginning of June, many feathers had molted out and were starting to grow back in. That continued through July and into August.

She was a velcro bird when I was packing for my last trip, and for the first time gave me an enthusiastic greeting when I arrived home (instead of the cold shoulder). The snipping is not as bad as before on the belly, but she did crunch her upper wing feathers quite a lot.

During both trips she was with Piper, with lots and lots of foraging material. The latest trip she stayed at home, with familiar people taking care of her, and her snipping started the third day, immediately upon hearing me talk to her over speaker phone. (Note to self…. ) She had already been behaving oddly, including hanging upside down rubbing her back on the cage, even with the door open; something she’s never done in front of me.

Since I’ve been home she hasn’t touched a single feather except for normal preening, and is carefully de-sheathing some newly grown feathers.

It was nice back when she didn’t notice I was gone! I’m not sure what can be done to make these trips less stressful. Perhaps a few short overnighters to break the routine that every time I leave it’s for a week. But then when it gets to be day 3, day 4 on a longer trip…? I wonder if it’s possible to train an alternate behavior for stress relief.

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.

Piper had his first exam at the vet today, and the doctor said he looked a little fat. I didn’t think that could be true, since he is barely over his newly-weaned weight from a year ago, but he thought he looked a bit chubby around the pectoral area. Then when he got to the physical exam he felt Piper’s chest and said, “Ah, muscles!”

He has said before that he rarely sees birds who fly enough to have developed pecs. Kind of sad that even a good, experienced avian vet sees muscles so seldom that he doesn’t recognize them by sight.

During the exam and nail trimming Piper did a stunning performance of non-stop growling, in between flying loops around the office. Carly went first, and acted (as usual) like she goes there for social visits every day.

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.

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