Parrot Training - Stepping on a Scale

Jenny Drummey: This is Jenny from Phoenix Landing. We're talking about training parrots today and in this segment, we're going to show you how to get your bird to step up onto a scale. It's really important to weigh your bird. We recommend that you weigh them about every week. A change in weight of 10% could indicate a problem because parrots are prey animals and they don't indicate that they're ill often at all, because in the wild that means they would be somebody's lunch. They don't often have sentence and the best way to find out early if there's some wrong with your parrot is a drastic change in weight, about 10% as I said. Ruth (ph) is going to help me with Lady Scarlett (ph) and show how she's been training her to get on this perch, and this perch, this scale, and this scale has a modified perch on it which is going to be easier for a large bird. Often bird's scales come with a small perch that you can put on there as an attachment. And just as we talked about earlier, approximations are the key here. Lady Scarlett is going to be desensitized to the scale and then we're going to try to reward her for making every effort to get up on the scale. You might try getting her, if you were starting with your bird just putting them next to the scale, stepping one foot on the scale, stepping both feet and then taking them off. And once they step on, don't be afraid if they are uncomfortable, you take them right back off again and reward them for that, because we are talking about small approximations and making your bird comfortable and watching the body language. So let's see what happens when we try with Lady Scarlett. The scale is now on two tables that this bird has never seen before. So she's not comfortable with it and that's okay. If we were going to work through this particular behavior, one or two sessions a day and this is a good time to talk about that. One or two training sessions, 5-10 minutes a day, that's it, that's all you need to do. Keep them short. Look at the body language, see her head is down, she is not leaning forward, she doesn't have a foot up. She seems pretty resistant to it. Ruth: When she touches it, then I am going to give her. If I get her --Jenny Drummey: If she would touch it, you would go her. There you go, excellent! That's the smallest step of an approximation. I would say that's where the training ends right there. So as you can see, she put her beak on the scale. It doesn't seem like a big step but it actually could be, she's pretty shy and afraid of the object. I would end the training session there because she doesn't seem particularly interested and she did make a little bit of progress. You want to keep your training sessions short, 5-10 minutes, may be twice a day, but you want to make sure your bird is motivated throughout. One thing we haven't talked about yet is your bird shouldn't be full, shouldn't have just eaten. He is not going to want to trained when he is full. He should be healthy; if he is ill, of course, he hasn't got enough sleep. You want your bird to be healthy, a little bit hungry and engaged.

So in this clip, we just talked about how to put your bird, get your bird to step up on the scale. Good try, and in our next segment, we are going to be talking about how to teach your bird to raise their wings.