Photo by Nathan Slabaugh Photography
Location: Centralia, WA
Pictured: Toco Toucan “Rocko”

There are lots of things that make raising a bird super complicated and scary, just like raising a human child. You worry they won’t turn out right, or that you didn’t do a good enough job in a certain area over another.

As long as you know how to properly raise a bird (you can learn these steps from our Total Transformation Course which also covers flight training indoors and fixing behavioral problems with your current ...

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Photo by Jamieleigh
Location: Kent, WA
Pictured: Toco Toucan “Rocko”

The only time you’ll hear and learn about how to give your bird what we call “The Gypsy Experience” is during one our live seminars, or in our Total Transformation Seminar Course which is a recording of that seminar that took place in Orlando, Florida.

We try to live the gypsy life and give the same to our pet birds. We’ve done this with all our parrots, and now we are able to offer this life to ...

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Photo by Jamieleigh
Location: Kent, WA
On my arm: 2 month old Toco Toucan “Rocko”

 It all started by half-joking about wishing I had the funds to buy a toco toucan; my dream bird, when we received an outpouring of love beyond my wildest dreams from our entire facebook friends list. And now, as I write this, Rocko gently plucks at the keyboard begging for my attention…

As many of you know, we were devastated by the sudden loss of Fiji, our Swainson Toucan. She was ...

Toco Toucans

Crate training might seem easy… you get the bird and put it in the crate, right? Wrong. At least not with these birds.

These toucans were, again, wild caught so they came to the island very wild and very scared of people. Cathy was their main caretaker on the island who brought them their food and cleaned their cages, they began to become comfortable around her. Until one day they had a hurricane warning and HAD to get the toucans out of their cages and into crates for transport.

Originally, their travel cages they came in stayed in their new aviaries and they ate out of them all the time so it wasn’t a problem. However, it made a huge mess between left over food (as they were over feeding) and poop everywhere so it wasn’t done for long. When emergency time came, they chased the toucans all over the aviary until they were too tired to move from the ground and could no longer perch. This was recommended to them by a vet as a means of getting the birds in the crates… so for 45 minutes they chased the toucans over and over again in the aviary until they were limp in their hands and they could put them in the crates.

After that experience, the toucans never trusted anyone and this included the crates.

Dave and I were darn proud to have gotten them over such a huge hurdle in the beginning and have them eating out of anyone’s hands on the island as a sort of “excursion” people could do. But crate training in two days time? Yikes…