First Shower: Congo African Grey

Photo by Jamieleigh Location: Orlando, Florida Bathers: Congo African Grey "Cressi" and Galah "Bondi"  Above is a polaroid photo I took of Cressi and Bondi. Cressi is now a 7 month old Congo African Grey and Bondi is a 3 year old Rose Breasted Cockatoo (galah). Bondi has been bathing for years now, but Cressi had her first shower a few months...
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Naming Your Bird

Photo by Dave Location: Moab, Utah Hiking with: Congo African Grey "Cressi" I wanted to share how I came up with names for my birds - as well as use it as a way to come up with a name for yours. One of my husband's serious pet peeves is animals whose name is "Blackie" or "Fluffy". I also had a doctor who hated this, too! I remember literally ...
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Night Frights

Cockatiels are probably the most commonly known for having the worst cases of night frights among parrots. Usually, night frights occur for mainly the smaller birds but I have heard of a few cases of it happening for larger birds as well; including my own. I've had one bird fall off a perch during the night or begin having their own night terror...
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Negative Reinforcement: Leaving Your Bird Alone

Back in January 2006, we bought three macaws; two blue and gold macaws and one military macaw. They were all around the age of 6 months old and were shipped to us while in Henderson, Nevada. We were preparing for the show we would perform for 13 months straight on the island of Saipan with them entitled Magical Flight. Jersey and Chayko, the two...
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Behavior Shaping

My favorite type of training is behavior shaping. It can also be the hardest because it requires finding a natural behavior your bird already does and having a clicker on hand to let the bird know it's a good thing to continue to do for a reward. I trained my galah, Bondi, (featured in the video above with Dave Womach) to do what is called "Th...
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Target Training and Clicker Conditioning

Photo by Dave Location: Orlando, Florida Trainee: Galah "Bondi" I just began target training our new Congo African Grey, Cressi. She caught on super fast to it and is learning the clicker more and more at the same time. She's still hand feeding but should be fully weaned soon enough. She's so smart and it's neat to watch her learn and gr...
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