Hi, my name is Chrissann Nickel, also known as “The Toucan Lady” from Adventures in Toucanland. I’ve been a big Bird Tricks fan for about a year now, shortly after I adopted my three adult Toco toucans – Paco, Paz, and Pepe (otherwise known as the “Three-Cans”) in June 2011.

I am really excited about this new blog series we are beginning, sharing the successes of others who have overcome behavioral problems using the Bird Tricks training program. I ...

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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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…