Morgan Update: Going Outside + Flight Skill Development

Here's your Morgan fix this week! First off, due to weather I was only able to work on outdoor desensitization one day (come on, Idaho-spring!) And here is what that looked like: After some serious time off from YouTube, Patty came back in a whole new light! Check out her and I training with our macaws, flying them back and forth between one an...
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Stop BABYING Your Bird! Let it FAIL! Don't Help, ENCOURAGE!

I've talked about this before, because it comes into play every single time we flight train a bird for outdoors. But the last time I really talked about it was years ago regarding an older Moluccan cockatoo, read the article here. I've never ever met a parrot owner that we haven't had to drill this lesson into. It's normal. It's hard for us, as...
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How to TRAIN Your Bird to Let You Pet Him

Can you actually TRAIN a bird to let you pet him on the head? Yep. You can. Is it really so hard to believe when people train goldfish to swim through hoops and dolphins to do double back flips (on cue)?  It's important to look at this training in a certain way: You are simply communicating to your bird through the language of training, what yo...
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Teaching BRAVERY To a Parrot

Just like raising a child, you want them to be confident beings, it's the same with your parrot - you NEED to teach bravery to instill confidence. A confident parrot is a much healthier parrot in body and mind.  When we bring these animals into our homes to live, there is so much that is crazy to ask them to be OK with: running, screaming childr...
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How & When to Use "Jackpot" Rewards

Because jackpot rewards lead to things like properly shaping a behavior, and random rewarding (a broader version of the concept), I want to leave links to those related resources to expand on the idea. So here are more helpful resources: Shaping a behavior Random rewarding introduction  In the following video Patty improperly uses the ja...
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How a Training Pouch SAVED My Training Sessions

First off, this is not an ad for this training pouch but seriously, it saved our training sessions recently.  MANY people fumble or lack coordination in holding treats, a clicker, a target stick, more treats... and then being able to actually use each of those tools successfully and timely!  I've heard of people attaching a clicker permanently...
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