Tiko is over 20 years old and highly prefers males. Ok... I was just being nice about it... he hates women. All women, except for my mother in law who he is sometimes nice to... and any woman willing to put in the time and effort of training so that he will learn to like you, but it takes a lot of work. And so far my mother in law is the only on...

Photo by Rachael Baker in Moab, Utah  Socializing your bird with new people can be really hard, not usually because of the bird, but because people react to things and sometimes they can react really dramatically. You don’t want the interactions your bird has with new people to be negative, and that’s why it’s best to start socializing with peo...

Photo by Dave Location: Centralia, WA Flying: Blue throated macaw "Jinx" It can be a huge challenge to encourage an older bird to fly. Depending on the situation, of course. But if you have an older bird and it refuses to fly, it’s likely because it has never flown in the past and it literally does not have the muscles to do so. When they sta...

Photo by Nathan Slabaugh Location: San Angelo, TX Modeling with: Camelot macaw "Tusa" Dave and I have a secret training method we use between the two of us and our birds, ALL of our birds. Naturally, your bird is going to like one person a bit more than the other people in your house. Even our own parrots have a preference, but that doesn't m...

Our military macaw has always struggled with flying well. Mostly because he would spook and panic if he missed his first attempt at a landing, and end up crashing. We tried training him in a flight aviary where he could learn on his own time, we tried batting cages, we tried having him watch birds that were good at it and learning from them (o...

I realized just the other day how I've used mirrors A LOT in my training of parrots. It sounds weird, but every time I use the mirror to train one of my birds... it seems to train something completely different. Okay, I've only had two examples of this but now that I've caught onto it I will be using it on ALL my birds eventually. So far, it's j...