Changing the diet

When I brought Marvin home with me from my parents’ house in Massachusetts I was determined to get him on a healthier diet. I have done a few things to change his diet so far. First I changed the type of seed mix that he was used too, something with less millet (a filler) and more larger and a variety of seeds. he seemed to take to that just fine, no issues. there are some things in this new seed that he won’t/has not touched; whole peanuts, whole corn kernels, the larger pellety type foods, and some of the larger dried fruit bite, but with what I find that he won’t eat just pick out of his food and move it to my other larger parrots food and he seems to like them just fine. I have noticed him trying some sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds that are in his new food; which is awesome!

A few weeks ago I purchased some pelleted food (Zupreem fruit mix parakeet pellets) to mix in with his seed. By doing this he would get used to seeing them in his bowl and hopefully try them as well. I also put in a small bowl of just the pellets in cage so that I could see if there was any change in the food level over time, and also filled the food bowls on his play perch with the pellets. Well a few nights ago while on his play perch I witnessed him dining on the pellets in the bowl! Then this morning I noticed that the food bowl in his cage was almost empty of pellets! This is a huge leap forward in his health! for being a seed only bird for his entire life of 16 years, he has taken to it very fast. Normally with a new food introduction you start with the original food and add in small amounts of the new food. and over time you would decrease the old food amount and increase the new food, and eventually end up completely on the new food or a mix of 20/80 new old; which is what I plan for Marvin. I don’t want to take the seed away from him completely because it’s good for him to have variety and whole natural seeds, not just pellets. but the pellets can give him so much more than just seed can. We are still trying to get him to try whole fruits and veggies (cook corn, peas, sweet potatoes, etc.) but he still hasn't taken much interest in these.

Working on "The Nod"

Today I decided "the nod" with Marvin now this is something he somewhat already knows, which you may have seen him do in this posting showing his tricks that he already knows. now before I started his training today I made sure that he was hungry; meaning that I did not yet fill his food bowl for the day. Doing this more likely ensures that he is more willing to accept the food reward that I have to offer him, once the training session is complete he goes back to his cage and a full food bowl awaits him.

So since Marvin already kind of knows how to do the nod this should be fairly easy to convert with the clicker and reward. Currently he will do the nod if I nod my head he will copy me. But I want him to do it on a different command; me moving my hand in an up and down (head nodding) motion. So to make the transformation from one cue to another I first start off by giving the cue with my hand; which obviously he doesn’t know what to do when he sees that. After a few seconds of moving my hand I begin to nod my head in conjunction with my hand; once he starts to bob his head I stop moving my head and just continue to move my hand, if he continues to bob his head without me nodding mine, then I click and give him the reward. The idea here is that it can slowly ease my head nodding out and just have him nod his head with the cue from my hand instead (this make me look less silly).

We did this about 3 or 4 times successfully today. although his head nod we not very dramatic; just some slight up and down movements from him, they were 'nods' and that is exactly what I’m looking for, so I took it as a successful training session. Hopefully with some more sessions like this we cut out my head cue and only need the hand cue. Once Marvin is done with his training I will usually let him have some free time out of his cage as another reward. We have a wall hanging play area that he enjoys quite a bit. Which if we wanted to, it also folds up and disguises itself as a picture frame.

Quick update

Just finished a quick training session with Marvin it has been a few weeks since our last. Things have been very busy lately with the holidays and all of the baby appointments. But I decided to try and move on from the clicker recognition to actual trick training. I decided to start with "the wave" because it’s fairly simple and he already steps up so well I thought that it might be easy for him to understand. I still used the plain baked chips as the reward which he does like but just doesn't quit go crazy for I may try some other rewards but for now I’m going to stick with the baked chips. I did not record this session because it was just kind of spur of the moment training and I wasn’t sure there would be much if anything that would be interesting to watch.

I started off having him step up off the perch and rewarding him with click and chip. Did this about 3 or 4 times and he seem to lose interest in the reward, even though he would continue to step up. Thinking that he may have been losing interest in stepping up I tried moving on to "the wave". To do this you act as though you are giving him a finger to step up on but move it away slightly so that he just lifts his foot and doesn’t actually step up on your finger. And so every time he lifted his leg I would click and reward. Now with this I am also giving him a verbal command of "wave" and using my left hand to wave at him, kind of in the way that a toddler would wave at someone; with my fingers together and just moving my fingers up and down at the knuckles. Now the idea is that eventually I can either just say "wave" or wave my hand at him and he will lift his foot on command. How ever there was some confusing from him on this whole having a finger to step up on and then having it move away business. a few times he somewhat lost his balance a bit and there was a few times where he was quicker than I was and actually got up on my finger (which I did not reward him for) but hopefully with some more sessions like this he will begin to recognize the cues and figure out that all he needs to do is lift his foot and he will get a reward.

Now the problems I am noticing with him not accepting the reward I think is due to the fact that he is not used to accepting food from a person’s hand. I believe that he may be either confused or intimidated by this gesture; hopefully overtime this will not be an issue.

Merry Christmas from the Parker Family!

No training updates for this post just a holiday photo for all of our readers!

Rusty the Brittany Spaniel, Marvin the Cockatiel, Moya the Senegal, Louie the Siamese, and Thistle the Bengal!

thrid try is the charm

Today was a fairly successful day with what I am viewing as a good step forward in Marvin’s progress. It all comes down to the reward, and finding the correct reward is crucial to getting an animal trained. With my numerous attempts at finding a training reward I believe that I found something that will work. I ended up going with my first thoughts of using a regular potato chip, Marvin seemed to take to the well and fast. A few more good sessions with clicker/reward recognition and we can move forward onto trick training sessions.

New reward attempt

So I am still trying to find a training reward that Marvin will work for. he seemed to do OK with the chex mix bits, but i really want to find something healthier. So I went out and bought some Terra Sweet Potato chips. Sweet Potatoes are very healthy for birds and they are a chip so I was hoping that Marvin would enjoy them. The down side of the Terra chips is that they are not baked but fried so even though the sweet potato part is healthy there are still many oils that may not be the greatest for Marvin. Any ways here is the video with the results.

Finding the right training reward

When trying to train any animal the "reward" is the most important part of the whole process. Now in most cases the reward is food; but the reward can also be petting or rubbing this works well with dogs and cats but not so much in birds. But in any case the reward is necessary and vital. Now with Marvin I have been using spray millet, but as I went on with his training I noticed that he really showed very little interest at all in the millet. At this point I was getting slightly frustrated and confused, thinking maybe I was pushing him to hard. And then I realized; that he just doesn’t want millet, and that I would need to try something else. Now as I mentioned earlier you don’t always have to use food as a reward, but somehow I had a feeling that Marvin wasn't going to see me petting him as such a great reward. I thought for a moment that showing him his mirror might work as he really enjoys seeing his reflection, but then I thought that it may confuse/anger him, every time I take it away and could be counterintuitive. Continuing to fiddle with my thinking cap I finally came up with a possible substitute for the millet. Check out the video and see what I came up with.