I realize this thread is quite old and perhaps no one will follow it up now... I'm quite late to the party! :08:
However, I did want to chime in with some info.
I am Jamieleigh, the one many of you have referred to in this thread (Dave's wife). Dave is the magician brother, Chet is the internet marketer brother.
I created and blogged over at a blog called "Jamie's Parrot Help" which now has a new home/title but is the same content. (Glad it has helped people because it really has acted like a journal for me with my life with my birds!)
Our cookbook was created by myself and Patty Jourgensen. The main point of it is our seasonal feeding system; which basically gives you 4 recipes for every season. Because as seasons change, so do the foods in that season and we wanted to mimic how a bird's diet in the wild would also change with the seasons.
Since the seasonal feeding system is a very condensed meal (it uses a food processor for all the veggies so most birds can't pick and choose what they want to eat out of it) it can be hard to get picky eating birds to eat it. Hence, the other 70+ recipes we included in the book. They are meant to encourage your bird to play and explore it's food and eventually encourage your bird to eat the seasonal feeding recipes. Those other recipes are also there to have fun for holidays (there's a separate book of super fun holiday recipes), of meals you can prepare and share with your bird AND recipes for bird's used to human junk food. Such as - many people give their birds human potato chips, mac and cheese, etc... we've created bird-safe versions so that people can stop giving them horrible snack foods.
Well, while performing on tour
(which, by the way, was a very good environment for all the animals - we became close with all the animal trainers and they, like us, own their own animals and train them. This was a two year tour and only we handled our own birds the entire time.) the elephants would get giant shipments of apples and bananas (among other foods) but the trainer, out of just being nice, would give us the leftovers. He would toss a banana or three on top of the aviaries for the birds to eat and what started happening was although these fruits were organic and otherwise "healthy" - they were becoming our bird's sole meal. A banana for the day, or an apple for a meal. Our birds were over-dosing on fruit/sugar and became really sick really fast.
We literally took them to the vet on tour, and $5,000 later, had all their results (we have a flock of 7 soooo... it gets pricey!). I immediately called Patty in a complete panic. I was close to sending the birds to her - specifically our female galah Bondi who was in the worst shape of all of them - but she calmed me down and we went home from tour and created this cookbook. I realized how easy it was to fall out of balance or not even know that "fruits and veggies" don't go hand-in-hand.
So why did Chet say we were killing our birds with a bad diet? Well, because he loves to drama everything up for effect. Literally while writing the cookbook, I would put text somewhere as a placeholder for Patty to fill in and it would say in the placeholder
"Your bird must eat this or its eyeballs will pop out!" even WE joke about how over the top Chet is with what he writes to try to entice people to click on something. We always laughed about the possibility about not catching those notes to one another in spell check once the book was published!
Pellets
I have no idea what he said about Zupreem pellets but I do know his African Grey at the time had an allergic reaction to them - so now we usually only recommend TOPS . They are the pellets with the best ingredients in our opinion.), Harrison's and Roudybush. These recommendations are purely ingredient-based.
One Day Miracles
ODM is something Dave and I produced on our own - we took applicants of Florida and went in to give in-home consults basically and work with their birds.
For those of you that don't know (you can watch the [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpto3KvQWEo"]teaser video[/ame] of it, though) Liam was only 10 years old at the time and trying to explain such subtle body language to him was really difficult. I felt it was easiest on everyone if I just did the training work side of things and then sent him back with a new perspective on people, and a language of training they could communicate to him in.
Parrot Magic Newsletters
Apparently, and this is something I was unaware of not being on the marketing side of things, when customers were buying ODM, they also were opting in for a monthly subscription of Parrot Magic which is a 12-month newsletter that was created by Dave (he teaches a parrot trick in each one that is unique), Chrissann Nickel, Heather Scott, Patty Jourgensen, Mel Vincent and myself... we all contributed making these newsletters something amazing.
[/B]A lot of people wonder how Dave and Chet got started and where their info came from - basically, Dave has been a magician since he picked up his first magic kit at 3 years old. His parents already owned birds, one of which was Tiko a blue and gold macaw (untrained) and Dave thought it would be awesome to use Tiko in his dove act at the time.
Only one problem: Tiko was mean! He had never been handled. So he and Chet taught Tiko a card trick where they could be "hands off" and not get bit. They realized during the process Tiko became nice. They had video taped their sessions anyway, and decided to show people that "normal people" could train birds and get results.
See for yourself...
Admittedly, they didn't have the best info back then - perching was a method they learned from the internet or books, or whatever, that they tried. None of that is being taught from BirdTricks - I've edited the Taming Training and Tricks original series myself to be sure of it. You can click that link to view the first volume for free, if you want. But please be sure to notice how young Chet and Dave are - c'mon, we were all young and stupid once, right?
You don't know what you don't know.
Chet... who is he?
Also to touch on Chet's
many websites. People have seen him on a dog training site, and a parenting site, and he has a prepper site and so forth.
Chet is an internet marketer. That is his passion. His dog training site is something where he sells professional trainer's stuff but only acts as the marketer. The prepper stuff is the same structure. The parenting stuff, he went by an Internet name and it doesn't generate sales, but that really made people worry because they saw Chet Womach and Mac Strider and they were the same people. I am not sure what his intention ever was with the parenting thing but since he has 4 kids... so I think even he forgot what the intention of that one was.
However, the point of that is that he can market anything and so he does have his hands in a mixture of things to market.
If you look at Dave and I - we have our hands in a few things too, they just tend to overlap a bit. We freaking love our birds, and they are incorporated into our magic. We love to video produce things like our ODM series - so Dave has a side business producing videos for people. Anything from experts in anything (he made a full length show video for the acrobats on board last year!) so our businesses are more than one and a bit over the map too, Chet's are just more public and not as widely liked because well, he's a marketer, and hasn't always made the best choices in the past.
When you act based on your inner intention; whether pure or not, it shows. And that's why BirdTricks has been so divided (within the company) for a few years.
Anyway! I hope that clears up some. I've literally designed a whole new website, taken away all "trial offers" and whatevers that are now a thing of the past.
It's not perfect yet (there's been a lot of clean up to do...) but I am very open to suggestions and your wants/needs.
And I hope this has offered some clarification for everyone seeking it.
I'm willing to talk openly about anything I may have missed or whatever as well.
xo Jamieleigh
