Help please...

[BHCowner]

I have posted up a few times before about my Caique being aggressive. Now it has become more of a problem than before. It use to be short amounts of time before he "snapped out of it" and became friendly again... But now he is aggressive all the time to me.
He is absolutely fine with my mum. Never aggressive at all. He constantly does an angry high pitched loud squeek around me and displays (open wings, eyes pinning feathers standing up on the back and climbing around his cage etc).

It is extremely rare that he will be friendly to me. I cannot pick him up at all or i get bitten really hard. He will come to me (whilst im on my pc next to his cage) and sit on my hand... funny thing is after a couple of seconds he will start pinning his eyes and getting angry again so i have to put him down...

I have read that caiques are not one person birds, but mine seems to have developed that way... Does anyone have any ideas?

Another question i have is i am moving out into my own house later this year with my gf. He is not friendly with anyone other than my mum i will add in here... Now without my mum around, and in a new environment, with a lot more people in the house a lot more often, due to my friends and my gf's friends coming around, does anyone think his attitude can improve?

Sorry for the long post... any questions please ask away if the answer may help you advise me.

Thanks.

 

[LoryLover]

Hi BHCowner,

I'm sorry to hear about the trouble you are having with your Caique. I have not owned a Caique before. It does sound like your Caique has definitely found it's favorite person.

One of the things I've learned from having a parrot (I have a Chattering Lory) for the past 20 years, is that they have extremely long memories - similar to an elephant, lol! One incident that the parrot perceives as threatening, can cause a forever behavior change in them.

When our Chattering was 1 to 2 years old (we got her at 6wks old), I began to let her hang out with my husband in the evenings and hardly with me (out of laziness on my part). Soon I noticed that when I would go get her to have her hang out with me, she didn't really want to come to me. She wasn't mean, she just showed that she was preferring to stay with my husband. I saw immediately that she was starting to become more bonded with him, and that would prove to be trouble if I didn't fix it right away. My husband and I both wanted the Chattering to easily go with either of us. So for about 2 weeks straight, I had the Lory hang out with me only in the evenings. And from that point on, I made sure I didn't get lazy about spending time with her.

I know that if I had just let things be, she would have gotten very nippy with me and refused to stay with me.

Maybe there's still time to correct the bonding for your Caique. When you move to your new house, there's a good chance your Caique could become better bonded with you. It will never forget your mom though and when it sees your mom, it will be so very happy to see her.

Parrots are like people in that they will behave differently around different people. They sense everyone's attitude and they respond accordingly. All I have to do is smile at my Lory and she says in a very sweet voice "you're so sweet, yes you are".

 

[Remy]

What happens when your mom is nowhere to be seen? Does he get nicer to you, and only possessive when she is near?

Darcy has been getting possessive of my boyfriend, but only when he handles him/her a lot. When he pays less attention to Darcy, Darcy is nicer to me.

 

[BHCowner]

With her around or not around he is exactly the same. Nothing has changed in his life or mine or in my room where he lives. It wasn't a sudden change in character... it was slowly over time. He use to get angry for a day or so with me then could of been fine for the next 2 days.... one day he got angry and seems to have not "snapped" out of it for want of better wording. I will add that i am the one that "looks" after him, cleaning him out, feeding, water etc etc. He spends more time with me than with my mum on the whole, and if i am in the house he is out of his cage. Last night he was actually quite nice to me for around 30 minutes. He came to me, climbed up my leg onto me and started surfing on my top whilst chewing it. No anger, letting me play with him normally. He stopped for a breather and then looked at my face, eyes pinned and i had to get a perch to get him off me before i got bitten. It changes that quickly.

The strange thing is he seems to get upset when i leave my room. Screaming and going a bit mad like he doesn't want me to leave. He screams when i come in the house as well. But as soon as i walk through my bedroom door he starts displaying and doing his angry squeek. It's confusing behavior. He is like it in his cage, out his cage, in any area of the house. So it's not cage aggression.

He genuinely seems to have just taken a dislike towards me. I have never been horrible to him in any way to preempt this behaviour either.

 

[LoryLover]

The Red Lory we used to have was very friendly towards both myself and my husband. A couple of years down the road, the Lory became very fond of my husband's feet, it would actually try to mate with my husband's feet. I thought that was bad news and told my husband that he should discourage that behavior... but my husband didn't think there was anything wrong with it. Time went on... and slowly the Lory's behavior changed with my husband. It would be playing quite happily, then race over bite my husband super quick (drawing blood) and go back to playing with its toys. If it was out of the cage and saw my husband with shoes on, oh my goodness, the Lory would get enranged and fly at my husband's feet, screaming and biting his shoes.

My husband and I both decided that the Lory (which was a male) had chosen my husband, or rather his feet, as its mate and it wanted to show domination behavior.

 

[BHCowner]

So you think this could be domination behaviour towards myself from my caique?

 

[MonicaMc]

Dominance doesn't exist in parrots...

http://www.naturalencounters.com/images/Publications&Presentations/Height_Dominance-Steve_Martin.pdf
http://www.parrots.org/pdfs/all_abo...tal_enrichment/The Struggle for Dominance.pdf
Height dominance is a myth - ParrotChronicles Why Does My Bird Do That? Q&A
dominance
Establishing Dominance Over Your Parrot? « Best in Flock – Parrot Blog
RP - Biting


Have you looked into positive reinforcement, often under the guise of clicker training? I made a post about it for another member including some links to where to get information about this kind of training.

Clicker training, aka positive reinforcement training. Part of this training is to not get bit, because the only bite that can't be rewarded is the one that never occurs. Easier said than done. The main point of this is learning how to communicate with our birds in a positive manner, as you want each interaction with your bird(s) to be a positive one. The idea is to teach the bird to do what you want rather than forcing them to. If you force them to do what you want, then it can lead to a bad experience for both you and the bird - especially when the bird is put into a situation that the bird doesn't enjoy and you are trying to get the bird to do a specific behavior, which ends up with a frustrated/annoyed/terrified bird that bites you. It's not pleasant for either of you.

Barbara Heidenreich has some great videos and articles on training.
Training Parrots | Parrot Training DVDS & Books
Good Bird Inc Parrot Training Talk

Melinda Johnson has a great Clicker Training Book
Birds & Other Animal Training Books | Clickertraining.com

Susan Friedman has some great articles online
Written Works: Learning and Behavior - BehaviorWorks.com

And here are a couple of bloggers with great information on training!
Living With Parrots Cage Free
Lara Joseph

Things may very well change once you move, but it's hard to say how your caique will react to that change.

 

[BHCowner]

Thanks for that. He is sitting on me now actually being nice. So there is light at the end of the tunnel. I will do some reading and change some of my ways and see what happens. He isn't a nasty bird so i am sure i can sort it.