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[Sngrpngr]

Hey so i hace an alexandrian named kiwi
So i bought kiwi for about a week ago and she is 6 months old
And the only interaction she allows with me is giving her treats and that is it
She bit me 3 times already for trying anything else
How do i advance our relashion ship
So she starts to like me and accept me
Give me tips please

 

[Sngrpngr]

And btw he does not really fear me
He kinda okay with me being around
But if i get inside the cage he bites

 

[itzjbean]

Definitely give this thread a read!!

Tips for bonding and building Trust

You are going to have to be very patient and understanding of her space and boundaries. Do not attempt to reach in the cage or pet her until you have established a trust bond (done by following tips in above thread). Good luck!

 

[wrench13]

A week is nothing, she is just barely settling in. Patience young padawon, patience.

 

[EllenD]

Yeah, as mentioned above you are trying to push/force things way too fast, it can take months and months to hand-tame a parrot that hasn't been hand-raised, or the same goes for a parrot that was originally hand-raised but who was then ignored and not handled for a while...At only 6-months old it sounds like your Alex was probably not a hand-raised baby but rather a "parent-raised" and parent-fed baby, so he's not ever been handled by a person before. So in that instance it can take months and months of working with them outside of their cages each and every day before they will even step-up for you...

The thing that is important for you to know is that the very first step to hand-taming a parrot or bonding with them, even with a hand-raised, hand-tamed parrot, is to first 'Earn their trust"...Once you earn the bird's trust only then will they start to bond with you and even think about allowing your hands near them...But if you keep trying to push/force him to do allow you to touch him with your hands inside of his cage while he's also inside it, then you are just making him trust you less and less and it's not going to go anywhere...

***And that is another issue...Even a hand-raised, hand-fed, hand-tamed parrot who has given their trust to their owner and bonded-closely with their owner often is still very, very territorial about their cages...That is his only "territory" or "safe-space", and you need to totally respect that from now on and only put your hands inside of his cage to change his food/water, hang a new toy, etc. You NEVER want to reach your hands inside of his cage and just "grab" him (never "grab" a bird anytime or anywhere at all), or try to get him to "step-up" onto your finger while he's inside of his cage, because not only will it not ever happen, but you'll get bitten, first it's usually a warning bite with birds that are hand-tamed, then if you don't remove your hand you get a real bite...But with a bird who is not at all tame and was parent-raised and then moved into his new home with his brand new owner that he doesn't know at all, he's going to just give you the real bite first, which for an Alex can be a very, very bad bite...And not only that, but you're just pushing any trust-building that you may have achieved right away, and you'll have to start all over with any hand-taming/training or trust-building/bonding that you might have already done...

(Just as an example, I have a female Quaker Parrot, Lita Ford, who I brought home when she was just 11 weeks-old, and she was a hand-fed, hand-raised baby who rode home from her breeder's house on Long-Island on my shoulder for the 4+ hour drive home to Pennsylvania, that's how tame she was after only knowing her for a few minutes...And now Lita is 4 years-old and is bonded extremely closely with only me (I am currently single and live alone), and I can handle her any way I like, she has never bitten me for any reason, etc...HOWEVER, from the day I brought her home and introduced her to her new cage, which I had set-up for her before I left to go pick her from her breeder's house, she has been extremely territorial over her cage...And I mean she loves her cage and defends it with her life...So from day 1 with Lita all the way up until today, 4 years later, I cannot put my hands inside of her cage when she is inside of the cage at the same time...If I do, she will very slowly walk/climb over to wherever my hand is and give me a "warning nip", which is just a light little "grab" with her beak, I wouldn't even call it a "bite" at all, she just walks over and simply puts her beak very lightly around my finger or hand, and she's saying "Mama, can you please take your hands out of my cage? Thank you."...And if I immediately take my hands out of her cage, then everything is wonderful...If I don't immediately take my hands out of her cage (and she doesn't walk away from my hand, she usually starts doing a Quaker-march back and forth on the perch next to my hand for about 5 seconds), then she gives me a bite that hurts quite a bit, but that doesn't break the skin, and that's her saying to me "Mama, sorry, but I asked you nicely, now all bets are off! Get your freaking hands out of my cage NOW!"

So the point is that you need to SLOW WAAAAAAYYYYYY DOWN! You've only had your new Alex for 1 week, and 1 week is like 30 seconds in bird-time...He/she is still a pretty young baby at only 6 months-old, so that's a good thing as far as hand-taming her and earning her trust, but it's also obvious that he/she either was not hand-raised/hand-fed by the breeder, or if he/she was in-fact hand-raised originally, after he/she fully-weaned onto solid food, the breeder stopped handling and stopped paying any attention to him/her...Alexandrines fully-wean onto solid food and no longer need to be hand-fed any formula around 13-14 weeks old at the latest, so usually sometime between 2-3 months old they no longer need to be hand-fed...And they told you that your Alex is currently 6 months old, so that's a good 3 months without any handling or human-interaction/attention from anyone (if he/she was hand-fed/hand-raised originally)...Unfortunately it's not unusual for breeders to hand-raise/hand-feed a clutch of babies until they are fully-weaned at about 2-3 months old, and then they sell them and they go to their new homes, but sometimes they have a baby from a clutch that for whatever reason doesn't get sold right away, or sometimes the breeder decides to keep one of the babies and make them one of their "breeders" (called "a holdback"), and breeders are not pets, they are not tame and they are not handled or interacted with by the breeder at all, or very little just to feed them (that's typically how it goes, there are of course exceptions, but usually breeder-birds are not pets and are not tame)...And then sometimes the breeder changes their mind and decides not to keep the baby and make it a breeder, so they put them up for sale as a pet bird...In both of these situations, whether he/she just wasn't sold right away after weaning or if the breeder was going to keep the bird as a breeder and then changed their mind and decided to keep them, the end-result is usually the same, the originally hand-raised/hand-fed baby was not interacted with much after they weaned, if at all. And as a result the now 6 month-old baby is no longer hand-tamed and is very scared of hands, just the same as if it wasn't a hand-raised/hand-fed baby and was raised by it's parent-birds with no handling.

There are some things you can do that will get you off on the right course and help you to start earning the trust of your new baby Alex, and make the hand-taming process go a bit easier, and that will actually help your Alex start to accept people and be a much happier, healthier bird in the long-run:

#1) Locate Your Bird's Cage In the Main-Room Of Your House!...This is a HUGE DEAL!!! Parrots/Birds are Flock-Animals, meaning they live their entire lives from hatching to death among a large group of other birds the same species (usually)...So even pet/captive birds/parrots naturally retain those instincts to want to live in a Flock, even birds/parrots who are not yet hand-tamed. ALSO, especially when you've just brought home any new bird to your home/family, and especially one that is not at all hand-tame, you want to make sure they spend as much time as possible just being around you and the others who live in your house (their new Flock). This is called "Passive-Interaction" (it's called "Socialization" with other animals), and it just means that having your bird's territory (his cage) located in the room of your house where you and the others who live in the house spend most of their time when they are home so that they are constantly near the bird, the bird can always see them, hear their voices, have them walking back and forth past their cage all day long, etc., all of this will help tremendously to get your new Alex used to you and to being around people in-general...Plus, they are Flock Animals, so if you put their cage in a spare-bedroom or some other back-room in your home that is away from where the action is, you are going against their natural want to be with their Flock. Some people mean well by making a "Bird Room" in their house, giving an entire spare-bedroom to their bird, thinking that the bird will appreciate it, but all they typically do is scream and scream whenever anyone is home and they are in that back room...Usually the "main-room" of a home is the Living-Room, Family Room, TV Room, Den, etc. So make sure if you haven't already located his cage in that room, that you move it ASAP. That way he can see you and be around you whenever you're at home and watching TV, on the computer, Gaming, eating meals, talking to others in your house, etc. This is going to help you quite a bit, and probably the most important thing you can do immediately to help to earn his trust.

#2) Buy or Build some kind of "Stand/Perch" that will be the place where your bird will go to whenever he's outside of his cage......This is also really important, because what you want to start doing is to teach your Alex to come out of his cage on his own after you open up the door and take a step back...Since he doesn't want your hands inside of his cage whenever he's also inside of it, and if you keep doing it you're never going to earn his trust or hand-tame him, you need to teach him that he is supposed to come out of his cage whenever you open up the door and you take a step or two back away from the cage...BUT HE'LL NEED A PLACE TO GO ONCE HE'S OUT OF HIS CAGE THAT IS ALSO CONSIDERED BY HIM TO BE "HIS TERRITORY".

 

[EllenD]

I don't know if your Alex has it's wings clipped right now or if he/she can fly, but you need to start training/teaching him/her to come out of the cage whenever you open-up the door to it and then take a few steps back away from the cage, and you do this BEFORE you put your hands inside of the cage to change food/water, clean it, etc. Because if you keep putting your hands inside of the cage while your bird is also inside of the cage, not only are you going to get bitten badly, but more-importantly you're never going to earn your bird's trust and start the bonding-process, nor will you be able to hand-tame him and get him to step-up for you, because it's your hands that he is most-afraid...Birds don't understand the concept of "hands" an what they are, and unless they were hand-raised/hand-fed or they've been hand-tamed, they don't really associate your hands with being a part of you, it's like they are these scary, moving things that aren't attached to anything...Seriously, that's how they first think of our hands...So it's important that you not do anything with your hands that he/she doesn't like or that scares or angers him/her...

****What I would start doing is simply opening up the door to his cage, then immediately walk away from his cage, like across the room from his cage, and then just wait and watch. The hope is that eventually he will come out on his own and either sit on the edge of the door, or climb to the top of the cage...It will probably take a while of waiting for him to finally come out on his own, but once he does come out on his own you need to immediately praise him verbally a lot and then give him a "Training Treat" right away, so that you positively-reinforce that behavior. But once he's out of his cage, he needs a place to go to every single time that he thinks of as also being "his territory"...And that's why you see most pet parrots/birds have at least one stand/perch of some kind that they go to whenever they're outside of their cages...

****In the meantime, I would find something that you can use as a perch, like a branch from a tree outside that isn't too large in diameter, probably a diameter around 3/4" to 1" around for an Alex, and that is long enough that you can VERY SLOWLY reach inside his cage and place in front of him just like you would your finger, for him to step-up onto, and then VERY SLOWLY bring him out of his cage while on the branch, and then put him somewhere close-by where he can stand while you change his food/water, clean out his cage/change the paper in the bottom of his cage, add toys, etc. And then you use the branch again to have him step-up onto and then very slowly put him back inside of his cage on the branch...This will get easier and easier the more you do it, it keeps your hands out of his cage while he's inside of it, and it will make both of your lives much easier, and you also won't be destroying any trust-building you've already done. (YOU HAVE TO PRE-HEAT YOUR OVEN TO 250 DEGREES, AND THEN PLACE THE BRANCH YOU CHOOSE DIRECTLY ON THE OVEN RACK, AND BAKE IT AT 250 DEGREES FOR ABOUT 30 MINUTES. THIS WILL KILL ANY AND ALL BACTERIA, FUNGI, PARASITES, ETC. THAT ARE IN/ON THE BRANCH. AND DO THIS WITH ALL BRANCHES YOU USE IN THE FUTURE FOR PERCHES, STANDS, ETC. FOR YOUR BIRD...And please do make sure that you have fully pre-heated your oven to 250 degrees F BEFORE you put branches inside the oven, because it must be at least 250 degrees F for the heat to kill everything....Also, prior to putting any branches in the oven, you want to use a knife, saw, etc. to remove any little branches coming off of the perch-branch, remove any leaves, and any other rough spots or off-shoots growing out of the main branch, so that there is nothing sticking up that will hurt his feet...And you DO NOT HAVE TO REMOVE THE BARK FROM THE BRANCH...My guys love to chew the bark off themselves, lol...Some people remove the bark because they like the way the branches look better that way, but it's much more fun for your birds if you leave the bark on...Either way, it's completely safe as long as you bake the branch first...No need to soak the branches in anything first, though you may want to use a scrub brush and hot water to scrub the bark/outside surface of the branch before baking it, just to remove any dirt, dust, sap, etc. from the surface of the bark. But no need to soak it in bleach or anything like that if you're going to bake it.

***And if you do decide that you want to quickly build a basic T-Stand that can be the place that your Alex automatically goes to whenever you open-up his cage door and that is very light and portable and that you can take to any room so he can be with you no matter what room you're in, if you need any help there is a "DIY" forum here with tons of ideas, tips, advice, etc., and you can also feel-free to make a post and there are lots of people here who have built a lot of PVC stands/perches, play-gyms, outdoor aviaries, etc. and that would be happy to help you.