need some advice on indoor free flight

[alleng8304]

My 7 yr old rescue Vinnie is out of his cage most of the day. After he has his breakfast he will fly from the top of the cage to the ceiling fan blades. Sometimes (2-3 times a day) he will fly to me-which is what I want-but will not do it on command. He usually flies to me if I am standing next to someone or if I am sitting down to eat supper. He usually lands on my shoulder. If I put my arm up for him to land he will turn around and fly back to the fan. I guess he is afraid of my arm. If I call him and just put up my hand -he mostly just ignores me. Any suggestions on how to fly to me on command and not use my entire body as a landing strip. Thanks

 

[texsize]

Try Patting your shoulder.
Bella my CAG responds to that. Most of the time if I hold out my hand for her to land on she ignores it and lands on my shoulder anyway.
When I pat my shoulder she is more likely to fly over and land on the indicated shoulder whereas holding out my hand and calling her does very little.

texsize

 

[chris-md]

Yep! I made a video on exactly how to accomplish this for questions just like this since describing training in text is often difficult and can be hard to visualize into action.

Essentially the way to do it is use targeting to convince him to fly over distance to you.

[ame="https://youtu.be/DomDr-dXZtU"]Evolution of parrot flight recall training, a tutorial on how to recall train your parrot - YouTube[/ame]

 

[alleng8304]

agree with the target training but he freaks out at the stick and clicker

 

[chris-md]

It sounds like you didn’t charge the clicker. A properly charged clicker is never feared. You also don’t have to actually hold the clicker in front of them, can keep it in your pocket or behind your back.

 

[ChristaNL]

then use your finger and a word of praise

 

[EllenD]

As Chris said, if you want your bird to fly to you on-command, you need to "Recall-Train" him. The best way that I've found to do this is to first find his favorite treat, whatever that may be, and then ONLY give this to him while you're Recall-Training him. Then this works best if you have a T-Stand or a mobile-perch that is about the same height as your chest is, because what you want to do is place it in a room where he'll have room to fly across to you without obstructions. Start out standing pretty close to the stand/perch, a couple of feet at most, and put Vinnie on the perch. Then you choose a phrase such as "Vinnie come!" that you'll say the same every time you call him in the future. Then say the phrase and show him the treat, and repeat until he comes, and give him the treat and give him lots of verbal praise. Repeat many times until he does it from that distance immediately when you call him, and then step further away from the stand/perch and repeat until he does that on-command, then further away, etc. Do this until you are on the entire other side of the room, then you can do it from another room, when he's on the fan, etc. Just make sure that you ALWAYS have a lot of that treat in your pockets.

A lot of people teach Recall-Training indoors with an Aviator Harness on their bird, and they order the very long leash-extensions for them so that they can actually take the stand/perch outside and do recall training with their birds on the harness/long lead from many yards away, and this is how they progress into Free-Flight Training outside. But the first step to that is always mastering Recall-Training from any distance/location.

 

[chris-md]

then use your finger and a word of praise

I’ve been such a big advocate for this, clickerless training, using words as markers...to the point I created a video once upon a time about how that looks like. But I’ve really found the clicker to be more precise, and gets better results, faster.

Perhaps it’s up to the individual bird and their MO. Clicker proved superior in my case - and most of everything Parker has been trained to do up until recently was done just as you describe.

 

[ChristaNL]

Grinn, I am a klutz when it comes to clicking, so I had to do it that way
But your are absolutely right- the sound of the clicker is like nothing else, so you will get results faster, because there is no confusion about the meaning.