Training Your Parrot to Like a Towel

Does your parrot high tail it out of town when a towel is in sight? More than likely it means at some point in his life something scary happened with a towel. Perhaps your bird had to be captured and restrained for a medical emergency. In a moment like that your veterinarian may have to take action right away.

However if your bird is healthy and not in need of immediate medical attention consider taking some time to train your parrot to LOVE towels. I say love because my birds have become obsessed with them thanks to some positive reinforcement training.

Delbert my yellow naped Amazon parrot will fly across the room to land on one. And as you can see in this clip of Blu Lu the blue throated macaw I hardly get to sit down before she lands on the towel in my lap. That is because she knows it means she gets to roll around on her back and get showered with head scratches. (I think it is adorable that she rolls over on her back all by herself.)

I also take advantage of this time to do things a veterinarian might need to do. These include wrapping her in the towel and moving her. It also means feeling her chest, looking at her vent and stretching out her wings. I also trim her toe nails when she is comfortably resting on her back on the towel.

To her it is all fun. I sometimes incorporate foot toys for her to juggle with her feet and beak. To me this is what it means to play with your bird in a towel.

An important part of this is that she is empowered to leave if she wants to. You’ll notice she sticks around for more. That is a good sign. A skilled flyer like her will just leave if the activity is not to her liking.

If you can’t get a towel even in the same room with your bird I do have a DVD that shows you how to train the behavior step by step. It is called Train Your Parrot for the Veterinary Exam. The birds in the video are mostly rescued birds with some bad experiences in their past. You will see even a bird with a questionable past can learn that towels now result in good consequences. There is also information on how to train your parrot to step on a scale, step onto strangers, enter a transport cage and more. (All of these are behaviors that can make life a little less stressful when it is time to visit your avian veterinarian.)

Having Blu Lu trained for toweling gives me peace of mind. I feel confident we have a good chance of keeping her next vet visit super positive.

To help you get inspired to train your parrot for a medical behavior I have a very special gift for readers of this blog. Just click on "free parrot training resource" and enter the code PARROTRX when you check out. It should let you get a free eBook on how to train your parrot to take oral medication.

Every parrot owner should train their birds for this behavior before illness strikes. It is an easy behavior to train and will avoid you having to grab and restrain your bird to give medication, which can cause your bird to lose trust in you. Train this behavior ASAP…you will be glad you did.

Barbara Heidenreich
Copyright Good Bird Inc 2011
For quality information on parrot training visit www.GoodBirdInc.com

Training a Parrot to Love a Towel

How much do I love this behavior? Let me count the ways. Training a parrot to look forward to being wrapped in a towel has become one of my favorite behaviors to train. I think in part because I know most parrots at some point in their lives will likely be wrapped in a towel for a medical procedure. Knowing that I can reduce stress that may be part of that situation by using positive reinforcement, makes it easy to add this behavior to my list of training goals.

In my DVD Training a Parrot for the Veterinary Exam, I go through the approximations of training this behavior with a yellow collared macaw and also a hybrid macaw. Both were re-homed birds who had a history of unpleasant experiences with towels. This makes it a little more challenging to train the behavior, but certainly not impossible. It just means taking it slower, using smaller approximations and of course lots of positive reinforcers. And as you can see in the video, both birds learn towels are now associated with good things.

One of the great things about working with young parrots, is often they have not yet been exposed to things in a way that might create a fear response. Both Jackson and Joker, the young parrots at my house, have seen a towel. But I have been very careful to make sure all towel encounters include positive reinforcers.

Joker thinks towels mean you get to roll around on your back and play with toys. Jackson thinks towels means you will get your head scratched for a nice chunk of time. My own yellow naped Amazon parrot, Delbert will fly to a towel if he sees one in your hand. He has had so many pleasant experiences associated with a towel he can’t wait to get into one.

People often ask what happens to all that great training when you go to the veterinarian and the parrot is restrained in the towel for a not so pleasant procedure. Will a traumatic experience cause the behavior to fall apart? The answer is “It depends.” If the experience is extremely difficult, the bird may need to be retrained on the behavior. However if you bird has a very long history of positive reinforcement with the towel, one not so great experience will probably not cancel out the plethora of wonderful times he has had in the towel.

Of course the best approach is to train the behavior to the point that actual restraint in the towel is not a problem for your parrot. Jackson and Joker are well on their way towards that goal.

Barbara Heidenreich
www.GoodBirdInc.com
Copyright 2009