Hi! I bought my first harness for my three year old female sunconure. She’s extremely friendly towards me. We share such an amazing bond. So the weather is getting a lot warmer and I want to be able to take Mari out with me so I ordered a harness. I knew it was going to be difficult because Mari comes from a rough past and never lets anyone touch her wings or back. Not even me lol. But I will be patient and train her. As of now? She is absolutely TERRIFIED of it. So I’m going to go at her pace and never force it and work with her as best as I can. My question now is first, if you harness trained you parrot, how long did it take you and what advice can you offer me. The second is how long and often should our training sessions last? Because now I do it three times a day for 20 minutes at a time. But I’m not sure how often to do it. Anyway! Thanks for taking time to read this post and I hope pretty soon I’m able to go to the park with Mari lol :-)

Short but frequent training sessions are often better than long and infrequent ones. By short, this could easily be a 3-5 minute training session, or it could be longer than that.

I was kind of lucky with my conure in that I didn't have to train him to get it on, but he does not like wearing it if we are inside. Outside, not an issue.


It can help to take the leash part of the harness and making a loop and teaching the bird to stick their head through for a reward, and teaching them to accept laying it on their back.

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I will be posting my method for putting on a harness soon. Rudy was exposed to a harness at 4-5 months of age. I hood him now however he has grown so accustomed to the harness, I believe I can shorten the procedure even more than the 30 seconds or so to put it on.

I have no idea of how my method will work for or others or other breeds for that matter

It took almost a year for Salty to be OK with me wrestling him into his Aviator harness.
We train every night, ona large variety of tricks, one of which is him putting his head thru the head loop of the harness and letting me drape the rest over his wings and body. he gets a treat for doing that, and then more treats for walking aroundthe training table with it on. And of course for taking it off. Make sure to use the same commands ( On , Off ) so she knows what to expect. After she is OK with this, then you can start to try and put the harness on for real. Expect some blood ( yours) the first few times. 3X a day for 20 min is a lot. Do you do other tricks with her during these, or is it exclusively harness training? If exclusively harness training, I think thats too much. Also, allow her the right to refuse a training session, its good for her self esteem. Just try again at the next scheduled session. Also keep to a fixed schedule, parrots like that. Ours is at 8:45 PM, and lasts 15-20 min from set up to cleaning up.
God forbid it's 8:47 and Salty does not see me clearing off the table where we train. Good luck, just take it slow and easy.

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For more info see my thread Mm6393 I'm going through the same thing with a basically same age bird. Tomorrow it's going to be over 70 so I'm going to try the flightsuit harness

Clark is getting a harness

aviator https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

flightsuit https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1


So far the aviator has things I don't like about it, with the long lead and the hard to "zip up" strap clench.

The flightsuit uses velcro but also covers the birds butt, (has detachable leash for say in the car) I will try the diaper thing it comes with, but I might end up just using scissors to cut that out.

Either way I'm going to review both....once clark tries both at least twice.

wrench makes a good point. It takes time to get a parrot "acclimated" or trained for them to smoothly accept the/a harness.

While I was fortunate to show Rudy a harness at 5 months of age there was a set back due to my absence . he went to the use of a "hood" Now after 100's of days, he is very animated and comfortable with putting the harness on. He moves left to right and lifts his wings and is accustomed to the cinching.

With that said, I am ready to put the harness on without a hood. He probably is more comfortable with it than I am, in that he would rather I not "hood" him.

The point is, no system will likely working perfectly on the first attempt nor the 50th. that ties into.. Try everything once, the things you guys like, try them twice.

I am setting up my phone to take a video of this process I use with harness. I think the points above are important to add to the video. Persistence pays off, don't give up!

Pic taken from last summer.

I maybe in a similar situation. Rudy knows when it harness time we go out. I dont spend more than a couple of minutes inside with the harness on. I think I might try a different routine. My problem is the length of the leash, if tries to take off inside he dragging essentially an anchor that could snag onto something. Interesting thought! Thanks!

I wasn't able to get clark into the flight suit.....I think I telegraphed what was going on by taking him to the floor and he was like...."NOPE" CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP

so, for the moment the aviator seems easier to get him into.