Bite pressure training

So Charlotte's new favorite activity is beak wrestling. For the most part she does good with not biting hard, but every once in a while she gets overly excited and chomps down a little too hard. When she does that, I withdraw my hand and tell her "too hard!" and wait a few minutes to start again. I think this is the right thing to do. Is there anything else I should be doing in addition to that?

I don't know if this will work for you, but I got my B&G from a very stressful place and she had lost all trust in humans.

She is very good now, but has every once in a while the same biting reaction if she gets scared. I keep calm and say "no, that's my beak" and hold her beak (I move slowly from the top and take hold of the beak). I might "play" with her beak and shake it a bit.

My experience is that calm is the key to any interaction with birds and with the big birds, let them know you're not afraid of their beak and at the same time let them know in a gentle way, that you are the "master" of the beak.

I hope I have explained myself in a clear manner.

I have tried to use the method, where you "force" the back of your clenched fist in front of the beak, but it only freaked my bird out. The other way I could tell her "no" without her being threatened.

My Sugar is now so gentle with her beak around me and my fingers, that I can easily have my fingers in her beak and she won't bite unless something scares her and even then, she will mostly just scream and threaten to bite.

Maui loves to beak wrestle with my hands and she also used to bite to hard. Whenever she did that I always said "no, easy" and pulled back my hand and stopped playing with her for a minute. Now after months I can say that she now knows not to bite to hard. It took a while but the result is fantastic I can play with Maui without being afraid that she bites to hard.

If the problem was strictly a beak pressure issue, I'd also suggest adding a timeout for the infractions. But it sounds more like a case of over-stimulation. So that being the case, I think your chosen tactic is a pretty good one. You may want to make sure she understands that her beak pressure is what caused the stop in play. Maybe stop the play for a few minutes before beginning again.

Also, on your end, you can watch her body language for signs that she's getting to the point of overload and pause play for a bit so she doesn't take it to that next level.

BeatriceC said:

So Charlotte's new favorite activity is beak wrestling. For the most part she does good with not biting hard, but every once in a while she gets overly excited and chomps down a little too hard. When she does that, I withdraw my hand and tell her "too hard!" and wait a few minutes to start again. I think this is the right thing to do. Is there anything else I should be doing in addition to that?

Click to expand...

NOPE. THAT IS ALL THERE IS TO IT.

If she doesn't calm down, and continues to be too hard, then she goes back and gets ignored for a little while. Try again in a little while. "If you want to play, you have to play nice." That's what you are reinforcing here.

Thanks for the replies.

I did get a good chomp this morning, but that was because she got spooked when I was taking her out of her cage. She had just calmly stepped onto my arm and a kid stepped in to the room yelling, which spooked her, and she chomped. Five minutes later she was face planted into my chest snuggling, so I'm confident this was just a matter of her getting spooked.

I am, however, off to the doctor. After two hours, it won't stop bleeding (she got me good), so I think it perhaps needs medical attention.