Time.
Lots of time.
I rescued Rosie from a very nasty situation, and to this day she is still afraid of hands.
It took 2.5
years to get her to eat millet from a distance. But here's how I helped put her at ease: The millet sprig is distant from my finger, so a safe buffer zone is created. See if yours likes millet. With each passing day, shorten the distance between hand and cage (by one cluster of millet, since one spring contains many clusters). If the bird remains hesitant, keep the same distance for another day - or two days. This will not happen over night.
Even when the bird gets close enough, be very still and let the bird explore. Do not move your hand, in any way shape or form.
This will take a long time to do, and each bird is different in terms of shyness and/or fear.
Trust-building will take a long time.
But it can be done.
A couple weeks ago, she finally took papaya from my fingers. Partly because she saw Scooter readily taking papaya from me and finally got the courage and trust of me to move that far. But she is still skittish and it will take more time before she fully accepts my hands as not being equated to all of the evil hands that hurt her in the past.
You have sunflower seeds, which work just as well as papaya and your bird already recognizes them as a treat - one needn't have a second bird for one parrot to, well, parrot from. It might require a little more time, but the bird will see those yummy seeds and eventually overcome its built-in fear. During this time, again, do not move your hand. Any little movement might scare it and damage (or wreck) the trust built up.
But I'd do the millet trick first - if you stood there with a couple of sunflower seeds, you'll be standing there for a very long time and probably die of dehydration before anything good happened... get it to like millet or another treat in stick form. Use that to build trust, slowly, via a distance that magically gets shorter over the course of a couple weeks.
If ever.
But she's come a long way, considering...
Every time she did something right, I would take a small step back and be dramatic with "GOOD BIRD!" as a response and looked/felt genuine jubilant. Like how I've done with my other fids. They dig drama, so I use it as positive reinforcement.
I know that, for most of the 3 years I've had her, she's done somersaults to make me laugh and feel better when I'm depressed, and at the store she would only do such tricks overnight when nobody was in the store.
But it really does take a lot of time, patience, and feeling bad for the bird.
And, in time, I also have to teach her not to spaz and fly up all the time when trying to perch on my finger. She's seen me do this with all my fids and I know she wants to, but that trauma induced by those creeps is still a barrier she must overcome. Having been abused as a child, I know how Rosie feels. It's not easy to overcome a barrier once made, and for some it is permanent. Again, it depends on the bird and the situation it came from.
