Seppun
New member
So, we've had Idris for a month now, and if anyone remembers my previous thread, we took her from a pretty abusive and neglectful home. I think we've made good speed in our progress with her, all things considered. She is around 6 months old, so I know we have a couple years to go in hormonal behavior.
We're having 2 major speed bumps, and Google isn't helping me with these. The first is that she doesn't like treats. Her normal food isn't enticing enough unless it's actually meal time, and she will NOT accept any other type of food reward. This makes rewarding behavior a bit of a problem.
The second, and largest, is that she has strange body language, and sometimes has none at all. She will literally go from walking over to lean on your arm, to rubbing the back of her head on you and squeaking happily, to just turning around and biting the living crap out of you. No change in feather positions, eyes aren't pinned (when we can see them), she just rocks her head back and forth and then suddenly one of those turns into a bite. Then she'll groom your arm hair and fluff up and click.
She does sometimes display fear or aggressive body language that I've gotten pretty good at reading and knowing not to push her at those times, but what to do about the ones that seem to come out of nowhere? I've tried capturing video but she always gets entranced by the phone and stops everything she's doing.
I have watched videos on touch training (which I couldn't finish utilizing because I don't know what to reward her with) & several on body language (though I have yet to find one that shows the conure specific body language), but it gets very confusing when you're wading through the polarization of the bird community on "positive" and "negative" training. We are going out to get the supplies to build a bird tree tomorrow, as we've noticed she's much, much more likely to bite if she's on her cage.
The past few days I have been able to get her to relax enough to puff up next to my hand and let me take care of the pin feathers around her beak, scratch her head and under her wings, and even remove some loose sheathing that was stuck midway on her tail feathers; I feel confident we're slowing going in the right direction. I'm just terrified of screwing up this bird for life, I guess not unlike I felt when I had my kids. lol.
I'm mostly looking for videos starring conure behavior that I may have overlooked, advice on how to choose a method I can be consistent in, what to do when the bite already happens during those "out of the blue" attacks, and maybe a little reassurance that my bird isn't going to hate me forever.
Here's our Iddy-Bird for anyone curious.
We're having 2 major speed bumps, and Google isn't helping me with these. The first is that she doesn't like treats. Her normal food isn't enticing enough unless it's actually meal time, and she will NOT accept any other type of food reward. This makes rewarding behavior a bit of a problem.
The second, and largest, is that she has strange body language, and sometimes has none at all. She will literally go from walking over to lean on your arm, to rubbing the back of her head on you and squeaking happily, to just turning around and biting the living crap out of you. No change in feather positions, eyes aren't pinned (when we can see them), she just rocks her head back and forth and then suddenly one of those turns into a bite. Then she'll groom your arm hair and fluff up and click.
She does sometimes display fear or aggressive body language that I've gotten pretty good at reading and knowing not to push her at those times, but what to do about the ones that seem to come out of nowhere? I've tried capturing video but she always gets entranced by the phone and stops everything she's doing.
I have watched videos on touch training (which I couldn't finish utilizing because I don't know what to reward her with) & several on body language (though I have yet to find one that shows the conure specific body language), but it gets very confusing when you're wading through the polarization of the bird community on "positive" and "negative" training. We are going out to get the supplies to build a bird tree tomorrow, as we've noticed she's much, much more likely to bite if she's on her cage.
The past few days I have been able to get her to relax enough to puff up next to my hand and let me take care of the pin feathers around her beak, scratch her head and under her wings, and even remove some loose sheathing that was stuck midway on her tail feathers; I feel confident we're slowing going in the right direction. I'm just terrified of screwing up this bird for life, I guess not unlike I felt when I had my kids. lol.
I'm mostly looking for videos starring conure behavior that I may have overlooked, advice on how to choose a method I can be consistent in, what to do when the bite already happens during those "out of the blue" attacks, and maybe a little reassurance that my bird isn't going to hate me forever.
Here's our Iddy-Bird for anyone curious.
Last edited:
