Teach your parrot to fly DOWN!!!!!

[bigfellasdad]

Hi there, ive spent every available minute finding and trying to entice an escaped African grey down from various trees all weekend, with zero luck so far. A local ladies, not Enzo of course.

I know in the same situation that Enzo would fly down, all be it with LOTS of encouragement and her 'naughty but absolute favourite treat', a corner of a biscuit. I try and at least once a day encourage enzo to fly down my stairs, which are quite steep and narrow, but she will after a few minutes do it. She makes her 'sad' noise, a slow 'ooooowww' sound and lots of 'come here' calls to me, she crouches and holds her wings out, she wants to fly to me, she REALLY wants that bit of a biscuit but she is frightened of descending, but again, she does do it eventually. I don't know if in an escaped scenario she would repeat this, but I know with out such training there is no way she would come down as she would be too frightened. Best advice of course is to ensure they cant get out, but it only takes a scare of the bird and panic flight out of a door/window

HTH.

Andy

 

[Flboy]

An excellent point! With a real life situation!! I work my JoJo with this skill, and watching him, you can see it is a controlled fall!

 

[bigfellasdad]

An excellent point! With a real life situation!! I work my JoJo with this skill, and watching him, you can see it is a controlled fall!

Well done, and yes its a constant 'throw on the brakes' scenario for them. Birds in the wild must do this all of the time as they clearly have the space and skills to do so with ease, home birds need to be taught.

 

[SailBoat]

Recall training is a solid fall back when this happens.

With another individual's Parrot, unless the Parrot has been 'recall trained' using their contact call 'can' work, but commonly works with that individual.

Commonly, recovery requires a ladder that will get to the Parrot and a slow approach.

 

[Qckslvr]

My wife and I live in a two story as well. Perci is still quite young, but he has descent flying down like a pro. At first he would sit at the top of the stairs pacing on his training perch. But he also knows the chopstick means treat. After a couple more paces, he flew down. After a week he is even starting to soar down the stairs, which my wife and I thought was the coolest.



We play hide and seek with him as well. If we call him and he looks a little lost, a click of the clicker and he is right there on our finger.

 

[bigfellasdad]

The lady rescued the parrot only 12 days ago! No real bond would exist but they do play together with the parrot on its back so I think the trust is there already.

We had a terrible electric storm last night, thankfully coco has been re-found this morning safe, I didn't sleep a wink....

Will take a clicker and Enzo along later after work, ill see if a ladder can be provided too. Thinking if I can climb up the tree with drink/food and try and get coco to come to me, hopefully. However, at 53 im too old for climbing trees lol

 

[bigfellasdad]

Good news, Coco is now back with his owner. I didn't manage to catch him, but I did try my hardest. Boy can these greys fly well