Teaching the Colours

[Dacombe]

Hello,

My Eclectus Rupee is two and she doesn't know many tricks. She steps up, goes poopoo on command and flies to me from anywhere in the house (If she can get to me) when I call or whistle. But I want to teach her something fun. She's very clever and an extremely good talker. I thought I'd try the colours, and maybe some numbers after that.
I have one of those sets with the coloured wooden circles on matching coloured pegs. Like this:

I've tried with just two colours. We're working on Red first because I think it's the easiest to say. I've shown it to her told her it's 'Red', got her to pick it up and praised her for doing it. I've held two colours to her and asked her to 'find red'. She can do it, but she quite often gets it wrong. We've been doing this for a couple of weeks. Once she picks up the colours she likes to throw them away as far as she can.

She's not motivated by food. I've tried giving her everything she eats normally as well as treats like millet, plain popcorn, cashews, almonds, grated coconut, peanuts, bits of plain biscuits, dried fruits, fresh fruits, sunflower seeds and lots of other things. She'll eat all of this no problem if I leave it out for her to get to in her own time, but if I try to give it to her as a reward she spits it out and runs off!

Everything else she knows I taught her by rewarding only by saying 'Good girl!' and giving her a big cuddle. I am concerned this is not sufficient motivation for the colours! Am I going about this wrong, is there a better way to do it? What do you recommend?

 

[MonicaMc]

A reward can be anything she likes! Praise, treats, toys, scritches, going somewhere, an object, etc! In fact, if you can find several rewards, the better! Keeps things interesting!

Instead of handing her a treat, what about setting the treat down? Have you tried training her when she's hungriest? If neither of those works and you can't find something treat wise, then just keep experimenting!

 

[kaybear]

motivation for training can be something that's difficult to manage. there seems to be a trend moving towards feeding two distinct meals a day, this isn't a bad thing, this happens naturally in the wild, it's why they have a crop, so they're able to slowly release the food into the digestive system throughout the day.

using the two meals method, you can train just before meal times when She's likely to be more motivated toward receiving food as a reward, i'd also highly recommend getting a clicker, as this better pin points the exact behaviour you're requesting of your birds which enables them to understand better and learn faster. If as you say she's unwilling to accept reward from the hand, there is nothing wrong with giving the click, which pin points she's done exactly what you wanted and that a reward is coming, and the pop her treat on the ground/table (where ever you're training) for her to pick up herself. If she still refuses food, the clicker is use a valuable tool in telling her at the exact time you click, what she was doing then, is what you want, the big praise can come just after the click.

I recently started to write a Blog Page | Kynuna Kronicles about training (and caring for) my baby Galah Cockatoo. Last night i filmed the tricks he's learned in only 4 weeks: 'target' 'shake hands' 'turn around' 'introducing the aviator harness' and 'flight recall' over the rest of the week i'll be filming each trick in it's own video, covering how i taught him the behaviours.

My KynunaGalah - YouTube channel contains the videos i have filmed so far and i'll always be uploading more. I'm also happy to take requests on specific things people would like to see. channel contains the videos i have filmed so far and i'll always be uploading more. I'm also happy to take requests on specific things people would like to see.

Taget/Clicker training, really does form the foundations for teaching our birds anything, it teaches them how to learn and allows us to build on those foundations for increasingly complicated behaviours and tricks.

 

[JDlugosz]

I'd be concerned that the colors the bird sees are totally different from ours. Different objects that we say are "red" might not be obviously similar to a parrot. Our primary colors are not theirs. But, I expect them to be able to distinguish any colors we do as being different. So, all the parts in the matching game must have the same exact paint, to make sure they really look the same. And I'd be less confidant about teaching color names that can generalize to any object.

 

[kaybear]

I'd be concerned that the colors the bird sees are totally different from ours. Different objects that we say are "red" might not be obviously similar to a parrot. Our primary colors are not theirs. But, I expect them to be able to distinguish any colors we do as being different. So, all the parts in the matching game must have the same exact paint, to make sure they really look the same. And I'd be less confidant about teaching color names that can generalize to any object.

they more than have the ability to learn this. I was teaching my grey similar before he died, he knew the shape of a ball no matter what it's colour was or anything else. next to that would have been teaching him to choose colour over shape, but he died before i got the chance.

Have a google for Alex and Dr Pepperberg.

 

[Klaery]

Sounds like an awesome activity to teach your eclectus Birds have great colour vision too so no issues there.

Having a food reward that your bird really wants certainly makes things move along quickly, though of course your cuddles will work just as well if your bird is keen on them

Here is a new vid of the training I am doing with Elroy my hahns. I don't use a clicker, I just say "good boy" as my cue and then give a reward. The clicker is just a bridge and so this essentially achieves the same thing.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLxi17vS3Hc]Training Elroy the hahns macaw - YouTube[/ame]

 

[JDlugosz]

Birds have great colour vision too so no issues there.

"great" doesn't mean "same as yours" so there may be some issues.

"I don't know why that human treat-giver insists that the object is GREEN when it is quite clearly QPUX!"

 

[Klaery]

Birds have great colour vision too so no issues there.

"great" doesn't mean "same as yours" so there may be some issues.

"I don't know why that human treat-giver insists that the object is GREEN when it is quite clearly QPUX!"

Like what? Colour vision is the ability to distinguish between different wavelengths of light. What you call them doesn't matter, in fact from one human to the next there are slight differences. You bird doesn't know that the word "green" generally refers to a wavelength of around 520–570 nanometers just like you don't know that the word grön refers to the same wavelength in Sweden (unless you speak Swedish).

It has been shown time and time again that birds CAN tell the difference between different wavelengths (often much better than we can) and so you can teach a parrot that this wavelength is green. The same way you teach a child that that this 550ish nanometer wavelength is green. What the brain perceives that as is irrelevant as long as the difference between them can be observed.

 

[JDlugosz]

Like what? Colour vision is the ability to distinguish between different wavelengths of light.

That would be true in principle if the color in question were a pure frequency of light. But in real objects, you have a mixture of different wavelengths reflected, and that gets interpreted by our "tristimulus values" — the R,G,B primitives. Commercial paint and printing inks are made by blending two dozen or so pigments that they manufacture, so orange paint will not in fact reflect orange wavelengths but may reflecting some red and some yellow light, to either side of orange on the rainbow. Now a sensor that's still essentially RGB but uses different exact response curves might perceive it as off-red, off-yellow, but not look exactly the same as light of the orange frequency, and even if it did might not be perceived as a psychologically distinct color.

Birds have 4 different wavelength sensors, not 3; and those that roughly correspond to our R, G, and B are different in exact frequency and depending on the bird can be wildly different in response curve. Birds with oil drop filters in front of the cones might not "get" the illusion of mixing primary colors, at all!

Now natural pigments (and colored objects) are generally broad flat plateaus of response within the spectrum they reflect. They can be measured more or less the same with different sensor details and under different lighting conditions, but it still presupposes that the psychological color exists as a distinct color. Manufactured paint and mixable colors are specific to the human visual system and will give wacky results if you change those details. My example of QPUX was actually concerning the 4th sensor that we don't have at all. We would consider that ultraviolet. What is the ultraviolet component of different green objects we see? It is totally unknown to us! So one paint that is "UV Protective" might be strongly dark in QPUX will barely a green tint, and another might have no UV component and the green dominates.

A bird might have psycological colors like we have Magenta (not in the rainbow) such as UV+Green and think it is something else entirely. In fact that exact case is likely so, so green fruit stands out against green leaves with a contrasting color. That's why we (unlike most mammals) have a red-green dimension to our vision.

An excellent web page on details of human vision is here: handprint : color theory .

For some photos illustrating how things look to birds, see Bristol University | School of Biological Sciences | Exploring the fourth dimension .

 

[Ezekiell]

A bird might have psycological colors like we have Magenta (not in the rainbow) such as UV+Green and think it is something else entirely. In fact that exact case is likely so, so green fruit stands out against green leaves with a contrasting color. That's why we (unlike most mammals) have a red-green dimension to our vision.

Isn’t it then the case that teaching parrots to colour match is basically allowing them to learn that the object you want has to look like the peg/container it goes in? You don’t necessarily need words for that but you could use words if you don’t care about the parrot not being able to extrapolate the ‘red’ thing to everything else a human things as ‘red’.

Im teaching my caique a colour match game and I’m saying ‘find X’ colour. But that’s just a verbal label for this particular game. I don’t necessarily want him to find every object I see as blue, for example, when I ask for blue. But for the game I do want him to put the coins I call blue in the box I also call blue, and the coins I call yellow in the box i also call yellow etc (matching).

I could easily achieve the same effect by using a fetch command and letting the bird learn himself that the blue coin goes in the blue box not the yellow box because he doesn’t get a treat when it goes in the yellow box. This way he’s still not going to be able to collect all the same coloured toys he owns and pile them in a box I think is the same colour when I ask him to, as the matching is all about the particular game we are playing.

I don’t think there is a right or wrong way to teach this skill, parrots are totally able to learn to distinguish between different coloured things and match them with same coloured things. But just be aware that the bird may not be able to extrapolate some colours we see as they see the colours differently.

 

[wrench13]

Once your parrot understands that you are trying to teach him something, it becomes much easier for them to learn new tricks. Its like a light bulb goes off. It also helps to have a set time for training, so they know that schools in. Be 100% consistent in how you request a given trick. What ever your reward is, food, verbal praise or scratches, it should be given immediately after the trick is done, like right away, so they can associate the successful accomplishment with the reward. Break tricks into little segments. Example, Salty plays pool. But we started with first picking up the pool balls, then he and I pushed a ball into a pocket together, and finally he did it by himself. After that we worked our way up to a full rack of pool balls. You get the idea.

Saltys latest video from November is below. And there are many tricks we didn;t do in this one, he knows so many that I dont want to give him that many pine nuts in 1 session. OP, try that as your treat, most parrots LOVE them - Salty would paint my house for a pine nut.


[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBUAsXLQFCo"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBUAsXLQFCo[/ame]