The training of Sunny

[CFellows]

In this thread I want to keep track of the progress Sunny is making as I try to tame him, train him and get him over some fears he has. Feel free to add in any tips or suggestions you may have or just follow along with us on our journey.

First off lets introduce you to our star character. Sunny is a five year old sun conure. He has lived in at least three diferant homes. We bought him September of 2014. The lady i got him from said he hated her and she could not do anything with him unless she had leather gloves on. Sunny liked her ten year old son, and would ride on the kids shoulder and take treats from him. When I went to meet Sunny, he was on the boys shoulder and very standoffish and nervious. I talked to the lady for a while and Sunny seemed to calm down. I leaned down and placed my shoulder next to the boys shoulder and Sunny walked over to my shoulder. Everyone in the room was amazed, including me. That was the moment I knew Sunny was going to be a part of the family. I paid the lady and watched as they tried to catch and force Sunny into the travel crate I had brought. Sunny was not impressed to say the least. I took him to the car and sat the crate in the front seat. Sunny screaming the the whole time. I had a two and a half hour drive home. After about a half hour of nonstop screaming I reached over and opened the crate door. Sunny instantly ran up my arm and sat on my shoulder. He rode there the rest of the way home and seemed content he made some noises but did not scream any more. He even snugled under my chin a little when it got dark.

 

[Buddies_mommy]

I am looking forward to hearing your journey with Sunny.

 

[CFellows]

I pull into the driveway and wonder what to do now. Sunny is standing quietly on my shoulder and i am sitting in the car, but I need to get him into the house. I tried a few times to get him back into the travel crate. With no chance of that happening I decide to calmly open the car door and try to walk inside without spooking him. It is dark and Sunny is sleepy. So I am hopeful he will just ride there while I walk into the house. It worked! So here I am, a first time bird owner, at home with my new bird. I have no idea what to do next. I had done some resurch on parrots and how to care for them, but not the same as fist hand experiance. At this point I do not even have a cage for him. The lady I got him from gave me some food, his "love sock", and a cage mounting water dish, this is all I have. It is late so I know I need to find somewhere for Sunny to sleep. We held up Sunny's love sock and he crawled right in, we then placed the love sock inside the travel crate and covered it for the night.

 

[CFellows]

That morning I uncovered the crate and opened the door, again sunny ran up my arm and sat on my shoulder. He stayed there the whole time I went about my morning routine. Taking snacks from my fingers as I cooked breakfast. Then we set out to find a suitable cage for him. (Note: I live 130 miles from the nearest large town, and only make the trip about once a month. There is a small town with a groceriy store 45 miles away but no change of them having anything for parrots. So I was on my own) I looked around the property and found an old rabbit cage, we added a few sticks for perches and we had a make shift cage for Sunny. Of coarse Sunny hated it. So Sunny spent the next week or so riding on my shoulder. He rode in the car, went on walks with me and my boys.( I have three young boys, 19 months, 3years and 4years) Sunny was always out of his cage and with us unless we where going to be gone for more than an hour. Then we would get him to stay in his cage. We needed Sunny to be happy with his cage so I added the sticks on the out side to make a play gym for him. This worked great Sunny now loves his area and will hang out there happily. He still does not go inside the cage much exept to go to sleep, but thats ok with me. (Note: I am still planning on getting Sunny a real cage, this is just a temp)

So what does everyone think so far? Pretty messed up start hu? I know now I did a few things wrong but I am just being honest about the way things happend

 

[Buddies_mommy]

As long as Sunny is happy all is well. Pretty neat setup! Are Sonny's wings clipped? My 2 year old would fly in a minute outside.

 

[Christinenc2000]

I am really enjoying this story . Thank you

 

[CFellows]

RE: buddiesmommy. When we got Sunny the lady told me his wings where clipped and he could fly about ten feet. I know now Sunny's wings are not clipped, and can fly from one end of the house to the other with no problem. I think he had always had his wings clipped in the past though, and just never really learned to fly because as time goes on Sunny is flying more and more. At first he was a cluts and there was a lot of fluttering and not much flying. Now he routinely flys to me as i am walking around the house.

 

[CFellows]

In the first two weeks we had sunny, we did not do any taming or training, we just let him hang out and get used to us. He had started preening me, my husband, and my oldest son. We also learnrd alot about Sunny and what we needed to start teaching him. First off any bird that likes to ride on your shoulder all day needs to be potty trained. I looked up some potty training videos online and started trying to train him to not poo on me. I thought I had my work cut out for me, trying to potty train a five year old bird, but he took to it really well. For the first day I just said the words "go potty" every time he went. The next day I started setting the timer while he was on me and every 15 min I would put him on his perch and say "go potty" It took a few times, but he did finaly go when I perched him so i rewarded him for it. I still said the conand when he would go on me but he got no reward for it. I also started rewarding him for going potty while he was just hanging out on his play gym, so if i was walking by and saw him go, i would say go potty and reward him. It only took about a week of this before he really got it and I noticed he would start making more noise on my shoulder if he needed to go and i would perch him, he would go, then i would let him back on my shoulder. Now he can fly so much better, that he will actualy fly back to his perch from where ever i am in the house to "go potty" I dont reward him very often any more just because i dont think about it. I think it has been about two weeks from the last time he went poo on me. That is when we are home, I am still working on what to do about it when we are out of the house, and he is away from his perch. Even that is better though because now I know his body language, and can at least lean so it does not hit me.

 

[Buddies_mommy]

Amazing! I have to try this!

 

[CFellows]

The next thing I wanted to work on with Sunny, was his diet. He is a junk fook junky. If you have chips, soda, or sweets Sunny will climb down your arm or the front of your shirt and stop at nothing to get a bite, but every time I offer fruit or veggies, he turns his nose up at it. I even noticed that he was only picking a few things from food dish and leaving the rest. So how do we teach him to eat a better diet? I still offer fruits and veggies every time we eat them, and after many failed atempts I have gotten Sunny to eat apple, dried mango, and sweet potato. Its not great but its a start in the right direction. For his base daily food, I feed a mix of three store bought parrot foods, a pellet mix, a seed mix, and a fruit and nut mix. I put them all into a bucket and mix them up. At first I would make sure his food dish was always full. But I have foud that is not really the best for him. I did some research and found it is better to feed a picky eater only what he will eat in a day. This way he is more likley to eat a variety of foods, and not just pick out his favorites like he was before. So I got him a smaller dish and started measuring his food, I started with about a 1/4 cup, it was way to much, at the end of the day he still had a lot of it left. I cut it down a little each day till I got to where I am feeding a mounded tablespoon of food in the morning, and there are just a few seeds/pellets left in the bottom at night. I will continue giving him fresh veggies and hopefuly he will give in someday, but at least he is geting more variety in his diet then he was.


Buddiesmommy, have you tried the potty training? If so how is it going? Has anyone else tried it?

 

[DoodlesMom]

Yours & Sunnys journey together is a realization of how patience, persistence and more importantly love gains our parrots trust in us! I'm quickly finding this out with Doodle. Your journey together is inspirational and heartwarming! Thanks for sharing with us!!

 

[CFellows]

Thanks Doodlesmom, I have read a few of your posts and from the sounds of it, you know exactly what sunny and I are going through. I am so happy Doodle is doing well with you. I can't imagine how someone would just leave a bird, but at least they left doodle with someone who will give him/her a great life.

 

[DoodlesMom]

Thank you for sharing your story! I enjoy the challenges & triumphs of your journey with Sunny. Looking forward to more of this beautiful story.

 

[CFellows]

Sunny is scared of everything, but most of all, is hands. The lady we got him from said he hated her and she could not do anything with him without wearly leather gloves, not even change his food and water. Sunny liked her oldest son, and the kid would sometimes let sunny out of his cage when he was home from school, But for the most part it sounds like Sunny sat in his cage and screamed all day. She told me Sunny talked a little, she told me he said "hello" "pretty boy" and "no" I have never heard him say any thing. My husband heard him say "no" once, John (my husband) had a glass of coke and wiskey, and Sunny was really trying to get a drink, he was climbing down johns arms and back and forth across his chest, John kept switching the drink between hands and telling Sunny NO. I guess this turned into a heated fight because Sunny started growling "NO!" back at john. This tells me that pore Sunny must have gotten yelled at alot in the past. The main reason she rehomed the bird was because of his screaming. Sunny does bite and he does scream, but it is nothing that can not be fixed. I just realized I am compleatly off topic and not even talking about hands anymore...oh well, I guess that can be the topic for the next post.

 

[faeryphoebe1]

Sun conures are a lot of fun! Sunny sounds super smart.

You've done so well with the potty training, too.

 

[Birdman666]

My guess is he hated hands because they were grabbing at him instead of stepping him up, and he felt helpless and afraid every time they did that to him...

Think of a conure as a shrunken macaw. Set boundaries, and make training a game. The more it feels like playtime to him, the more enthousiastic he will be about interacting with you.

My two "evil ones" did really well with the discipline associated with trick training. It got them focused, made interacting interesting and positive, and helped reign in their bad behaviors. Having a dominant amazon hen in the house that didn't put up with any stuff from a conure ALSO worked wonders to keep their behavior problems in check. My AMAZON trained those two to stop screaming! (I can't take the credit for that one.)

Conure spoiled bird syndrome is very real, and it's very similar to the out of control behaviors you get with spoiled macaws. So boundary setting is a top priority.

 

[CFellows]

Yes I agree with birdman, I am sure sunny was never tought to step up and instead was man handled in and out of his cage ect. He did not like this so he started biting, and once the started biting, he did not get as much attention, so that starts the screaming. Every time he would scream the lady would come yell at him. Yelling = attention so that trained him to scream more. Bottom line you have a biting screaming monster that hates hands, and gets rehomed.
Sunny has come so far in the past few months. I touch trained him, and he now steps up most of the time. He lives a very cage free life, and only screams in the mornings or if someone comes over. His house manners are 10 times better, granted he had none before. I can't wait to see this bird after a few years here with us, it should be amazing
Touch training was quite the indever, because Sunny was afraid of my cue stick. I was so proud of myself, I found one of those sticks rock candy is made on, it was a small wooden stick about 8in long and it had a small wooden ball on the end. I dipped the ball in blue food color, and i had the perfect cue stick. I was ready for the first training! As soon as Sunny saw the stick he ran away. So to start out i just tried feeding sunny treats with the cue stick in hand. It took about a week for sunny to willingly take treats where he had to reach over the cue stick slightly to get it. This is when it happened... I had got everything out and ready for my morning training, but had to leave the room for a min, when I came back, my four year old son was holding the cue stick... he says "sorry Mom" I look and the cue stick is broken just under the ball. I wanted to fix it but I knew it would not hold. So much for the last week of training now i had to start over with a new stick. Now i had to find a new stick... I looked around and found a metal shish kabob stick, this thing is about 12in long and has a metal ring in the end. I tryed it with sunny. The shish kabob stick was my salvation, I had sunny touching it to get the treat by the end of the first training. The diferance was the ring, with the ring I could put food in the ring, Sunny would go to get the food out of the ring I made the treat smaller and smaller till it was gone, but sunny still wanted to check, so when he touched, I clicked and treated. Sunny caught on fast after that. Some times a bad thing really can be a good thing

 

[CFellows]

Basic house manners. Sunny is out of his cage 95% of the time, and he is flighted so he has free range of the house. Sunny does not like to land on anything in the house other then his perch, people and my dinning room chairs. At first I was washing my chairs several times a day and the floor under the chairs, it was a pain. I did not know how to teach sunny not to land on the chairs, so I just did what came to mind. Every time I see Sunny on the chairs, I shake the chair and he flys away. My thought is he will associate the shaking with the chairs and think they are not a good place to land because they shake. I dont know what Sunny thinks, but he is landing on the dinning room chairs much less then he used to, so it seems to be working. This is basicly the same thought I use in other areas of training too. Like screaming when on my shoulder (makes my ears ring) At first if sunny would scream on my shoulder I would walk over and put him on his perch, but this did not work very well because if I was in the back of the house when he screamed it would take a few seconds to get to his cage and by that time he was being good again. So I started shaking my shoulder every time he screams in my ear, this makes him loose he balance and sometimes he flys away and sometimes he does not. I cant really tell if it is working yet cause I have only been doing it a few days now.

 

[Birdman666]

Yes I agree with birdman, I am sure sunny was never tought to step up and instead was man handled in and out of his cage ect. He did not like this so he started biting, and once the started biting, he did not get as much attention, so that starts the screaming. Every time he would scream the lady would come yell at him. Yelling = attention so that trained him to scream more. Bottom line you have a biting screaming monster that hates hands, and gets rehomed.

Stop me if you've heard this before...

Sounds vaguely familiar.

It's all the bird's fault, you know. A person has to be crazy to own one of these things. What did you expect? It's just a bird! All they do is scream, and poop, and make a mess!

 

[CFellows]

Stop me if you've heard this before...

Sounds vaguely familiar.

It's all the bird's fault, you know. A person has to be crazy to own one of these things. What did you expect? It's just a bird! All they do is scream, and poop, and make a mess!

Yes, it seems it is always the same story... It is a flaw in most people. I see people do it with their dogs, and even their children. It's just a crazy hyper dog there is no controling it. Or my kid just will not listen to me. People come over to the house and see how my kids behave, and they are always saying things like "I wish my kids would clean their room" My thought is, if you put the time into teaching them good habbits they would, its not like my kids just magicly woke up one day with manners, their is a lot of time and effert invested to make them act that way. I dont see how people are never willing to take the blame.