Always learning

The other afternoon Lisa and I were hanging out on the couch and Niko was with us and he started acting all strange, and so I took him from Lisa and attempted to calm him down. This appeared to be working and generally he calms down more when he gets near my face so I moved him up closer to where he likes to be by my head and without any kind of warning he attacked my lip. It hurt, like mad, but some of the reason it hurt as much as it did was that it was completely unexpected.

Being as this is the second time in a month and half that he has physically removed skin from my body I had a very serious conversation about removing the small green one from our apartment and keeping. In the end it was decided that we would choose to attempt to do something about it instead of "accidentally" leaving the cage door and balcony door open.

I found a site (birdtricks.com) that I honestly couldn't tell was real or a fraud but after a LOT of internet research I figured I would give it a try. (BBB searching, Whois tracking, forums, reviews, etc etc) They claim to have a six month money back policy, but frankly if it's a scam it doesn't matter what they promise. This is getting long. Anyway, I sent them some money and they are shipping out the full training videos, but they had some up on their website and I spent two and a half hours watching some of them the other morning and there is some really good stuff in there. The videos could be edited down to loose the sales pitch in a lot of them (I already bought it...) but it has helped me and is helping me to tweak Niko's schedule and how to train him to be a better bird. (So far he's a little confused about some of the changes.) We'll see if they are worth it in the long-run.

I am drawing all sorts of parallels between parrot training and life in general though... as I am sure those of you that have children are aware, it seems like half of training something that really doesn't understand you is your attitude and how you respond to things. Always something new isn't it?

Hopefully we can post some "stupid parrot tricks" or something here in the future... and hopefully it can happen without anymore blood being drawn. (On either side...)

~B.
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