How to Stop Parrots from Screaming

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Elizabeth, and I'm talking on behalf of Expert Village. We're going to talk about screaming today in parrots. Now, screaming in parrots or just excessive vocalization is normal. There's a point where it doesn't become normal. In the mornings and in the evenings most parrots will vocalize, either scream, give their normal jungle calls, African grays and some of the other talking birds will beep and go through their vocabulary in the mornings and evenings. This is fairly normal. If you're not comfortable with this, you probably shouldn't have a bird. But, there is a point where it becomes excessive, where, as soon as you walk out of the room, the animal will just scream for attention and will not stop screaming until you get back into the room. So, how do you modify this sort of behavior, especially when the best way to reward that behavior is to scream back at your bird? You scream back, "shut up," "stop," you know, "be quiet," the bird doesn't care, it doesn't understand those as negative. The bird is just happy that you're calling back. You're like, "oh, my flock is in the other room, he's calling back to me." You're just encouraging the behavior. The other way to encourage your bird, or teach your bird, to scream is, every time they start screaming, come back into the room and say, "no." They don't care, I mean, "no" does not mean anything to these birds. You need to find a form of distraction. If your bird screams every time you come out of the room, you need to find some way to get the animal to have something else that?s more motivating than your attention. One of these things can be foraging, you can do... So the bird is hungry, suddenly when you leave the room, either to go to work or if you need to get a task done, you hide some treats in their cage and then you leave the room. Every time you do this, soon the bird will learn that you leaving the room means that there's going to be treats in the cage. Other things that you can do is, one of the simpler things, is you can come quietly, don't say a word to the bird, come in simply and just put a blanket over the cage. Just for a few minutes, just a 15-minute time out. Give that bird some time to realize that this is not negative, suddenly... again, this is negative reinforcement, and you want to try to avoid punishing the bird. You're just trying to discourage the behavior. The best way to do that is to find something that's more distracting and more entertaining than calling back to you. And, the best way to keep your bird from screaming is to keep from encouraging it the first place. Such as, if your bird starts screaming in the first place, do not come back into the room. Wait until there's a quiet pause in the screaming, come back into the room, and reward the bird. Reward him for being quiet. Then walk out. If he starts screaming again, just stay out of the room. Again, wait until the bird's quiet again, come back in and give him a reward. Soon the periods of silence will increase to a longer and longer period, until the bird is no longer screaming when you're out of the room."