How to tame a Cockatiel. Taming a bird down is a long, can be a long and delicate process. You really have to have patience. There's a lot of books on the subject. I highly recommend tracking down as many as you can and reading them if you're going to be serious about it. We're just going to do a brief overview of some different techniques here with you quickly. I'm not going to get too deep into things, because that would take forever. So, you're, the first thing you're dealing with when you're dealing with any kind of bird and taming it down is getting it to get on your hand when it's ordered to. It's just like teaching a dog obedience. Now the term that, the phrase that we use is called Step Up. That's telling the bird to step up onto your hand. So, what you do, is once you get the bird out, what you can do with it, if it's a new bird to you, to help build trust and to help build into it's mind how to, how to respond to you, is you get it on your finger and you just tell it, step up. Step up, step up, step up. Keep doing that, over and over again. Do it for like five minutes or so, give the bird a rest. Maybe give him a little treat. I have a little piece of dried papaya here. A little treat of a piece of fruit. You can see he's not really into that, he's still kind of afraid of me. He's not trusting me very much. But, I'm going to give him the chance to try to take it, he doesn't want it. So then we'll go back to it again. Step up, step up, step up, step up, step up. Just keep doing that. Now if he doesn't want to step up, if he's being a little stubborn, just push your finger into his breastbone, just like that. Step up, step up. That will make him step up onto you, because he doesn't want to fall off your finger. Now, for biting, which is going to be the next thing that's probably going to be the biggest problem with most birds. There's two different ways to discipline for biting. There's blowing on him and there's what's called bouncing, OK, which is when you bounce your hand. So what you do, is whenever he tries to bite you, you blow on him. Just, not hard, just lightly, enough to make him shake his head. He doesn't like that, it's telling him that biting, he's going to get that happen to him, he's not going to like it. You can see, he stopped biting, now he's just trying to go away from me. That's a fine response. Then you go to the step ups for a little while. OK, the other thing you can do is when he tries to bite you, he tries to bite you, you bounce your hand. So what you do is your just taking your hand and you're just giving it a bounce movement, like that. That makes him unstable. So he's going to put his wings down, he's going to try and stabilize himself. And what that's telling him is when he tries to bite, his perch becomes unstable. So he's going to stop biting over time. These two techniques, used with time and patience, will break virtually any bird of problem biting. Now, it's not 100%. Some birds are just going to bite, period. They're never going to trust, or like people very much. But, those two techniques help a lot, and can curb most biting behaviors. Now, other things to keep in mind when you're dealing with birds. A lot of people like to put the birds up on their shoulders. It's a big no-no. Don't put a bird up on your shoulder. I know it's convenient, it's cute, but what that does, is that teaches him that's he's equal to you as far as the dominance of the flock goes. So, when you keep a bird on your shoulder, you're going to be more and more likely for the bird to be a problem biter, to nip you, to scream a lot, to try to boss you around. Birds are just like having two year olds. If they can get away with telling you what to do, or getting you to do what they want you to do, they''re going to do it. They want attention, be it bad attention or good attention. So, and the other thing to do is to make sure whenever you're dealing with a bird, that whenever your done, when you put him away, it's ending on a good note and not a bad note. If a bird is biting you, and being all around disagreeable, don't ever put the bird back into it's cage at that point. Because you're rewarding him, and you're telling him that you scared me away, and you win. OK, you want to wait until you can get the bird calmed down, and he's not biting and he's acting well and being on good behavior. Then you can put the bird back in his cage, and that's telling it that it's being rewarded for being friendly and being behaved while it was on your hand. So, those are some basic techniques you can use to help tame your bird. There are lots of other ones. You know, make sure you are always giving the bird treats when he does anything good. Reward, reward, reward. And don't ever give him attention for negative things he is doing. If he's screaming a lot, don't yell back at him. If he's biting a lot, don't yell at him or put him away into his cage. Always make sure that you're the person who's in control and the bird is doing things because you want them to do things, and not because they want you to do things.
