A behavior I get a lot of clients struggling with is getting their bird back into its cage (cockatoo people especially). Either the bird refuses to get off of you, shouldn’t rushes, flies off, or bites you, these are all common reactions parrots have to going back into their cage. Though common, this is not good, and it should be addressed. Your parrot should love its cage and go back willingly. Cages are NOT the enemy!I am teaching an online class on how to get your parrot back into its cage. We talk about how cage size and design affects a birds willingness to go back, methods to get your bird back, training of new skills to help the bird go back, and how to handle sticky situations to avoid the bite. This class is going to be a little over an hour long and is on Sunday March 31st at 1:00pmEST. The even will be recorded, and attendees will get the recording about a week or less after the class. The cost of the course is $20.00; it’s a small investment for life-long results for your long lived parrot. You can sign up in my website www.FluffNFeathers.com (link in my bio) or comment “GO HOME” and I will message you the live link 💙
Fluff and Feathers are always looking for motivated interns to join our team! We are located in Maryland, and we accept out of state interns! Our internship focuses on all specs of working professionally with animals. Some activities include cleaning, creating enrichment, socializing, training, and sitting in on consultations. Our program emphasizes on education for our interns! We want you to leave here with a lot of knowledge and experience to continue your journey working with animals professionally. Interns must be over the age of 18. We ask for a minimum of 4 hours a week at our facility to learn and gain experience. We sometimes have “field trips” where interns can come with me to specific facilities to train and work with even more animals! We cater our internship program to what you want to learn more about. We can work specifically with canines or avian. We can focus on behavior, training, enrichment making, consulting with clients, or even more practical activities like husbandry behaviors and practices. We understand that you are taking the time to work with us, so we want the experience to be beneficial to you!If you’re interested in learning kore, you can find information on our website WWW.FluffNFeathers.com or you can message us to learn more!
Fulfilling orders placed on Monday! I’m so glad that so many people are experiencing my handmade parrot toys! These toys are designed to last, and I get so many reviews about their durability. I have toys for every sized parrot and in every price range. I have toys for $1.00-$60.00. I ship internationally, and orders over $150 in the USA get free shipping by using code “FREESHIP” at checkout. Hop on over to WWW.FluffNFeathers.com and shop my parrot toys, toy bundles, perches, online classes, training aids, toy parts… we got it all! I also have free educational resources 💙For those who like to read, I also was doing training while fulfilling orders. My toy making area is animal free. It’s a completely detached building and no animals are allowed around it to ensure quality and safety. Ramona, my basset puppy, used to chew my wood trim when I left her alone outside of her crate. She does perfect in it, but she has so much energy that she can’t be in the crate for long. I’ve been consistently leaving her daily in her crate. Now when I’m placing orders or doing other outside work, I leave her out with a camera on to monitor her. This morning, she did 2 hours alone with no issues! She looked out the window and laid on the couch. I’m so proud of her!
Teaching fun tricks to Alfie! This is day two of teaching “fist pump” where he will lightly put his foot on my hand for a few second. Tricks are really fun to train when you don’t have a training plan in place for an animal. A trick like the one I’m teaching Alfie is a valuable foundation behavior. If I wanted to, I could build on this behavior by doing voluntary foot checks, voluntary nail trims, and other tricks like shake. My favorite behaviors are foundation ones because even though I don’t have an idea of what I want or need to train next, I have so many option ready for when we’re ready. It’s good to have consistency with training, even if it’s just tricks like this or rehearsing behaviors they already know. It provides great mental simulation, exerts energy, and builds the bond between you and the animal.
I always encourage clients to feed a larger sized pellet to their birds when applicable. It increases the amount of time it takes the bird to eat their food, leaving them more enriched and less time to do undesirable behaviors like scream, feather destructive behaviors, pacing (and other stereotypical behaviors), and more! This can increase your birds confidence, and have their personality come through! At least this is all what science says 💙For smaller birds, this is pretty simple to size up a pellet. But, for larger birds, there is no pellet to the size they prefer, even nutriberries aren’t big enough. It was found in the wild that parrots prefer to hold big round chunks of food in their feet as their preferred method of eating. Using our large plastic gears found on my website www.FluffNFeathers.com (link in my bio), you can increase the size of the pellet by placing them in the gear slats. This means your bird now has something to hold onto and manipulate to get their food out. The gears we sell hold all sized large pellets and a verity of other treats! As you can see, mine are well loved by my birds. It’s great because I have a bunch of them that I can I fill up, then I can sanitize and reuse them! These last quite a while with my flock, and clients agree with their longevity! Enrich your parrots life by providing larger food items to them, or use one of our gears for the big birds! Perfect for amazon/grey sized up! Conures and other similar sized birds still love these gears, as it challenges them!
The majority of parrot caretakers aren’t having the appropriate sized cage for their parrot. As we continue to learn more about parrots needs in our care, we are advancing our knowledge and practices on husbandry. The cage gets demonized by many because it doesn’t fit the animals needs. This is not the cages fault, rather, ours for not creating a good environment for them (as well as some anthropomorphism that is used to hate on the use of cages). The cage is not a full-time environment. It’s designed to keep the bird safe while not being watched. Our homes are an unnatural environment with tons of hazards and toxins. A client of mine’s cockatoo was cage-free and when they left, the bird chewed a hole through the house and escaped. I know a lot of people have lost cage free birds from flying out the door or getting injured. A cage needs to be the appropriate size for the species. I recommend double the bird’s wingspan in length, the birds wingspan in width, and double the birds height including the tail. This is my minimum, and other associations and professionals agree. That means a macaw needs to be in about an 8ft long cage, 4ft deep, and 6ft high as it’s minimum. Most marketed macaw cages aren’t even 4ft long, disallowing the bird to stretch both it’s wings or flap. You also have to consider how active your bird is. Species like caiques, cockatoos, and conures that are very active will need even more room for enrichment and exploration. Your bird also needs an area in their cage where they can do a full flap and not his another perch, toy, or the bars. This is a species-specific behavior that should never be ignored for health and welfare. Parrots have a lot of unique needs and abilities that we need to account for in our homes in order to give them the best possible life we can. Message me if you need some cage design tips!
When I’m working with clients on new behaviors, I always recommend using reinforcement in order to increase the rate of that behavior happening again. That’s pretty standard. Overtime as the new behavior is being mastered, we have to start thinking of when to stop directly reinforcing this behavior and starting to just make it apart of life and the expectation. Usually I recommend for it to go onto an intermittent schedule of reinforcement where there are set guidelines on when to reinforce, how much, and overtime, decreasing it till it isn’t being reinforced frequently. But there are also extinction trails we can use to see if the new learned behavior is now the preferred behavior over the undesirable. How this works is you stop reinforcing the new behavior to see if the old undesirable behavior comes back. Usually the animal is set back up in the same environment where the previous behavior happened to see which one they choose. Matching Law will show that the most reinforcing behavior will be the one the animal chooses, so if they choose the old behavior, we know there is still something driving the behavior and further modifications need to be made.When I try an extinction trial, I usually don’t put the animal back into the same environment. Behaviors are influenced by the environment, so when modifying behaviors, I usually also suggest modifying the environment for success. It usually increases the welfare of the animal. So, I put the animal in the more appropriate environment and see if the previous behavior comes back because either way, the environment needs to be changed, and that change is the new normal. Though for it to be a true extinction trail the animal needs to be back in that environment, if we are creating a new “normal” then they should never be exposed to that environment to rehearse the behaviors. With a lot of my clients just changing the environment resolved behavior with no official training. Environmental change is huge with beh
Boy do I love me some cockatoo snuggles. See how long this interaction lasts? It’s super short! Parrots are not the same tactile creatures as domestic mammals are, like dogs or cats. Parrots really only groom each other and themselves after a strenuous activity to help calm down and unwind. There are exceptions like for bathing or for bonding with their mate, but generally it’s just some self care to help unwind! This means it’s not done all throughout the day because they’re foraging for food 8 plus hours a day. But in our care, we tend to be too tactile with them. Without having something to do, parrots get bored, and we want to love them. There are also a lot of stressors for parrots in our care when their needs aren’t being fully met. A lot of tactile touch can lead to pair bonding, which is an inappropriate bond to have. It can increase aggressive-type behaviors and cause medical concerns due to increased hormone production. Even just touching the birds head can still send these signals and create behavioral concerns. Humans are tactile creatures, so avoiding it completely is unreasonable. But having short, infrequent snuggle or petting sessions is usually completely fine, and you’ll get the positive bonding effects without behavioral concerns. If you’re struggling with your parrot’s behavior, please feel free to reach out to us! We would love to help you be successful with your lifelong companion 💙
Yesterday resident Merlin got his aviary rearranged and some natural perches put in. Currently he is chomping small twigs off of an apple wood perch. This is great for promoting species specific behaviors, as birds in the wild would do the same thing to help groom their beaks! It’s great mental stimulation for our birds. It’s also low-cost enrichment, especially if you sourced your own parrot safe wood like we do! We post to local Facebook community pages when we need perches to help find people who have parrot safe trees that they would like to be pruned a bit. We were thankful over the winter to have a lovely lady ask us to come out and cut back multiple trees, allowing us to have a wonderful stock, a happy flock, and enough to make perches to donate to rescues. We also collect natural browse for our parrots to enjoy. The last batch was bamboo from someone who had more than enough on their property. Since bamboo is an invasive species, cutting it down and back helps the ecosystem. If you’re looking to provide more nature to your companion parrot, be sure that no pesticides or insecticides are used on the plant or the grounds around. Make sure that you are properly sanitizing items before you give them to your bird. Parrots in our care do not have the built up immune system of wildlife. Make sure the wood or plant materials you are given are safe for parrots because not all are. If you have any other questions, feel free to comment or shoot us a message!
I’ve been going training with Alfie using differential reinforcement of an alternative behavior for his screaming. It’s been really successful, and he’s picked it up super quick in true cockatoo fashion. What is differential reinforcement of an alternative behavior? It’s when you reinforce a different behavior and ignore (using extinction usually) the behavior you want to decrease. In this example, I want Alfie not not scream for attention, rather, ring his bell. This training is successful because it gives me the ability to put his bell in front of him when I am able to give attention, and when it’s away, he can learn I am not able to give attention. Once the bell is there, he can communicate when he wants attention. Differential reinforcement of an alternative behavior works best when the alternative behavior is incompatible. Alfie cannot scream if he needs to sit quietly and ring the bell. The matching law comes into effect where the animal chooses the behavior that gets them the more desirable reward. Quiet bell gets the reward and screaming maniac does not. Using differential reinforcement of an alternative behavior has to be done methodically. This is because if you make a mistake and reinforce the undesirable behavior then the undesirable behavior is put on an intermittent schedule of reinforcement. This schedule of reinforcement is the most effective at keeping learned behaviors strong, making it harder to modify. In this older clip I’m training him to ring the bell with food, then the reinforcement changed to attention once it was learned. The main training for this is through our everyday lives because structured training gives the attention he’s after, so it doesn’t fully allow for him to use it as intended. Feel free to message us or email us to learn how you can decrease undesirable behaviors in your companion animal!
Do you live in or near northern eastern Maryland? Are you interested in working with animals as your job, yearning to learn more about behavioral science and training techniques, or just a crazy animal lover like myself? My business, Fluff and Feathers All Animal Training is opening our doors for the first time to interns for summer 2023! Not only will we be working heavily with our residents, but interns are also able to travel to facilities with me to get more experience with a verity of animals. The internship is catered to your desires! Whatever you would like to learn and work more on, we can cover! This internship is designed to be for the intern’s benefit. There are so many behaviors we can teach, husbandry we can work on, and honing in on aspects of running a successful animal training business. Interns will have the opportunity to sit in on client calls, with permission, so knowledge can continue to be gained. You will be able to work hands on with animals to increase your skills and confidence with behavioral modification and training. This will be an action packed summer that you will not want to miss! To learn more, you can go to my website www.FluffNFeathers.com
Munchie Monday Cage Design for a Disabled Bird
This week we will go over ideas of cage designing for special needs birds for a variety of disabilities. We will be speaking very generally, but if you have a disabled bird, or thinking of getting one, and need help, you can always contact us here or by email [email protected]
What is Munchie Monday? Munchie Monday is a weekly livestream where I co-star with resident parrot Munchkin on our page to talk about topic that you choose. Topics include but not limited to behavior, enrichment, diet, training, generalized care, and so much more! Topics are chosen every Thursday on our Instagram page!
Can't make the livestream? Don't worry! The livestream reply is posted right after the event, as long as technology cooperates with us. We also post a written blog post here on our website on the topic chosen.
Our website is www.FluffNFeathers.com and we are currently having a cyber Monday sale ending tonight at midnight EST for 10% off the entire site (excluding shipping charges). Use code BFCM at checkout!
Munchie Monday!
Join us on this Muncie Monday Topic: Positive Punishers
What is Munchie Monday? Munchie Monday is a weekly livestream where I co-star with resident parrot Munchkin on our page to talk about topic that you choose. Topics include but not limited to behavior, enrichment, diet, training, generalized care, and so much more! Topics are chosen every Thursday on our Instagram page!
Can't make the livestream? Don't worry! The livestream reply is posted right after the event, as long as technology cooperates with us. We also post a written blog post here on our website on the topic chosen.
Munchie Monday
This week we discuss an overview of the hardest species of hookbill parrots to have in our care, and some of the easiest and what you may say "beginner friendly" species.
What is Munchie Monday? Munchie Monday is a weekly livestream every Monday at 7:00pmEST where owner Melanie co-stars with resident parrot Munchkin. We go over topics that are chosen by our following every Thursday over on Instagram. Topics can range from training, behavior, animal care, diet, and so much more!
Miss the livestream or cannot make it? Don't worry! We always repost the recording when technology cooperates immediately after the stream. Or you can always check out the information discussed on the livestream over on our blog! Our website is www.FluffNFeathers.com.
If you have any questions or need to contact us, you can easily email us at [email protected]!
Munchie Monday: Launch Party!
Join us for Munchie Mondays! What is Munchie Mondays? Munchie Mondays is a weekly livestream every Monday at 7:00pm EST where I co-star with resident parrot Munchkin, and we go over topics that you choose. Topics are chosen every Thursday on Instagram stories. Topics can always be suggested by comments and messages if you are not apart of our Instagram community. Topics range from animal care, diet, enrichment, behavior, training, and so much more!
Missed the livestream? Don't worry! We always post the replay, as long as technology works with us.
Join us as we start a new adventure through our website of selling parrot enrichment. You can learn more and order on our website, www.fluffnfeathers.com or watch this live video!
Munchie Monday: How to Find a Good Avian Veterinarian
On this week's livestream, we will go over how to find a good vet for your feathered companions.
What is Munchie Monday? Munchie Monday is a weekly livestream every Monday at 7:00pmEST where owner Melanie co-stars with resident parrot Munchkin. We go over topics that are chosen by our following every Thursday over on Instagram. Topics can range from training, behavior, animal care, diet, and so much more!
Miss the livestream or cannot make it? Don't worry! We always repost the recording when technology cooperates immediately after the stream. Or you can always check out the information discussed on the livestream over on our blog! Our website is www.FluffNFeathers.com.
If you have any questions or need to contact us, you can easily email us at [email protected]!
Aggression "Out of Nowhere"
Welcome to Munchie Monday, a new weekly livestream! Melanie, owner of Fluff and Feathers All Animal Training co-stars with Munchkin, resident parrot, every Monday at 7:00pmEST. Topics that we discussed are anything from animal behavior, care, training methods, and more! If you miss the livestream, don't worry! The replay is always posted after. Need to access the material faster, have a hearing impairment, or English isn't your native language? We post a written transcript on our blog found on our website wwww.FluffNFeathers.com after the live event.
This week's topic is aggression "out of nowhere" and some general explanations as to why it is happening. We always advise when aggressive behaviors start to immediately take your animal to a trusted vet to do a full workup to rule out undiagnosed medical conditions. If medically cleared, it is recommended to work with a certified and educated trainer using force-free, positive, and scientific training methods. Fluff and Feathers would love to help you and your animal with aggressive behaviors. You can message us here on Facebook or email us for a faster response at [email protected]
Talking about our online enrichment class!
In this live, Melanie and resident Merlin go over Fluff and Feathers newest online group class on enrichment for parrots and how it can be beneficial to a behavioral modification plan. To learn more about the group class and to sign up, please visit https://www.fluffnfeathers.com/enrichment-group-classes
