HOW I PREPARED MY COCKATOOS FOR OUTDOOR FREEFLIGHT

For the safety of your parrots, please DO NOT freefly your parrots without proper training. Even a fully clipped parrot unrestrained outdoors is at risk. To learn more, subscribe to the freeflight list:

There are about as many methods of training freeflyers as there are freeflyers. But, if you look beneath the surface, you will find that they all follow a common theme: positive reinforcement. The method most commonly used is called "clicker training" or at least some modified version of clicker training.

The purpose of this article is not to describe "the one true way" to teach your bird, nor is it intended to be a "users' guide" to freeflight or to training. What it will do is describe the methods that I used to prepare my outdoor flyers. My advice to you is to research, research, research, use all available resources and then apply your own common sense. This website and this article will list resources that I have found useful in educating myself.

There are five main areas that must be addressed to prepare your bird for outdoor freeflight. In basic terms, these are:

Recall training - teaching your bird to come when you call

Flight skills development - helping the bird to learn adequate flight skills to be successful outside

Stamina development - encouraging aerobic exercise to build up stamina

Familiarity with territory - promoting comfort and confidence in the outdoors

Contact Calls - developing a vocal communication method between you and your bird

Recall Training

The goal of recall training is simply to teach your bird to come to you when you give a command, cue, hand signal, etc. This concept can be taught whether the bird is flighted or not.

On the freeflight list, I read that "clicker training" was the way to teach the bird to come to you when you called. I didn't know a thing about clicker training except that it was a bit of a controversial topic in the avian community back then. Off I went to learn. The most useful references I found for learning about this were the book Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor, the Click Birds email list on yahoogroups, and the Clicking with Birds website by Linda Morrow. I can't recommend strongly enough that you begin your education by reading "Don't Shoot the Dog". It is a short, easily readable book that describes the concepts of clicker training and teaching through positive reinforcement. Once you understand that, the other resources will demonstrate how to actually train specific behaviors.

I am a mediocre trainer at best. I have failed pretty miserably with my dogs in the past, despite taking many lessons with them. I'm not into teaching my parrots to do parlor tricks. I just had one goal and that goal was very important to me. I knew I had to teach my birds reliable recall in order to have the confidence to set them free outdoors. Much to my surprise, I learned that almost all of my birds LOVE clicker training sessions, they really do! And they learn incredibly quickly. You may decide that you do want to teach your bird to perform silly tricks and other behaviors. These are the tools which will enable you to do so.

The concept is simple:

As mentioned in the previous article, I had identified Gucci Galah as my first potential candidate for outdoor freeflight. One of the reasons for this was that when out of his cage, he was likely to fly right to me on his own. All I had to do was to anticipate when he was about to fly to me, guickly give the cue "Fly to me" and when he did, click and give him a treat. He caught on very quickly and all that was left was to practice, practice, practice. If you are lucky enough to have a bird that does this, you're halfway to recall training already!

With my other birds, I needed to start from scratch. I started by teaching them "targeting" which means teaching them to touch an object (usually a small stick or dowel) with their beak on cue. This is the way that I taught them the basic concept of clicker training. It can also be a useful tool in shaping other behaviors. They all grasped this concept in only one or two sessions and then it was very easy to train other behaviors such as recall.

After that, all you need to do is practice, practice, practice to get the bird to perform the behavior consistently and under various conditions. For the best results, keep the training sessions short, frequent and fun!

Flight Skills Development

I am told that it is easiest to teach recall and flight skills to a fledgling. I can't confirm or deny this, since none of my flyers were that young when we started. I did have one advantage. Even though most of my birds started out their lives clipped, they all started flying on their own once their wing feathers started to grow out. This seems to be especially true of Cockatoos since they are such light bodied birds who are generally light on their feet. And Gucci was an inspiration and a motivater for all the rest. Some adult birds are not so inclined to fly on their own and need some help from you. You can learn about methods of encouraging flight on the freeflight list.

The following categories of flight skills need to be mastered before the bird can safely fly outdoors. Individual birds vary widely in their ability to achieve each of these skills.

Landing without crashing. Just about all birds have some trouble with this when first attempting flight and this is as true of fledglings as it is of older birds. One of mine, Daisy Citron, had this problem at first. It's important to be aware that a bird can be badly injured or even killed by crashing into a window or other solid object and you must supervise and help them until they master this skill. If the bird seems inclined to crash a lot, I advise only letting them fly in a much smaller room while they learn, so that they can't built up enough speed to crash hard. Also, take your bird around the house and "show" it windows. Bring it right up to the window and rap on the glass. Encourage the bird to knock on the glass with its beak. They are very smart and usually catch on quickly.

Even if your bird doesn't crash into solid objects, many have difficulty learning to land with precision. That is often the next step in developing flight skills.

Controlled flight A bird learns how to fly in a controlled manner through practice and experimentation. The only thing that you can do to help is to try to encourage and inspire your bird to fly as much as possible.

One of the best drills you can do to help your bird to improve its landing skills is to teach it to fly very short distances from your hand/arm to a familiar perch or cage. Once the bird is doing this repeatedly and consistently, gradually increase the distance you ask them to fly. I have taught some of mine the "go there" cue, where I point with my finger and say "go there" and they fly to the place where I pointed. This comes in quite handy when they are somewhere you'd rather they not be.

One of the things that I like to do with early flyers is to get them to fly around corners, through doorways, up and down stairways and into other rooms. I do it by playing games similar to "chase" and "hide and seek". Use your imagination!

Flying Down Flying down from any great height is among the most challenging skill for many birds to master. And among the most important! It's not clear if this is a skills issue, a confidence issue, or a little of both. It's very important that you work on this skill with your bird as much as you possibly can in a controlled indoor environment before it ever flies outside. Many are the first time outdoor flyers who wind up high up in a tree and fail to come down anywhere near the time their people would like.

I started working on this with Gucci Galah by lying down on the floor under his playstand and calling him to me. We worked on placing him on higher and higher perches and calling him to fly down so that he could master the skill. I also took him to fly a few times in a warehouse so that he could practice flying in a bigger space with much higher ceilings. Gucci never had any trouble with flying down but some of my other birds sure did.

Stamina Development

It's impossible to overstate just how much stamina is required to fly. With each set of skills they master, they must also build more and more stamina in preparation for flying outdoors. I think it must be akin to training to run marathons and that level of fitness is only achieved through constant practice. It is particularly challenging for the larger birds such as Macaws and Moluccan Cockatoos to build up any reasonable level of skills or stamina in the relatively small environment of the home. I recommend that you try to find a safe, large building that you can regularly take your bird to practice. Some potential buildings are warehouses, gymnasiums, meeting halls and abandoned grocery stores. These are skills that it's possible for your birds to learn outside but can be very stressful and risky during the learning process. Gucci was the only one of mine who got to practice in a large building before flying outside and I saw a big difference.

Familiarity With Territory

It's important that the bird is very comfortable with the great outdoors and all of its distractions and stressers. The bird should spend a lot of time outside in a flight or cage until it is comfortable with everything going on out there. If a flighted parrot flys away, it is just about always caused by panic or lack of solid flight skills, even if the bird has an outstanding recall response under normal circumstances. In many cases, this level of familiarity and comfort can take months. But, it's well worth it!

Contact Calls

I have learned that contact calls are an invaluable tool for locating your bird outside. The fact is that a parrot in a tree can be extremely hard to see, no matter whether the bird is bright white or vibrant red. That is a part of their natural defense system. Click here for an interesting description by Chris Biro on why this is so. The easiest way to locate your bird is by hearing them, which provides the clues for where to look. Words or sounds, it doesn't matter.

The first parrot I ever got to know, an African Grey, did a cellular phone ring every time her person left the room. If Bruce was in another room, he could make his cell phone ring and the bird would ring back. This would make a great contact call, audible over long distances.

In my household, we are a vocal bunch, so this is just something we do as a matter of course. If you need to train your bird to use a contact call, when the bird makes a sound or says a word or phrase regularly, you should always answer back with a sound, word or phrase. It works best if you always give a consistent response to a consistent sound from the bird. Then, after a while, you say it and they answer back. Pretty soon, it just becomes a matter of habit. Easy!

That describes, in a nutshell, how I prepared my Cockatoos for outdoor flight. Gucci flew outside alone for almost a year before I felt that the next flyer was ready. Daisy C2 was the next and the others followed, one by one. Their flight skills and flock dynamics continue to develop and evolve and it's fascinating and great fun to be able to observe all this. I hope that reading this will pique your interest enough to want to research further and learn more about the possibility of freeflight for your bird.