FLIGHT SCHOOL JOURNAL
Some parrots, even those unfledged or clipped for years, can learn to fly fairly easily, once their wing feathers grow back in. Cockatoos, in particular, usually recover their flight skills quickly, probably because they are such light bodied, active birds with a very wide wingspan. But other species, after given back their wings, simply do not fly. Bartie, my Black Headed Caique, is just such a bird. After trying for years and years to encourage him to fly without success, I finally devised a plan that worked. I am sharing this journal so that others can learn from my experience. It is compiled from emails I sent to the freeflight list chronicling our progress. I hope that by reading this, you can encourage your birds to fly too.
It has always been very frustrating to me to live with a bird who will not fly. That is my Bartie Caique. He had all the reasons in the world not to fly, from his early upbringing to his little Caique physique (stocky body, very short wings). But, I always wanted him to fly, if only for the health benefits and the freedom. This is a very active little guy, no perch potato is this bird. But, the only time he would ever take off was when he was suddenly frightened. No exceptions!
I tried the "short tosses to the bed" technique a few times. But, he really, really hated that so I stopped. I could wave a broom at him and he would fly. But, I didn't want to do that either. All the other birds flying around were no inspiration to him. So, we stayed at this stalemate for the last seven or eiqht years.
June 12, 2005 - About six weeks ago, I devised a plan. Even I was skeptical that it would work, but at this point, I was willing to try almost anything. I put Bartie on a perch and held my hands, pressed together, side-by-side, palms up, literally one inch away from the perch and lured him with a treat. He stretched his little chubby body out and got on my hand. His feet didn't leave the perch until his beak was grasping my hand, but he did it. So, I decided to increase the distance at the smallest of small approximations over time. I literally increased the distance at less than an inch a week, with daily short sessions. At some point, after a few weeks, he could no longer stretch his little self to my hand, so a little flap / hop action began. This was a pretty big milestone. But, I forced myself to continue with the teeny, tiny increases in distance.
Today, he is flying more than six inches from the perch to my hand on cue (no luring necessary). This probably won't sound like much to most of you but for Bartie, this is HUGE! It's not a stretch, it's not a hop, he's *FLYING* on cue!!!! And, he will do it as many times as I ask him to.
I still don't know if he will ever fly volitionally, but if we never progress beyond this point, he is still getting the exercise and having a good time doing it. I'm going to keep increasing the distance slowly, slowly and just see what happens. I don't think I have the patience to do anything this incredibly tedious ever again but at this point, it has definitely been worth it!
June 16, 2005 - As of last night, Bartie is repeatedly flying at least 12" to my hand! This is a huge increase from 6" on Sunday. And I'm not pushing him at all, he's setting the pace. He seems to just love this! Definitely knows what he's supposed to do. The big challenge, in my mind, is not to let him try to fly too far that something bad happens, like a slip or a fall. So far, so good. I'm mindful that all this flying is a huge effort for him, so I'm also trying to let him build up his physical condition slowly. I'm seeing other subtle changes along the way. A couple of times during a session, he has been startled by something and took off. But, unlike in the past, when he would panic and end up someplace precarious, he flew in a little tight circle and ended right back where he started. He has never done that before that I can remember.
He is hilarious to watch. He takes off from the perch like a little kid jumping off the side of a pool. And his flying style is like a cross between a hummingbird and a brick. About as different from a Cockatoo's flight style as it gets. I haven't done flight training with a bird in a really long time, so this is fun!
June 20, 2005 - Yesterday, when I tried to have a flight school session with Bartie, he wanted nothing to do with it! I tried both in the morning, right before breakfast, and again at our usual late afternoon time. This was a first for us and he delivered a hard "no", turning his back on me completely. (My birds have found this to be a pretty effective way of communicating to me that they want nothing to do with what I'm asking.) He was so consistently cooperative up until then that I was really a bit concerned. I can only imagine that I've either been pushing him too far too fast lately (we're up to about 36"!) or else he just wanted a day off.
So, with some trepidation, I began our regular session this evening. I'm happy to report that he was as eager to do his little recalls as ever. But then, something REALLY exciting happened. Three different times, while I was standing there breaking his treats into little bits, he flew off his perch to me and landed dangling off my shirt. Granted, I was only a foot or two away but as far as I know, this is the first time he has EVER done any flying for transportation in his entire 10 years of life!!!!! This is such a big milestone for us I'm in shock. Can flying for fun be far away?
June 25, 2005 - I think it was last Tuesday that I reported that Bartie was flying around the room like a little maniac. Ever since then, he has pretty much refused to fly. ;-( Each day, I managed to coax one very short little flight to my hand only to ensure that we could end our fruitless sessions on a somewhat positive note. At this point, I have to conclude that we went too far too fast. That's only partly my fault, since most of his real distance ("distance" being a relative term in his case) flying was on his own impetus and not because I asked him to.
This morning, I was happy to see him return to his previous eagerness to fly to me on cue. ;-) So, I'm going to adjust my training strategy and I'd love to hear input from anyone. My plan is to stay at a distance of 4', one which he seems pretty comfortable with but is enough distance to meaningfully fly. I'm going to keep doing drills from that distance and no more and hope that he works on improving his skills, rather than my previous focus on increasing distance (and hoping the skills would follow). There's got to be a fear/confidence factor in the increasing distance he was being asked to fly. If we stay at the same comfortable distance, maybe the impact of that won't be so strong. If he decides to take more days off, I'll probably reduce the distance by another foot and see if that makes a difference.
July 3, 2005 - It's been about a week since I wrote about Bartie's Flight School so here's an update. As I described last time, we have stuck with the same distance of 4' or less and just kept practicing. It's not nearly as exciting to write about, but he hasn't chosen to take a "day off" since either. We've been working on generalizing his fly-to-me to all kinds of different locations, as well as varying the angle of ascent and descent to my hand. Alas, poor Bartie has lost the "privilege" of stepping up. Now, when he or I want him on my hand, he has to fly, even if it's only a few inches. He has been doing quite well at adapting to this change. One noticeable change is that when he startle-flies now, he flies *up* and lands somewhere on purpose, instead of his previous downward trajectory ending in a crash. It's a big improvement, although my intention was never to improve his startle-flight skills. I guess this is a sign that his strength has increased a lot. Maybe his control has increased a bit too. He still flies volitionally only occasionally. The other day Dana and I were sitting a few feet apart chatting and he took it upon himself to fly to her. Unfortunately, Dana has a pretty well developed startle response herself (especially when it comes to Caiques?), so the result was pretty dramatic. But, I was still pleased that he used flight as a deliberate means of transporting himself.
July 11, 2005 Bartie's flight is *much* stronger and *much* faster than ever before. His posture in flight is still pretty abnormal, almost erect. And he is still not flying volitionally very often, other than when cued. My goal is to bring him to a level of "natural", effortless flight. Either he will never achieve that or it will take a really long time. At this point, I'm operating as if the latter is true. He has 10 years of not-flying to overcome. This is a fascinating process to observe. Now that he has built up all this strength and stamina, my strategy is to start increasing the distance again, a little at a time. He's been flying 2' - 4' on cue for the last few weeks. I'm thinking distance flying is what will flatten out his flying posture in the long run. He hasn't really resisted flying in any of our sessions since I stopped increasing the distance and it will be interesting to see if he starts that again.
July 13, 2005 Bartie Caique has been flying A LOT this week. He's been flying regular reps of 8' to 10' which is really far for him. He does start to lean into his flight more than before but about halfway to me, he straightens back up again as he assumes his exaggerated landing posture, long before he needs to. I believe he reached another major milestone today. He turned mid-flight! We're not talking loop-de-loops here, but he would start to fly to me and then take a left and land on a cage instead, something he hasn't done before. I think that's the start of a major new set of flight skills: mid-air turns. And something he figured out all by himself, which is pretty cool. Up until now, simply staying aloft and managing to land took all of his concentration.
Those of you who have birds who fly reasonably well may not be able to appreciate just how difficult and painstaking this has been for my little green bean. But, all my other birds fly very well (and learned fairly quickly) so it fascinates me to watch how different this process is with Bartie. And even though it may not sound like it, he's come really, really far.
July 26, 2005 - At this point, we had reached a sort of plateau. While still doing daily flight drills of 12' - 14', Bartie's flight skills didn't seem to be improving much and he was not generalizing his flying outside of our sessions much at all. My friend Nate reminded me of his approach described in a great article on his website. I decided to try his approach which was sort of the same thing I was doing, but in reverse.
Click here to read: Teaching "Fly To Perch" by Nate Waddoups
August 6, 2005 - After re-reading Nate's "getting your bird to fly" article, I tried to get Bartie to fly *from* my hand *to* the perch, the reverse of what we've mastered in the past few months. Let me tell you, it was DARN discouraging! He was no more willing to leave my hand to fly to the perch than he was initially when learning to fly from the perch to my hand. The very best he would do was, again, to stretch his little body out as far as he could to grab the perch and pull himself over. Back to square one! The only improvement I saw was that he "got" what I was cueing him to do right away. He definitely understands this cue / reward business very well. But that was it. I even once tried to jerk/tip my hand slightly toward the perch, but he just held on for dear life, stumbling wildly to keep his balance. So, for 4 or 5 sessions, that's where we were stuck and I was feeling like I hadn't really made any progress at all toward getting him to be comfortable with flight.
And then, today, he did it! He easily flew 3 or 4 inches from my hand to his perch, just like that. And, since he accomplished in a few days what took him more than a month to achieve the first time, I guess that shows that his flight aptitude or confidence or something really has improved. And I know from previous experience that once he gets those first few inches, it's easy to increase the distance relatively quickly. So, now we have new challenges and skills to work on.
August 7, 2005 - Whenever I succeed in getting a new behavior out of my birds, I'm always afraid that it's going to be some sort of anomaly, never to be repeated. So, I was anxious to see if Bartie would "fly to perch" again this morning. I'm very happy to report that he is doing it repeatedly, as if he's been doing it all along! No big deal.
I'm thinking that when your goal is to get your bird to fly (rather than "recall training"), "fly to perch" has a lot more applications than "fly to me" and ultimately can take *me* right out of the equation. For instance, in no time today, I had Bartie flying 20" from one cage top to another, something he has never done in his whole life! He'll do it over and over when I cue and I think that this is a BIG STEP in the process of getting him to fly for normal locomotion.
August 10, 2005 - Mark your calendars. Today, for the very first time in his life, my little green bird flew because he wanted to. Not because I cued him, not because he was scared. Because he wanted to.
I had been cueing him to fly back and forth between two cages 20" or so apart. Then, I went to prepare fruit snacks for the rest of the guys. Bartie was on one cage top and Daisy C2 was on the other. I happened to glance over at just the moment when he decided to fly over and chase her off the other cage. And then he flew back where he came from. Like it was no big deal.
Some might think that one bird chasing another is not something to be desired, but I couldn't care less. Bartie is less than half the size of any other bird here and waaaaaaaayyyyy less than half the flyer.
I can't even tell you how happy I am right now. I've been waiting for this moment for most of his 10 years of life. And that's a really long time......
August 14, 2005 - Bartie's "fly to" behavior has generalized to all over the house. Now, just like all my other birds, when I'm hanging out with the birds, I can call Bartie to me, give him a treat, and then fly him back to whatever he was doing before, then go on about my business. A few minutes later (maybe after doing that same thing with another bird or two), I do it again with Bartie. It's a big change! He has also become quite a bit 'lighter on his feet' these days. Not 'Cockatoo' light-on-his-feet, but much more so than he has ever been. It's becoming almost difficult to remember how totally grounded he was up until a few months ago.
His flying style is still awkward but I really think that this phase we're in now will go a long way toward creating the flight habit that we have been talking about.
At the risk of sounding sappy, it's hard for me to express how much the on-going encouragement I have received from members of the freeflight list has helped. Doing something this long and tedious, with infinitesimal increments of progress is really hard (and against my nature!). I started working on this in early May! You guys helped to keep me inspired. Give yourselves a pat on the back for having a part in giving my little Bartie the gift of flight. (Influencing behavior through positive reinforcement really works..... on me!)