Learning to Teach

On September 20, 2005, Barbara Heidenreich, author of "Good Bird Magazine", came to Seattle to give an excellent seminar called "Parrot Behavior and Training."

The following is a write up by Nate Lott describing his experience at the seminar with Patani M2, the star of the day. Nate and his wife Betsy run Mollywood Sanctuary, a large sanctuary specializing in Cockatoos. He brought a few of his Cockatoos to the class to be students. As far as I know, this was both Nate and Patani's first experience with parrot training. I know it won't be the last!

If all you want is my impression, it was awesome. If you want details, read on… - by Nate Lott

As mentioned in other posts about the birds on Saturday, even those of us that didn’t feed that morning had trouble engaging our students. I wish I had read the pre-training info and seen the part about not feeding favorite foods the day before.

What I think finally got Patani interested was seeing me eat lunch. Watching me eat really got her attention. After lunch I chipped off some small bits of carrot and quickly determined she was ready to eat. We decided to try to teach her to wave on request.

Barbara came over and worked with us for about five minutes before Patani lost interest in the carrots. As it turns out though, those five minutes were enough to demonstrate the basic principles. Barbara had me start by offering her my arm as I would for a step-up. Every time Patani picked up her foot to step-up Barbara (she was faster than I was at first) would give her the ‘bridge’ and I would withdraw my arm and give her a carrot sliver. I do mean sliver, these pieces were smaller than half of my pinky finger nail.

For those of you who weren’t there, a bridge is an audio cue to the student that they have done what was requested and tells them that a reward, the positive reinforcement, is coming. The idea being that they may forget what they are being rewarded for by the time we get it to them. In this case just lifting her foot was an approximation or step in the direction we were going in order to teach her to wave.

While this was going on Barbara would comment on the different things Patani did. At one point she realized that she was being rewarded for something but wasn’t sure what it was. She decided to try different things to test the situation. She lifted her other foot and didn’t get a reward. She tried just standing still. Then she very deliberately lifted the correct foot and you could see the light go on when she was rewarded. Now she knew what was going on.

All during this time Barbara is continuing to talk to the class. Mostly telling us what we will do next to proceed with teaching Patani to wave. By the time she had had enough of the carrots, and Barbara had moved on to another student, I had a pretty good idea about how to proceed if and when I found another suitable reinforcement. Patani being a feathered pig, this didn’t take long.

Once I determined that Patani was willing to work for corn niblets we started again. Now when I put my arm up in the step-up spot I would say ‘wave’ and give her the bridge by saying ‘good’ when she lifted her foot. At the same time I was lifting my arm a little higher so she would lift her foot higher. About this time she decided she had had enough corn. We moved on to peas and she was back to work.

After several repetitions of this it was time to see if she had associated the word wave with the action. I said wave but didn’t put my arm up. She didn’t get this the first time so I put my arm up again while saying wave. She was back on cue. We did this only a couple of times before she no longer needed the arm to lift her foot. I would say wave and up came the foot. This is where we are in the picture, still getting her reward. It was only a minute or two after this that she decided she had enough peas but was still enjoying playing with me enough to do the wave without needing a reward.

All told this whole process took about 15 minutes. As I said, it was awesome…