Hello and welcome to the Animal Training Academy Making Ripples podcast show, the show where we share the stories of the ripple-making extraordinaires with behavior nerd superpowers who make up the Animal Training Academy membership. I'm your host and one of the happiness engineers at Animal Training Academy, Shelley Wood from Drop Your Jaws Dog Training in Cape Girardeau, Missouri in the United States. We're absolutely thrilled and grateful to have you here with us today.
Make sure you go ahead and hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss a single episode. This show is brought to you on behalf of the Animal Training Academy membership, so if you like the conversations in these episodes, then we want to invite you to continue them with like-minded people in the ATA membership, which you can find out more about at www.atamember.com.
Within the membership, you can get access to twice-monthly live web classes, the back catalog of previous web class replays, plus a huge library of videos and projects to help you problem-solve your training challenges. And we're a sociable bunch with an exclusive private Facebook group and forums area. It's like a Netflix social media platform for animal behavior geeks. Today we are excited to welcome Robin Hormans to the show. Robin is the owner of Parrot SOS.
She has dreams of providing quality education materials to all pet bird owners so that they are better able to communicate and bond with their birds. Just like we do with dog training, our parrot training focuses on building foundation skills, paving the way for an owner and bird to live a long, happy life together by lessening the need for behavior modification or re-homing down the road.
Robin is a Certified Parrot Behavior Consultant with the IAABC, a Certified Professional Bird Trainer with the IATCB, a Certified Training Partner with the Karen Pryor Academy. She is also an Accredited Dog Trainer with IAABC. Starting in 1998, working at HARI through years of university and additional training now as CPBC, Robin continues to learn about evidence-based behavior change. Welcome, Robin. Hi, it's a pleasure to be here today. Hi, I'm super excited to have you here today.
Thank you for running through all of those letters. I know it's a lot. Those are a lot of letters. I know what some of them mean, but I don't know what all of them mean. What is H-A-R-I? That is the Hagen's Avocultural Research Institute, commonly known as HARI. They are a bird food brand. They also own a variety of other food brands. Hagen is a fairly large worldwide brand.
They have an avian research institute here in Canada, where I'm from, and I was able to do some work for them way back in the 1900s and dating myself a little bit. HARI is a wonderful, wonderful place. They have some great staff there as well. I've worked with them to this day. They're a really interesting resource. Very cool. Yeah, it sounds like a really interesting resource. Maybe we will hear a little more about them. Maybe we won't. I'm not sure.
Why don't you start us out, though, by telling us a little bit more about your story? You've told us a little bit about there in your bio, but let's have you dive a little deeper, if you would, and tell us about how you started working with animals and some of the work you've done over the years and what you're doing today. Yeah, and I'm super happy to share my story. I think it's really interesting to hear how everybody gets into the animal world. My family's always been with animals.
My parents were dog trainers in the before times, in the time of the before land, always growing up with dogs around. And fortunately for me, we had a little pet budgie who lived in the dining room and the little tiny budgie cage again in the before times. She was a little yellow budgie and she was incredible. She came out and flew around the house.
She'd whistle tunes and really sparked something in me that I couldn't ignore from the age of six, just loving little, little budgies, always having a little bird around. And that grew into the bird obsession where I actually had a whole bunch of budgies and bred them for show. If you can believe the dog show parallel in the bird world, there are show budgies commonly called English budgies, and they're judged for standards that are published just like a dog show. It was a great time.
I was a teenager. I thought it was hilarious, fun. And I learned a lot about genetics and birdkeeping in general. And it was a different time. This was more than a couple of years ago. All of those birds lived as good a life as I could at that time in large aviaries and had breaks from the breeding program. I learned a whole bunch, especially fun for a 16 year old. That grew into where I wanted to do more with my life.
So going to university for a degree in biology, trying to find my niche as a young person who lives in Canada, who's not necessarily, Canada's not really known for their tropical birds. And my poor mother having to help direct me to my passions and also trying to mediate that young girl wanted to work with parrots professionally, sort of sounded a little far -fetched at that time. But I could never really let it go.
And as I went through university and went through life and learned more about biology and the behavior sciences and always had my own pet birds, one of the birds that I actually bred in the before times was a little cockatiel. His name is Monster and he still lives with me to this day. He is 24 years old. He has a little brother cockatiel who's 23. And yeah, I have grown up with him. I was that teenager who got the cockatiel, but then was able to continue that bird's care.
Even though I moved across the country, even though I went to university, even though I had to work two, three jobs to make ends meet, and even through the boyfriends and the break ups was able to do everything I could for these birds. And it really grew into the passion that I have today, which is now credentialed and certified and taken all of that passion and directed it through science evidence-based learning to actually have, as close as you can, a degree in pet birds.
Yeah. Hey mom, I did it. That is awesome. Very cool that you've wanted to work with birds since you were, you said six years old or just since forever, basically, right? I can totally relate to having an animal friend who's always by our side through all the moves and the changes in life and changes in partners and all of that. However, I've always had dogs and cats and I've never had a bird. And so sadly my animals have not lived to be 24.
So what a beautiful relationship you and Monster must have. I'm sure you treasure that. Sweetheart. Yeah, I do treasure him. He is now in old age for his species. Some species of pet birds can live quite a long time, 50, 60, 80 or more years. There are a few reports of Monster's species. He's a cockatiel living into their thirties, but in the same way that some humans age in their body at a different rate than the age of the number on the calendar, Monster's old at 24.
He's got some medical issues that are showing his age now. So very happy to have him. But yeah, I would give him a senior title. Yeah, super fun. How many birds do you live with right now? I have four birds in my home right now. So I have the two cockatiels, Monster and Skeeter, who are 24 and 23 years old. I have a Congo African Grey who is 25 years. I got him when he was six years old through a rescue. And the fourth bird is a foster bird who is also an African Grey. And she's about five.
So she's in transit. She's likely going to be going to a new home, but I'm super happy to have her in my house for now. I love her to pieces. She's wonderful. And do you foster birds often? Do you foster them frequently? I don't foster that often. I really enjoy working with birds and something I get to do all the time with my business, Parrot SOS, is work directly with the individuals who have the birds in their home.
And I get asked fairly often if I would take the bird board and train style and do the work with them and then give them back. And I tend not to do that in any way, shape or form. It's not something I like to do. This particular bird needed to be surrendered and also had some behavior concerns, so it was a good match.
But generally, I want to work directly with the bird's primary caregiver so that they can develop the bond and develop their relationship and get those foundation skills with their own animal. I find that really rewarding. Yeah, this one's sort of fun too. Just a brief, brief detour from birds. Do you live with any other animals at the moment? I currently have a rabbit in my home. She's super sweet. She was a stray found in the back alley, found her way into my heart and lives with us.
Over the years, I've lived with dogs, I've lived with cats. Oh, and I currently do have a small tropical fish tank, just a little freshwater tank for fun. I don't do any training with them right now, but I have in the past. Yeah, the rabbit's a really interesting one. They're similarly needing foundation skills and not a lot of training resources are available from the evidence-based positive reinforcement corner. So really interesting to work with her too.
Yes, we had Thea Harding on the podcast a while back and she talked about rabbit training and it does sound like there is a pretty good gap there as far as resources for rabbit owners. So it's great that we have folks like her and yeah, working with rabbits. Absolutely. Yeah, it's super fun. It's really interesting. Yeah. So let's talk some more about birds. You started your educational training, your educational background and training, it sounds like was in biology.
And how did you then what steps did you take to get to where you are now with all of these letters and being a bird behavior consultant and all of that? What has led you to that? What was your next step after biology? Well, that's a question I often get asked as well. There at that time were not very many mentors or schools that were teaching behavior modification for anything other than dogs, necessarily. Most dog training schools for dog trainers are focused primarily on dogs.
And there aren't a ton of places to become a trainer of other species. I know there are becoming more and more common now it's 2024 when we're recording this. This is a thing that there are mentorships and schools that are offering other species. But at the time, I was a little bit aimless. I really wasn't sure where to go and how to become a bird trainer as you would become a dog trainer. Because I do love dogs and do have some background working with dogs.
I was teaching classes at our local humane society with dogs. And actually, the trainers at my local humane society encouraged me to do the Karen Pryor Academy certified training partner program. And I was able to complete that and felt like I had certification under my belt, even though it wasn't bird education. It was quality, positive reinforcement, evidence-based education.
And through taking the KPA CTP program, I identified a lot of parallels in those foundation behaviors that we do with dogs and their owners, to help them live with their family, to help them stay in the home to help maybe prevent behavior problems from cropping up later. And those foundations of, you know, walk calmly on the leash and come when you're called and name attention and even sit and down and stay as more, you know, skill type things rather than environment type things.
They're parallels to the bird world. And I was thinking, wouldn't it be amazing if all of these pet parrots have this type of foundation skill set with their new people? Because often though, these pet parrots are in a pet store at a breeder and purchased by very loving families who want to give their bird the world. They have great cages and great toys and great diets and great environment. And then the very first thing that happens is there's a bump. There's a behavioral bump.
The bird won't come out of the cage. The bird won't go back into the cage. The bird won't go to my spouse. And there was a gap. There was a void of what to do next. Who do you talk to? Do you go and call the pet store back up and say, hey, how do I get my bird to go back in his cage? Where do you go for that information? I feel like many dog people, no matter where you found your dog as an adult, as a shelter, as a puppy, would then know, hey, I'm having a bit of a problem with my dog.
You won't come when I call. I should probably call a trainer. And I wanted that to be something that existed in the bird world. I wanted somebody to have a bit of a bump behaviorally and go, hmm, I'm having a problem. Who should I call? Oh, I'm going to talk to the bird trainer. I know that bird training is a thing. There have been some wonderful trainers that have been around in the last 20 years that have really helped our pet bird owners realize that there's some great resources out there.
All right. Let's take that model and go, what are the foundation skills that every bird should know? What are the foundation skills that will help build the relationship between the bird and the owner? How can we work together on this and get that information to those people? And so that was how I created my very first incarnation of Parrot SOS, which at the time was called the Calgary Bird School.
I started nice and local, set my sights on what I felt like I could do, which is my local city in my local area. And I had the equivalent of dog training classes, but for birds. So had a location, had people come with their bird in a carrier, they each got their own table, they each got their own set of instructions, and we would work on a basic foundation skill.
There would be some instruction, there would be some demo, there would be some time to work with your own animal, very similar to that, you know, dog training class, but with birds. It was fantastic. We had a ton of fun. There were some challenges in there too, but it was really well received, and I still have people to this day asking, when am I going to do the next bird school? It was so much fun. And when did you stop doing the bird school and why?
Bird school as it was, the Calgary Bird School, morphed a little bit into the Canada Bird School, so I could use the same CBS logo. The frame was the same, trying to think bigger, and then COVID hit, nothing was open, and no one could go anywhere, do anything, let alone bring their bird to a bird training class. It was a bit of a challenge for everyone at that time. 2020 was tricky, and I moved all of my classes online.
So like many have access to Zoom, we put our bird training classes online on Zoom. I was then able to record a lot of these classes, and recording the ideas that were in them led me to creating more of a database and more of a resource base for more people.
Instead of having to attend Wednesday night at 6 p.m. to attend the class, let's take these foundation skills, put them online in a class that's accessible any time of the day, 24-7, log in, get the recording, get the skills, and get the projects, the little homework projects. So we've identified foundation skills for our bird community in our classes as a target, which is specifically a beak target.
Any target we talk about, we're going to talk about specifically a beak target, unless we specify otherwise. So beak target. A station, which is stand on this particular spot, please, whether it's inside the cage or out of the cage. A recall, which is come here, please come towards the spot that I'm, please come. The fourth foundation skill we call step up, which is where the bird puts their feet onto the human's hand or fingers.
And the step up skill is something we take for granted with a lot of birds. We ask them to step up, meaning please come forward and step onto my hand, generally hand. The step up skill is actually a little more complex than that, and we go into those details. So between target, station, the recall we do, and a step up skill, those are our four foundations.
If every bird could know versions of those, it would be amazing because now they can communicate with their human and their human can communicate with them. And when the human says, hey, could you move over a little bit? They can give a cue and the bird knows, ah, just go over to, oh, I got it. I gotcha. I gotcha. Just like we do with dogs. I can see where those skills would be really critical for helping birds and their humans live together a little bit more cooperatively, I guess.
I can just, I've not ever had a bird or lived with a bird, but just like you were talking about earlier, I wouldn't be, I mean, I would just because of my involvement in the animal training world. But if I were just a person who was not really involved in the animal training world, I'm not sure that I would have any idea where to go for resources for training or behavior for my bird.
And listening to you talk through those skills, target with a beak and station and recall and step up, I can see how all of those things could be used to ask the bird to move to different locations. And then I find myself wondering how people are achieving meeting that need when they don't have those foundation skills. So really important for them to have them. I see you nodding. That's a great question. Those skills are the ones that we've identified as foundations.
And just like we have people who have dogs who have never taken their dog to a manners class and have never talked to a trainer and have an understanding with their dog of probably all of those basic things of please move a little bit. I need to sit on the sofa or, Hey, it's dinner time. Could you come on over here to your dinner bowl? Those communicative skills come naturally to some people and come naturally to some relationships.
Some need a little more assistance and going to a dog trainer helps to create that communicative doing the puppy class, partly for the puppy, partly for the human, having communication skills that are two way between the owner and the bird between the human and the bird are almost a new idea in the bird world. Fortunately, or unfortunately, we haven't done a ton of bird training for pet birds up until I want to say 1995.
Like we're talking a 30 year amount of time where there's been any kind of talk of training at all. And we've had to go from, can we train our birds? Should we train our birds to how are we going to do it? To could we make it better? Could we use an evidence-based positive reinforcement style training system? And to this day, there are still a mix of opinions and I'm not going to say skills, a mix of training schools offering a mix of behavior modification techniques.
I specifically do my school with the positive reinforcement side of things weighing heavily. And if we talk about any other modification skills, we talk about why, um, for example, the step up that we teach is going to be asking the bird to come forward. We have a five part thing for step up. The bird needs to come towards you. You're not going to be going towards the bird to chase them around. So the bird comes towards you. The bird has some sort of indication they're about to come on.
Usually it's a foot that comes up a little bit. It could be a lean. So the bird indicates. And right there, those two things have not been taught by the old ways of doing stuff. It was when you want the bird to step on, you go get them and you push into their stomach until they're standing on your foot because you are demanding the step up. This is happening now. And you can see the parallels within the dog training world where the birds learn that when the hand approaches, you jump on.
And so now they've got this essentially cued behavior and we're going to flip it around. We're going to go, yeah, we want them to think jumping on your hand is the best thing in the world. So we've got our five parts that say the bird looks at you. The bird indicates the bird's going to put both feet on your hand before you start moving your hand.
We have a fourth one is called up and out where we make sure we're not bumping any bit of the bird, the tail, the head, the wings, very common to bump a tail as you're moving the bird away from a perch. And then the fifth part is a reinforcer of some sort, some sort of awesome thing that the bird is getting. Because they've jumped on your hand doesn't mean we're done. Let's make it amazing for that bird.
So that we are expecting the next time our hand comes up and those five things are around, we're going to be getting that same behavior. There's a lot more to it. Those are the five parts of it that we talk about to get a really awesome voluntary step bird onto hand behavior. And it's easy enough for the humans to see and it's easy enough for the bird to understand. But we're not shoving our hand into their stomach until they step on the perch anymore.
We've got more information we can do a little bit differently and make it work for everyone. I love that. I love step up. I love step up. It's so cool. You've never had a bird on your hand. Get one. It's so cool. It sounds really cool. I never have. I don't think I ever have had a bird on my hand. If I have, it's been a very, very long time ago. So yeah, I need to try that sometime. But yeah, I can see where a step up would be really cool.
And it's really cool listening to you talk about it because you can just see and hear the passion in your voice as you talk about it. And I really liked listening to you talk about the training methodologies and strategies and techniques and how as we get more information that kind of shapes what we do and changes what we do and really sounded like some kind of growth mindset kind of thinking there. And I really liked that.
And I also think that maybe I see a parallel with your own work, not the specific methodology or anything that you're using in training, but I'm thinking about how you started with those in-person classes. And then you got some information there. And of course, COVID was a big setback, but it sounds like you probably also, there was some other learning that happened that made it make more sense for you to continue down the road of developing or sticking with the online classes.
Can you think of some of the biggest things that you learned, some of your biggest takeaways from those in-person classes about maybe some of the things that were amazing and went really well and some of the things that it's like, oh, that's kind of challenging. Maybe this isn't the best format for what I'm trying to do. Absolutely. There were both. There were so many learning opportunities for me out of these in-person classes, especially with birds.
And I think some of these challenges were paralleled through some of the cat kindergartens when they did the first few of those, however many 10, 15 years now. Birds are pets in our homes, but generally we don't take them for walks around the neighborhood and we don't, you know, go to the pub and have your birds sit with you. They're just not quite the same type of companion as the dogs are, which are a little more mobile.
Now I do know people who do that, but we're talking generally speaking, most of these birds that were coming to classes lived a very good life in their home and going into a crate generally meant going to the vet. And so having a negative association with going into a crate is something that we need to overcome because now we're going into a crate and we're going to go to the bird school. Bird school's super fun and they get there, but their eyes are wide. Their stance is very wide.
They're gripping tightly and they're not quite able to get their attention level simmered down. They're a little bit on edge. They're a little bit not, you know, six, seven, eight out of 10 for fear, anxiety, stress. No, they're not on the FAS scale at that point. They're just gripping tightly, wide-eyed, not learning, observing. Am I safe? What the heck is going on and why are we here? It's a brand new space, a brand new people, there's stuff going on. Holy moly.
And having them going in and out of a crate was a whole thing. Having them going in and out of their travel cages is a whole thing. It generally took two or three bird schools for a bird to come to the bird school, come out of their crate and go, oh, I remember this place. It was super fun last time. All right, we can get settled and start to learn.
And having those couple of classes where the bird was just not quite able to be in that learning headspace meant that the owners were getting frustrated because they're there and they've got their reinforcers and they're in a class and they're expected to perform. There was just a level of expectation that I needed to then communicate to the humans to say, you're here and letting your bird experience this in a positive way is learning. We don't have to necessarily do the lesson. This is a lot.
Your bird hasn't done this before ever or has had a negative association with something like a veterinarian. So that type of work I needed to communicate a little bit better when these people were coming to the live classes the first couple of times. Being able to point it out the third, fourth or fifth time, look, you've come, you've got your bird and they're ready to work right away. We don't need the 15 minutes decompression time. Look, they're ready to go. Let's do it right away.
So those are some learning things that I definitely picked up. The expectation of the humans to come to class very similar to a dog class also meant that they were putting a lot of pressure on the bird in general. Some birds were getting shoved into a cage just to come to class so that they could learn and that set them up to not perform as well. And that expectation of the human needed to be adjusted before they even came to a class.
So it was almost like I needed to call each person to say before you come, before you even think about putting your bird in a crate, could you do these things? Do you know if your bird will take a piece of food out of your hand? And we had birds that were attending that were not taking food out of their owner's hands. They weren't what we would call tame.
Though I don't like that term, but taming is in our world the process of having a bird come forward in the cage, take food from your hand or perch on your hand is sort of the thought. The bird's not coming forward. They're not necessarily comfortable and that's okay. But I can't say to a person who's done so well to get their bird into a crate and come to a class and their bird's just not even able to take food from their hand. I needed to get on that before all of that happened.
So setting that up was definitely a learning point for me. Some of the benefits we had from those classes were once the birds were comfortable or the birds that were a little more socialized that had traveled to other places before were coming to these classes and learning some really valuable skills in the frame of an hour or less than an hour.
Because you know with dog training the working moments and then the pausing moments happen throughout class and so you'll work for two, three, maybe five minutes and then everybody pauses and we'll talk about it and decompress what we've learned and then we'll go back and do a little more teaching. Those birds were picking up a targeting skill within one class. Bingo bango we're good to go. Here's your target.
Here's your clicker if you're using the clicker, which we didn't always use a clicker but it was handy for some. You've got target. You can take it now. You can run with that. If you want to use a target stick go ahead. If you want to use the target stick as part of your recall we can now do this.
If you want to use that target stick and take it to a voluntary medical procedure like eating food out of a syringe we're golden and so the idea of having the bird go from out of their crate to learning these new skills in an hour people loved it. It was so empowering. It was empowering for the bird. It was empowering for the people. They couldn't get enough. They just wanted more and more and more so really value those experiences from that in -person time.
Something that I've done now nowadays now that I don't generally do in-person classes is when I'm going to speak let's say in another city in another location having a speaking time I'm going to be speaking on this topic that'll be a whatever a two hour three hour thing and then having no birds at that speaking event but then having a one hour bring your birds session limited number of attendees limited number of birds and base criteria for people to be able to come.
Your bird has to eat out of your hand. Your bird has to be comfortable going in and out of crates. Your bird has to be able to do a couple of these basic things and then having those spots as almost an intensive workshop for those say eight people and we could do that one hour intensive after the speaking day. I've done that a couple of times. It's been really well received. The birds love it. The humans love it. The challenge that continually persists is one of health.
Parrots are exotic but parrot species there's I believe more than 350 different species of parrot around the world. Not all are in captivity in aviculture but we see dog is a species. Cat is a species and imagine having eight birds eight different species in a room. How do we keep them safe from viruses, biological issues? How do we keep them safe from harming each other? How do we keep everybody safe in that space?
I know my veterinarian would prefer that no bird that was out in the world ever came in contact with another pet bird because of the risk of disease transmission and there are some pretty gnarly bird diseases out there and it's not something that has enough research to be curable. They're most of them pretty well fatal. You have a virus. We're talking a major issue. How do we keep everyone's safety first and foremost before going into all of this fun behavior stuff?
We don't have a rabies vaccination. Birds don't get rabies but there there aren't any vaccinations for any of these very serious very communicable diseases. It's tricky. Something that I did when I did have my in-person classes and I have continued to do is to give a working team, the humans and their bird, a single eight -foot table. One of those tables from any conference center. Those eight-foot plastic fold-away tables. That is your space.
Every table gets disinfected before and after use I use Vircon. It's a viricide. I also put hand sanitizers on each table and I ask people not to go from table to table. Try not to let your bird jump around on every person's shoulder. Not everyone is comfortable with that and having an attestation of health, though it doesn't really cover anyone's butt, but having someone say my bird is generally healthy. I'm not worried about their health in any way.
I'm coming with a bird that has seen a vet in the last year and has been generally healthy enough. It makes people more aware that these are concerns when we have birds in space together. It's tricky. That's probably the trickiest part for me. It's not the behavior, it's the health. Yeah it sounds like it would be really complicated and definitely something that you'd have to be incredibly on top of to keep everybody safe.
So well good for you for continuing to try to find new ways to make that sort of in-person interaction happen for those who can benefit from it. I think that definitely myself and I'm sure that other people who are listening are going to see parallels even with dog training classes, even dogs who we do take everywhere with us.
I think that other dog trainers are going to hear a lot of common challenges that they experience in group classes sometimes as well in the things that you were talking about with birds. And getting people to practice things before they come to class to make sure that the birds or the individuals, whatever species they are, have certain skills on board first is a great way to try to address that.
But then shifting to online just eliminates all those health needs that your health risks that you were just talking about as well as all those other challenges. And it sounded earlier like another benefit to the online work was the broader reach. It increased your reach quite a bit. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah and so just maybe really helping you reach for that mission of educating all pet parents, pet bird parents about their birds needs.
So do you have classes like going, are they on demand, are they, how does your online stuff work? We have a variety of options online and definitely you're right it really speaks to that mission of providing this opportunity for foundation skill learning to as many pet birds and their people as possible. So we have on-demand courses, I have 21 available right now on Parrot SOS. They are a recording of the presentation that is done as well as text and picture and video elements of each topic.
So we try to break it down as easy as possible for each human to be able to absorb. And we do the foundation skills but we also have other topics. So there's 21 courses that are yeah 24 -7, go online, take a look. They vary in price. I want it to be very affordable for those who need it. And I'm in Canada so if you're in the United States you benefit from the dollar exchange rate which is almost 40% off. If you're a United States person, come to Canada, you get a real good price deal.
So all of my prices are going to be in Canadian. But the idea is to get this accessible to as many people as possible while still maintaining the value of it. I do offer live classes over Zoom. So we do our foundation series with those four foundation behaviors twice a year. They are done over Zoom with these people where we have time to discuss the behavior and then time to work with them over Zoom as well.
It works fantastic because the bird and their human are in the place that they are most comfortable. We're setting them up for success by having them in their own home, on their own sofa, on their own coffee table, in places that they would normally be interacting. And it's also not having me in the room. I'm on a screen and so there isn't even that stranger standing in the corner staring at them. It's just a computer screen.
So it's been really, really helpful to have the virtual access to people's birds and their relationships because I've been able to do a lot more work and a lot better work with them. So the foundation classes are offered live over Zoom twice a year and there are four classes in that. We do also offer master classes live on Zoom often. I've been trying to do once a month. I got real sick recently so not last month.
But once a month we'll deep dive into a topic like step up or body language or we'll talk about problem behaviors. And another thing I do offer is private consultations just like you would with a dog behavior consultant. Having a private consultation means the individual with the issue gets an individually customized behavior modification plan because every animal is unique and every home is unique and every situation is unique.
We take that as unique and do a functional assessment and figure out what's going on and then build them a specific behavior plan. So I do a lot of virtual consultations as well. Between the online classes, the master classes, the foundation series, yeah, there's lots going on. Awesome. It sounds like lots of wonderful stuff going on and we'll link to everything in the show notes for folks to find you online. So if they want to take those classes, it's all basically it's all Parrot SOS, right?
Parrotsos.com and then Parrot SOS on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and TikTok. Is that right? Everything is, yep, Parrot SOS. Yep. Awesome. All right. Well, Robin, you are too interesting. I could continue asking you questions down the road that we have been on and just learning more about your services and the different types of training that you're doing and all of that. But let's kind of shift gears a little bit and dive into some more specifics right now.
Could you share with us now about a training-related challenge that you've experienced and talk to us a little bit about how you worked through it or are working through it? I'd love to. I love working through behavior challenges. I love working with my clients with their behavior challenges and really looking at that individual and the function of that behavior for that individual has opened my eyes to all sorts of different possibilities.
So some really interesting stuff that I'm doing right now with the foster bird that I'm working with, who is an African gray parrot. She's five years old. She's currently doing some behaviors that I was really not sure what the heck was going on and they started to escalate. So what was happening is when changing the food and water bowls in a parrot cage, like the one I have, there's a little door for the little bowl and it's different than the front door of the cage.
There's a little side feeding door and opening and closing that door, this foster bird would lunge and bite the dish while it was sitting in its little holder, which isn't necessarily unusual. We do have a number of pet birds who tend to do that lunging biting behavior on their food bowls. What was interesting was that that behavior continued when the food bowl was out of the cage.
It was sitting on the counter, it's in the dish drying rack in the sink, it's filled with food, it's empty, wherever that dish happened to be seemed to be the cue, if she could see it, to fly towards it, land beside it, lunge at it and bite this bowl. This bowl is specifically a stainless steel bowl. We thought it might have been something about stainless steel.
The issue became when you were holding the bowl in your hand, she'd often redirect from biting the bowl to biting the fingers, which became an issue that needed to be addressed more seriously than just biting a bowl while you're feeding a bird in a cage. It was also at an intensity and a duration that was starting to be really prolonged.
We were talking about intensity level of maybe a nine out of ten, very focused, very intense and unable to distract this bird with anything else, as well as a duration. We're talking about five minutes of maintaining that eight or nine out of ten intensity and focus, laser beam focus and unable to be redirected. Those were the things that were really interesting to me as a behavior consultant. Fortunately, this bird is in my home and I'm able to do some work with her specifically.
Looking through problem solving this, first we go to what's the function? What would be the function for a bird to lunge and bite at a metal bowl, empty or full, in her cage or not in her cage? What the heck is going on? Because this came from a rescue situation and was surrendered to a rescue group, a bird rescue group, just like dog rescue groups. I'm technically her foster home. There was likely some unpredictability in her previous life as far as feeding schedule or as far as routine goes.
My analysis was thinking if the antecedent is bowl is in vicinity and the behavior is lunge at bowl, bite at bowl, the consequence, the outcome is likely the human remembering to put food in the bowl and put the bowl in the cage. It's likely due to this unpredictable schedule and going, I don't know what, hey, pardon me, human, human, ma'am, may I have something? It goes in this dish, please.
This biting, attacking, lunging would almost be the cue for the human to go, oh, right, I should get you the chop, I should get you the veggies, I should get you the pelleted food, and then putting it in the cage. The function was likely an increase in food in that bowl, increase in access to food in that bowl. I took that function and we started to manipulate some of the arrangements around it. I made sure that we weren't practicing the behavior of lunging and biting at this bowl.
It wasn't out without supervision. We started to play with some of the different antecedent options. Is it only metal bowls? Are we talking plastic? Are we talking glass or ceramic? Is it only round bowls? Are we going to, you know, try a plate or anything else? So it's specifically parrot bowls and specifically her stainless steel ones, but it did also trigger a slight response to a plastic parrot bowl. We decided to reinforce the behavior we wanted to see. Haven't you heard that one before?
I would like her to feel like she can engage with those bowls, but not at that intensity, please. So we decided to take a behavior she already had, which was that beak target, where she would beak touch the end of the target stick very nicely and calmly in exchange for a nut, and transfer that skill to a very gentle beak touch to a bowl that was low enough intensity to not trigger the lunging and biting immediately.
So we used a plastic bowl, we used a ceramic bowl, something that would be a little lower stimulation for her, asked her to touch as she would touch the target, a gentle beak touch, earned her her reinforcer of choice, which was a piece of almond. No, piece of walnut. Piece of walnut was her reinforcer of choice. Touch gently, get nut. Touch gently, get nut. In short sessions, we kept them really, really short. We did other behaviors before and after for behavioral bookending and momentum.
She was phenomenal. The first couple of times she amped up very quickly, the first couple of sessions. Within a minute, she was already up to that seven or eight, starting to go and beat very, very strongly. But putting the bowl away and cuing other known behaviors, she came back down really quickly to a very functional thinking, actionable level. So really interesting to see the intensity change and the behaviors change. We're not done this behavior series yet. We're still working on it.
But it is to the point now where I can wash the balls and put them to dry in the dish rack while she's in the room. And she does not fly immediately to beak them. She'll stare at them. There's a, you know, it's still salient to her. She understands the balls are there. She's waiting for the cue. Could you please touch? Do the touch, get the nut. Having that under, I don't know if I can call it stimulus control yet, but a little bit of control on her part, knowing that the food is appearing.
We've got a really good schedule for that. We've got routine happening. So taking care of some of those antecedent problems, but also being able to then cue her to touch it gently, get her, her reinforcer for touching it gently. It's made a huge difference in her bowl behavior. And we're able to now put her food in and out of her cage. It's coming along really, really well. Still surprises me from time to time.
If I am slow, if I forget the bowl on the counter, she will remind me and fly over and beak it really hardly. So I think there's still work to be done, but it was a fascinating case of looking for the function and then working through it as we do with that hierarchy of behavior change. It's the same stuff as dogs. It's fascinating. It's just not a dog and it flies. It is fascinating. I'm curious how you came to your hypothesis about what the function of the behavior was.
Did, were there other things that you thought it might be? Did you just kind of brainstorm to get there? How did you land on that? It was a really interesting brainstorming session. I'm fortunate to have some amazing colleagues in the bird training industry. And I love my AGA family for that. I'm able to send some ideas around and say, Hey, I've got this behavior. It's happening specifically in these instances. I see it with stainless steel bowls. I see it with plastic bowls as well.
I see a long duration. What is the function here? What could be talking? What could we be talking about as far as bowl things? There could be noises. It could go ding when she attacks the bowl with that strong beak. Maybe there's an auditory part of this. It's not necessarily chewing because it's a solid object. So it's not going to be a tactile self-reinforcing there, though that did cross my mind.
Some explanatory fictions tend to creep in as we do because we're human and we try our best, but sometimes it happens. So one of the explanatory fictions that is really, really common in the bird world is caged territoriality. There's huge air quotes floating above my head. You can't see in the podcast. The idea of a space that is that birds own and they own it.
I'm not sure has been backed up by anything evidence based, but that's one of those things that comes in as says, well, maybe it's because that's in her home and we're messing with her home. I could see, I could make that. It's not just in her home. It's on the counter and it's not just when you're holding it. If there's all of these variables that are starting to preclude, well, it's caged territory. It's not though. It's on the counter too. Okay. Was the bowl empty? Is the bowl full?
What would be the expected outcome here? So yeah, it stumped me for quite a while. I'm super happy to have the colleagues that I do. So a big shout out to Lee, Lee Stone is listening. She was phenomenal. Thank you, Lee. We did a bunch of back and forth trying to figure out what the heck's going on. And then the nice thing about doing functional analysis, doing the ABC of behavior is it is a hypothesis. And so you work it thinking, maybe this is it. I don't know. It seems plausible.
Let's test it. And so if that is the function, if the function is to remind the human to put stuff in there, then if I put stuff in there, I'm not going to see this. Like this is the functional outcome is completed. If it's the dinging noise, then there would be a different functional outcome. Or if it's not the dinging noise. I love working through them with it as a hypothesis, because then you can just test it to see if you think it's right.
I'm constantly reminded by a bird that I'd worked with many years ago named Sweetie. She was a cockatoo who bit me on the foot. We tried very hard not to have any animal put into a situation where biting is their only form of communication, especially parrots. We have a zero bite club. Love it. But this particular cockatoo wasn't being interacted with with me.
She was on top of her own cage and she crawled all the way down off of her cage, walked six feet across the floor towards me and bit me on the foot with no provocation. In my mind, air quotes again, no provocation. What the heck? That's a lot of energy expenditure for an animal to do a behavior like biting when I wasn't necessarily even in her space and we were just sitting on the sofa watching TV. What the heck? I'll save you all of the ifs, ands, or buts in there.
End of that one was the function needed to be looked at. The bird isn't mad. The bird isn't crazy. The bird isn't any of those labels. The function was I would pick her up and I would put her in her cage for safety, close the door, which is what I recommend. If any bird is biting, we need to calm the situation, make safety for everyone, safety for the bird, safety for the humans. Great. She would immediately go and eat from her food bowl.
Could the function be she wanted to go in her cage to eat out of her food bowl and the best way for in her mind to get locked in. You know what works every time? Biting the human. I get locked in every time. We worked through this from maybe she's actually just hungry. We put extra food bowls up top.
We did all of this other antecedent arrangement and we worked on her skill of being able to walk herself from the top of her cage to the inside of her cage, which was open the whole time, by the way, she just didn't behaviorally do that. So we, we focused on the skills of making sure she knew how to go into her cage, grab a snack and come back out on her own. It completely changed her. The function is so necessary to look at because we start to go into these recipes.
If the dog's doing this, you do this. If the bird's doing this, you do this. And I think that it works a lot of the time. And this is something that actually made me a little worried about doing online courses. I'm offering a recipe that may work or may not work. If I'm saying, here's what to do about biting with your parrot. I don't know your bird. I don't know you. I don't know the situation.
And I constantly think of Sweetie going, if I had just given your generic advice, it wouldn't have helped because Sweetie was hungry and Sweetie needed skills to learn how to go and find her own snack. And my generic course on biting wouldn't have helped me then.
So how do I make a course with lots of information and great stuff to look at, but also not give her a recipe and make people feel like they've tried everything and they're in a corner and the throw up their hands, like they're out of options. So it was really tricky for me to reconcile that as a trainer, because I do want to look at all of the birds as individuals and all of the situations as unique. How do I balance that with doing an hour online course on biting?
It was really tricky to make that point. And I've tried to in the courses say, here are things to look for. Your bird is unique. See what they're saying. Thank you to Sweetie for that lesson. So much interesting stuff there that we could spend another hour I'm sure talking about. Thank you for the reminder though, especially of looking for that function and finding an idea of our best, most educated, most logical guess with the information that we have and then testing it out to see it.
Is this it? And we can always change that plan if it's not it. So excellent point. And a great, great example with Sweetie of a situation where that is not an obvious function. I mean, I'm not a bird person at all, but it sure doesn't seem like an obvious function to me. It wasn't at the time either. That one took me probably six weeks of trying to figure it out. And I was brand new to functional analysis at that time. And so thank you again to Sweetie for letting me learn with her.
It took me about six weeks to figure out six weeks of being bitten on the foot. It was not a fun time, but also kudos to Dr. Friedman, who at that time was teaching everybody in the world about behavior analysis and about the ABCs of behavior and helped me figure that out with Sweetie. Yeah. What the heck is going on? And I try something and that hypothesis wouldn't work out, wouldn't pan out. Okay, back to the drawing board. Do another ABC.
Well, maybe, maybe it's because of the color socks I was wearing. Or maybe like you can think of 100 different possible functions and none of them were working. I just go back to that drawing board. Okay, it's not that. Well, what could it be? So I skipped over that in the story because there were a lot of options I tried. But yeah, the ending up on being a good observer, really looking for the antecedent. She'd been on top of her cage where there wasn't any food.
She'd been out for over 90 minutes was a big antecedent. What happened right after the behavior? She gets locked in her cage. Then what happens? Like, let's be good observers and look at the animal in front of us and figure out what that function is for them. And it's going to be hard, because we're not in their head. And we can't see what they're thinking. But we can see their behaviors. And we can see that sweetie, every time we'd go face down in her food bowl. Maybe it was a security thing.
Maybe it was a hunger thing. Maybe it was a, who knows what was going on in her head. But that was definitely the function. Okay, now we know the function. Now we can work on skills. We can make sure that she's not left without a food bowl closer, we can make sure that, you know, 60 minutes instead of 90 minutes, she's getting interacted with so that we can maintain her satiety levels.
Yeah, it was, it was about being a good observer about looking at that function, and about making it work for her. And for us, I didn't like getting bit on the foot, it hurt. Shoes didn't matter. Socks didn't matter. Barefoot didn't matter. Nail polish didn't matter. Also, what a great example of um, or a great reminder that they're always that there is always a function that behavior is happening for a reason. And that reason is not inside the individual.
It wasn't because sweetie was bad or mean or aggressive or any of those things. A spiteful was spiteful. There are a lot of spiteful dogs. I bet there are a lot of spiteful birds as well. They're not a lot of they're not I have I love talking about it because we often defer to the label. How many times have you heard it's because of X breed? Oh, he's a breed. We get that with Oh, it's a cockatoo. Of course. Yes, sweetie was a cockatoo. But that is not not what it was. Great, great reminder.
Thank you for sharing that with us. Could you share with us now about a training situation that you are proud of and or that you found reinforcing? I have so many. This is one of the hardest questions. I am so proud of so many things with my animals. They are just superstars in every little tiny way. I love working with birds because they are so expressive once you are able to read their body language. And just like dogs, they give a lot of try.
They give a lot of heart and they try so hard to communicate with us humans. Some of my favorite training has been with my own African Gray. His name is Quentin. And he's an absolute sweetheart. And he's put up with so many things over the years with me. And I think I'm actually most proud of doing some work with creating with him because he was definitely not happy about being in a crate for many, many years.
And through exploring different types of crates, different crates that have more openness, more vision from inside from the animal's perspective, or less vision depending on the species. Do you want it darkened and closed? Do you want it wide open so they can see everywhere? He got shoved in so many crates at the beginning that he had an aversion to going into some of these dark spaces. The plastic cat crate is an absolute no, thank you very much.
But some of the work that I've done with him has made me so super proud of him. And going back and watching the videos of how hard he tried to work through some of whatever it was he was going through. He would try so hard to go into those crates. We've made it a game. I know crate games is a thing in the dog world. At the time, it wasn't in the bird world yet. Coming out with that course shortly.
Crates are an incredible tool and being able to have your bird walk into a crate on its own has been done in zoo fields for many, many years. Brand new in the pet bird world. So we found a crate that was very, very open. He liked to see more and then having opportunities for him to walk into the crate on his own gave him more agency. This is where agency is starting to creep up in every single conversation.
And I think it was the pivoting point in this, even though I didn't really realize it at the time, this was 10 years ago. Him having the choice to walk into those crates on his own was even more reinforcing than any nut that I could put in the food bowl. And showing those videos now, you go back and look at your videos training 10 years ago, you're a little cringe on some of the stuff you used to do. All of us have those.
But I'm constantly impressed by him and how much effort he made to do those things. So now he goes into crates pretty well anywhere. I've got a couple of different kinds of crates. He's still a no for the cat plastic carrier. Thank you very much. We'll take it. But he'll go into dog crates. He we have bird backpacks. So they have a little perch in them, you can have a backpack. I know they're getting more popular for cats, but birds have them as well. Yeah, he's he's just a superstar.
That's my that's my favorite training story is. Yeah, watching him progress through his little creative version. He's a superstar. He's a superstar. You are a superstar as well. Congratulations on your success with your crate training with him.
I can just imagine how heartwarming that was for you to watch him work through that challenge, because when our animals are not doing something like that, because they're concerned about it or worried about it, I know that can be a tough thing for us as their caregivers. So to see him kind of overcome that I'm sure has been very reinforcing for you. It's great. And it really goes back to that be a good observer thing. Because it wasn't just about making the treat better.
And it wasn't just about making it you know, making it easier for him to go into there, there were all sorts of things in that antecedent arrangement. But there were things in his body language that he was telling me, I am not okay right now, I'm going to give it a real good shot. But I am not okay right now being able to see that and being able to rearrange things.
So it was easier for him, you could almost see him visibly relaxed and go, thank you so much you put the perch so I could just like shuffle sideways up the perch and I wouldn't have to climb all over the bar. Awesome. Okay, finally, she got the message. Like it's just it's amazing to watch those videos back. He's such a good boy. Do you have any pictures or videos of him in his backpack? Yes, I can share those with you. Yeah, yeah. Or share them in ATA so everybody in there can see them too.
I'm sure that everybody would love to see that. I know I would. Absolutely. Our time is just about up. But before we wrap up, I wanted to give you a chance. I know we've covered a lot of ground here talked about a lot of different things. But I just wanted to make sure that to ask you if there's anything that you haven't shared about yet that you would like to share about before we wrap up to give you an opportunity to do that. Hmm. You know, I can't think of anything off the top of my head.
I think I like to focus on having this accessibility to everybody in a way that is inclusive of as many people as possible. Something with the online courses that showed me that many people need these resources also means that not just the people who've got the bird from the perfect situation and the perfect home with the perfect home are the ones that need these resources. And I'm not going to be judging anyone who's coming and asking for help.
I'm not judging anyone who has maybe tried the shove your hand up the birds front to get them to step on. And you don't have to apologize. And that the judgment that happens in all of our training communities against each other is something that we're slowly working on as a community. And I love and appreciate every single one of us for slowly pointing the direction towards the love and acceptance of all. Like we're working on it. And we do it in every species. It's not just dog world.
It's not just cat world. It's not just bird world. We're not going to judge you for getting a bird at a pet store. We're not going to judge you for doing something, error quotes, huge error quotes again, the wrong way. We're all in this together and we're all going to point towards the right direction. Let's go this way together. And I'm going to lead from the front. I love having my community as diverse as possible.
I'm a neurodivergent person and I want to have as much inclusivity as possible so that people who are needing that help can come in and get the help. Started at foundations. It started at the target and the station and the recall and the step up. It's just grown into this huge community of really wonderful people who just absolutely adore their birds. And I mean, I can't think of anything better. I love my birds too. Thank you so much for all of that.
I cannot think of a better way to wrap up the episode. Thank you, Robin, for joining me today on behalf of ATA, on behalf of everybody listening today. Thanks for taking time out of your day to share a little bit about your bird world with us. Thank you so much. This has been really wonderful. I'm really happy to be able to share the bird side of dog training. This is so much fun. Thank you. We do, of course, appreciate all of you tuning in as well.
And if you have enjoyed this episode and are interested in carrying on the conversation about working with the animals in our lives in the most positive, most fun and most choice rich ways, then as mentioned at the start of this episode, the Animal Training Academy community is waiting for you. Head on over to www.atamember.com and click on the membership button in the main menu to learn more about what members are describing as the Netflix social media platform for behavior geeks.
That's it for this episode, though. Thank you so much for listening. You'll hear from us again soon.