Quote:
Originally Posted by debelm2
Sarah, can you tell me if your budgies are young little ones or older birds and how long you have been working with them on this? And thanks so much for the details. I will be keeping them in mind when Tonka finally gets airborne!!!
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No problem! Jerry is roughly 3 years old and we got him as a baby of about 6 months. I've been doing the recall training with him for maybe 6-8 months. He came home to us untame and clipped, we let his wings grow out, and then clipped him again (which I totally regret!) when he started pestering my tiel. Then we let his wings grow out again and will never clip him again.
Winston is roughly 2 years old and we got him a year ago and was told he was about 1 year old. He has had one other home, that we know of, in addition to the pet store where we got him (previous owners dropped him off). He was cage bound and untame when we got him, and he was fully flighted. It literally took him months to learn how to fly - his muscles were extremely atrophied (literally flying from one side of the room to the other would have him out of breath). And it took him months to learn how to turn corners and fly down.
debelm2 brought up a point that I saw with Winston - flying down takes SKILL. I had read that before but never saw to what extent until I observed Winston learn how to fly. He would work on a task sometimes for 30 or 60 minutes (depending on how much stamina he had). He is now a skilled flier who races around the house with Jerry, but he's still a little slower in speed and doesn't do the fancy aerial tricks that Jerry does.
He is still sometimes unsure of himself and his recall is more like target training where I hold out my hand to him at various angles and sometimes he'll take many tries to get it right. He'll fly towards my hand, get nervous, and make a U turn and start again. I try to figure out what the issue is - my hand/arm position, the angle, etc. We're learning together and because of that we really respect each other. Because his feet were weak from being on crappy perches he's come around to things differently than my other 2 birds - like being more comfortable at first on my forearm rather than my finger. And he was more comfortable hopping rather than stepping one foot at a time. It's been slow revelations like that he's opened my eyes to. So to be able to begin recall with him is amazing to me - I'd say we've only begun the recall training in the past month or two with Winston.