Welcome to Animal Wonders.  I'm Jessi, and this is Jamieleigh and this is Dave.  These guys are professional bird trainers with extensive experience training all parrot type birds.  I'm really excited to have them join me today because I have a project I could use some help with and they've agreed to help.

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Jamie, Dave, we've actually never met until right now today, but I've enjoyed watching your videos and you do this all the time, helping people with their bird problems?

Jamie & Dave: Yeah.

Jamie: We're actually professional parort trainers, so a big part  of our business is doing consultations with just the average bird owner as well as we do theme park shows and we perform all over the world with our flock, so we've been probably to more than 20 countries already with our birds.

Dave: The birds have been to about 20 countries and we've been around 75 countries, six continents, with our show and so the birds get to go to a lot of that with us, but of course not all of it.  Through our company, birdtricks.com, we're able to travel not only for helping people with consultations (?~1:04), but it's also (?~1:05) so we use and get to work with our birds in our shows and then other clients like David Copperfield have hired us to go out to his own private islands to train him with his parrots, so the worlds have kind of meshed together in a really unique way.

Jessi: It sounds like you've worked with birds a lot more than I have, so are you ready for my bird problem?

Jamie: Yes, definitely.

Dave: Yeah.  

Jessi: Okay, alright, now, some of you may know our very cheeky and talkative quaker parrot, Chopsticks.  Chopsticks and I have not been getting along lately and I'm looking forward to having you help me figure out what I'm doing wrong.  Now, I like to say it's always the trainer's fault for not getting desired behavior, but I have to say that Chopsticks um, is probably one of the most unpredictable or unreadable birds that I've worked with, so I'm excited.  Should we get to it?

Jamie: Yeah.

Dave: Let's do it.

Jessi: Alright.  

Jessi: I think we nailed it right there.

Jamie: Cool. 

Jessi: Is that like, I was reinforcing him for 1) not doing anything and I was training him to be impatient and then adding on like, reinforcing for that way high energy level that it was turning to aggression.

Jamie: Cool.

Jessi: And so I think those are two huge points that I was missing, and I think that I can go from here.

Jamie: Yeah, cool, and I think if you find that you're just associated with this heightened state and you find him like that, give him a bath, let--see if that creates calm.

Jessi: Okay, okay.

Jamie: And then try target training when--

Jessi: Great.

Jamie: Teaching the target training when he's wet and calmer.

Jessi: Great.

Jamie: Try to find something that makes him more calm so that you can have a successful session.

Jessi: Good idea.  

Jamie: Don't let him learn to target at a heightened state, because I don't want him attacking or biting.

Jessi: Okay.  Oh, yeah.

Jamie: I want him gently touching or I want it to be accidental.

Jessi: Gentle.

Jamie: I want it to be like, an accidental bump.

Jessi: You know what would be nice is if he kept his mouth closed and just touched the top of his beak.  That would be great.

Jamie: That would be awesome.  

Jessi: Thank you so much for helping me work through that.  Chopsticks is going to hugely benefit from that and so will I, so thank you so much.  

Jamie: Yeah, I'm just excited that you invited us out here to work with you and that we got to work with a quaker because now I'm very prone to them because I'm working with one at home, so--

Jessi: Yeah!

Jamie: I love this, I loved it.  

Jessi: So if you guys want to see her quaker and all of their bird adventures, you should check out their channel.  It's called BirdTricks.

Jamie: And if you want to go on more animal adventures with us, subscribe to animalwondersmontana, and I'll see you next week.

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