I'll just clear up the biting if I can. Any bite that is accompanied by aggressive body language is an aggressive bite, whether it hurts or not, whether it is a warning nip or a full blown blood letting. It is the intent that is important, not the result. Nila has never bitten hard, but he still needs to be respected by us and his body language taken seriously. Otherwise he will probably learn to bite hard to achieve his desired result. Even Sapphire has only bitten me hard enough to bruise me once and it was purely my fault for ignoring her warnings (in my defence, she was on the back of my head).
Any bite that is accompained by fluffing around the head/beak, pinning eyes, growling, lunging, whatever is aggressive and has a meaning that should be respected whether it damages us or not.
Beaking is not accompanied by this body language, it is just chewing on stuff, and can do just as much damage.
Parrots don't draw blood from each other in the wild, they threaten to bite and the rival retreats. It is our behaviour that is unnatural.
I think that even a small amount of wariness of hands is so easily exacerbated simply because our hands are always doing random stuff that is unrelated to the bird, but the bird perceives as a threat.
For example, making my coffee was assisted by two birds running around the bench trying to throw everything on the floor. When I reached for my packet of coffee, I had to reach over a bird or 2, if either of them were worried about my hand approaching from above this would have given them another reason to think it was directed at them and hands can't be trusted. They would have run out of the way and congratulated themselves on escaping such a near miss. I would have been oblivious to this. What actually happened was Sapphire tried to take the packet of coffee off me...
This kind of scenario can happen multiple times a day, it doesn't have a huge impact in this instance, but it could. I haven't found that irns get desensitised to things they don't like unless a positive association is added, but I'm not sure if that's just my birds or a rule.
They do build a negative association very easily, you only need to do something they really don't like once or twice before they won't hang around to find out if the reaching hand will grab them and turn them upside down again. That I'm sure about!
The point of all this waffling is. ... umm... well a couple things.... Whether we are conciously training our birds or not, they are learning from every interaction. Unwittingly, we can be reinforcing those perceived threats multiple times a day.
http://goodbirdinc.blogspot.com.au/2012 ... s.html?m=1
I find trading a suitable object or a treat with my birds has resulted in a reliable way of getting things they shouldn't be playing with off them without aggravating them. Because it is a trained behaviour that, Nila especially, knows he gladly gives up his trophy knowing that "Ta" means he will get something better. We trained it as a trick for treats, the positive association is so strong that he doesn't appear to feel short changed when the reward for giving up my coloured pencils is being told he is good and his least favourite toy.
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
Sapphire is less trained, but has the attention span of a goldfish, so any new object being handed to her is the best thing ever, for about 3 seconds...
I'm done waffling for now. Please read the link.
Regards,
Claire