DELCO BIRD CLUB INC

Meetings - Second Thursday at the Media Community Center in Media, PA

The Most Painful Bites

by

Ken Globus

www.thebirdwhisperer.com

copyright 2007 - reprinted with permission of the author

Here’s another one of those rules in the bird world that makes it very difficult for a person whose bird bites them to respond in the proper way.    We know a bite is painful on the obvious level, but it also hurts on a deeper emotional level.    In some cases it even affects a person’s self-esteem.  You run through a range of emotions, from “Ouch, that hurts!”  to “What did I do wrong?”  to “Why does my bird hate me.  All I do is offer it food, love and attention?”   Here’s a phrase I read in an article that displays the kind of thinking that makes people feel guilty and incompetent:  “I have never met a parrot that bit without a very good reason.”   In other words, if your bird bites you it means you did something wrong. 

Sound familiar?  It’s another one of those “facts” that paralyzes bird owners.    And like some other absolutes, this one puts the entire blame for a bird’s biting issues on the human.  Okay, there are some people who haven’t got a clue about how to read a bird, but with many birds you can get bitten without doing anything wrong. 

I was at a friend’s house with my daughter, Shelby , 6 ½ at the time, who loves birds.  She was calmly playing with a little conure. On another cage some fifteen feet away was an Umbrella Cockatoo.  The cockatoo sprang off its cage, scrambled across the floor and went after my daughter’s Achilles tendon.  I barely got there in time to prevent a serious injury .  My daughter was more scared than hurt.  Fortunately she was able to laugh about it later and she still loves birds.  So, what did my daughter do to make that cockatoo bite her?  You can speculate that the cockatoo was being territorial or, that maybe it was abused or provoked in the past by a petite, 61/2-year-old girl with brown hair.  Or, maybe it was protecting the little conure.  Or…. who knows?  So, is my daughter at fault?  What does she need to do to avoid getting bitten?  Stay out of that house?

 I was once interacting with Billy, my little Senegal Parrot, when the FedEx guy got too close to my window.  Billy nailed me.  Is it always possible to anticipate those kinds of things?  No.   

 What does conventional wisdom tell us to do?  “Don’t create a situation in which the bird will bite.”  So, here we have a bird that just plain got startled by something.  Or maybe your bird is not in the mood.  Or…. what?  Maybe a shadow zoomed by the yard.  Or a loud noise.  Or, your bird just feels like doing something else. The things that incite a bite are numerous, ranging from serious to whimsical and are not always easy to predict.

I recall at a bird club meeting I attended, a pair of Blue & Gold Macaws on a T-Stand were squabbling like a middle-aged married couple.  Only they do it with beaks, hard, strong beaks.  If you put one of those beaks up against a human hand, it can be mighty intimidating.  But neither of the two macaws was especially serious about the argument.  They were just squabbling, jockeying for position on the perch and each telling the other that they were in charge.  Neither one was injured; it was beak-to-beak, so they were equally matched.  However, when those squabbles are between you and your bird and it’s beak-to-flesh many a bird owner is sent staggering backward and down the path to fearing their own bird.

 What do YOU do when your bird bites?  According to the bird world you screwed up.  Do you hang your head in shame?  Do you allow a relationship that was once calm and loving to become permanently troubled?  Does it make you feel afraid?  Guilty? Or like a failure as a bird owner?  That’s how many people are made to feel.  And you shouldn’t.

 Here’s an example of what sometimes happens:  you go to the cage, open the door and offer the bird your hand for a step-up.  The bird is not in the mood to come out at the moment.  What does it do?  It lunges at you.  Or bites.  Maybe it’s just bluffing, but you’re not around to find out.  You jerked your hand away as fast as you could to avoid the chomp.  What just happened?  You’re training your bird to bite.  What can you do to in response to that behavior that is at both sensitive to your bird’s needs and proper on the basis of training?  Try this: you offer your hand, the bird lunges, you don’t recoil, you insist on it stepping up.  Then, bird on hand, you step away from the cage for a few seconds, then go back to the cage, put the bird back on the perch, close the door and leave it alone for a while.  In other words, you never make an aggressive behavior pay off.  You follow through with the intended behavior, then you put the bird back.  A bird should never feel that biting is a means to get what it wants.  You have drawn a clear line.  But you’re also being sensitive to its mood by putting it back in the cage for some time alone. 

 Many people harp on you to learn to read your bird and make sure you don’t do anything that causes it to bite.  That’s great, but it’s not always possible.  And what you do after a bite is a key to a happy relationship.  The best way to teach your bird to bite is to back off when it bites or bluffs.  By retreating you’re encouraging it to bite.  The more you allow and accept negative behaviors the more likely they are to get worse.  But bites happen.  And when they do, it’s not always your fault.  No matter what the “experts” tell you.