- Hi, my name is Rose, I'm from Alamogordo, New Mexico,
and my bird's name is Sailor.
She is a two and a half year old Green Wing hybrid.
So technically a Jubilee.
(upbeat guitar music)
So I found bird tricks just by chance
with a random YouTube video that was recommended to me
about four or five years ago.
I had parrots when I was younger,
but I never thought that I would have them again
because of the cage guilt.
And when I found you guys, I was like, this is possible.
Like I had no idea.
And I just have been obsessed with parrots again ever since.
I chose Jamie and Dave as my trainers, because for one,
they lived in the West, which is somewhat close to me.
Moab is a drivable distance for me to achieve.
And I liked their emphasis on the psychology of the bird
when it comes to behaviors and energy levels
and the fact that flight is necessary for a healthy bird.
They were the first that kind of phrased it that way.
They just had the most similar frame of thinking
that I had with birds.
Sailor was about six to eight months old
when she got out of the house by accident.
I was transferring her to a cage on my porch
and I tripped and she just took flight.
For a second, I thought she was gonna stop on our fence.
And she just caught the wind, was like, I'm outta here.
She went behind a tree, but she was calling to me,
and she couldn't descend,
but she was doing everything else right,
she was turning, she was doing contact calls
and she wasn't leaving the area.
And she finally just crashed landed on the neighbor's roof.
And I ran up there and got her
and she was exhausted and terrified.
- [Interviewer] We hear that same story
with different outcomes, like all the outcomes all the time.
- My consults with Jamie specifically
were all focused on diet
and making sure that Sailor was not getting any human snacks
and on the seasonal feeding system, pellets,
so all of that.
With Dave, it was the more hands-on recall training
and really fine-tuning those behaviors.
The road trip from New Mexico to Utah,
even though it was over two days,
was a little too intense for my bird.
I found out about an hour in that she gets very carsick.
It gave us a delay when we started here
because we had to spend all this time
really getting her healthy and happy and comfortable again.
So that took a couple days.
My first day out here was Sailor was a little rough.
My expectations were set very high.
I thought she was just gonna come out here and rock it.
And she may have if she hadn't gotten so sick
coming out here.
So it was a failure on my part to prepare her for the trip.
Even though I was taking her in the car in town,
you know, 15, 20 minutes,
a six hour day one is not the way to do it.
So again, just another learning experience.
So it was just kind of desensitizing her
to the environment that day.
I believe we got a couple A to Bs,
so we just spent time with her there in her crate.
She hung out with everybody.
She's not used to seeing so many people,
running in so many different directions.
So a lot of it was just letting her
kind of see what the environment
was gonna be like with the week to come.
So it ended up being good on a long note,
but at the time it was a little disappointing.
- So Sailor had kind of a crappy day one yesterday.
So Dave's gonna work with Sailor over here and Rose.
I have Claude and Sarah doing A to Bs over here
and I'm gonna have Liz and Reagan join them.
I also put Twoso over here, cause I wanted to play too.
- So Sailor was struggling a little bit
with the travel period.
And so she's gonna do a little bit better today.
I think she looks better.
She looks more active. Yesterday she just looked tired.
- Yeah. Got the slow eye blink a lot.
- The head roll back and sleeping.
- Now she looks active, so.
- So we're probably gonna get some pretty big flights
is my guess, but we'll find out.
- Cool. Let's do this.
(wings flapping)
(parrot cawing) - Sailor, come.
(wings flapping)
Good.
(group chatting)
- [Jamie] Hey handsome. You're so good.
(wings flapping)
- [Group Member] Yay.
- [Rose] Sailor. Come on.
Sailor.
(parrot squawking)
- [Jamie] Yeah.
- [Rosie] Sailor.
- [Jamie] She's gonna land on the rocks.
Yep. She's landed.
- Yeah. Here.
- Where?
- She's right there.
That little red thing.
- Oh yeah.
Good eye.
- [Jamie] Did she fly back or did you guys just grab her?
- [Dave] She had to go up and grab her.
- [Jamie] Oh, she looks exhausted.
- [Dave] She is, like, what the hell?
Well, you can put her away for a little bit.
Let her recover. Offer some water.
- My experience with the Marshall GPS has been pretty great.
They just recently started supporting Android devices.
Dave helped me walk through everything and
showing me all the capabilities of it,
which was just awesome.
Like you can broadcast to anyone in the vicinity
that has a cell phone.
So if everyone is trying to look and recover your bird,
they will be able to pinpoint exactly
on their phones where the GPS is.
They've noticed in one of the training videos that I posted
that I have netting above my cabinet,
specifically garden trellis.
He asked me about that and
I explained that Sailor had a bad habit of hanging out
on top of the cabinets and chewing the wood
and causing chaos.
So one of the things we worked on in the course
was unwanted positions
and it was also kind of convenient
because it also helped with her descending,
but I would go and put her on the cabinet
and recall her down,
put her on the cabinet, recall her down
until she's like pinching me,
like, "why are you putting me back up here?"
That translated really well working outside because
one of the first days she flew onto a vehicle
and I was able to just recall her right back down from it.
And she didn't struggle with it
which was like really awesome.
- [Dave] So let's keep her attention cause she's-
(parrot squawking)
- [Jamie] Yeah. Even a short little hop.
There we go.
- Good girl.
- My favorite part of the trip has been
our final full day here.
And it was just so beautiful.
There was not much wind,
so it was perfect and warm.
And we were at a location where we were able to
fly the more advanced birds as well as birds like mine
that are still beginners and getting used to everything.
So we were able to really have everybody out
and enjoy a really fun and just good last day.
And she was just rocking it.
So that could be more than happy.
(parrot squawking)
(parrot cawing)
- [Jamie] Little show offs.
Here's Yolo.
Nice, good job Claud.
- So I went skydiving with the group
heavily pressured by Dave,
but I felt like that this whole trip has been very symbolic
in overcoming fear and anxiety.
And I was one of those people that was like
I would never do that.
That is so dumb.
Why would you ever take on the risk?
But I have a fear of heights,
but I'm here like giving my bird her wings,
and I felt like if I don't do this,
I'm gonna look back and regret it.
So I just kind of mustered up what little courage I had.
We went out there, had Dave's support, and we all jumped,
and it was terrifying and I'll never do it again
but it's gonna be a story worth telling.
So seeing everybody else the first few days
at the time was a little disappointing
because everyone's progressing
and I was kind of stuck in a lull.
It was also really reassuring
because everyone came to me and they were like, you know,
my bird's first few days were this and that.
So I had the support of the group as a whole
and that made me feel a lot better
'cause then I realized like my expectation was way beyond
what I should have expected for my bird.
So learning experience, but it was great having everybody
and their stories and just reassurance that, you know,
she's gonna get there.
They just gotta, you know, be coached along.
My goals with Sailor are to fly almost daily.
I live on a really nice road out in the county
and I take walks very frequently.
So I wanna be able to take her with me.
And that kind of goes into why I even got a macaw
rather than a smaller, way more convenient bird,
because we do have occasional hawks
and I wanted to make sure that I was doing this
in the safest way possible.
So of course, keeping in mind, you know,
not setting up strict schedules of doing the same thing
at the same time every day
and getting into those kind of habits, I have to be mindful.
But my goal is to always keep her flighted and
to fly with her as much as possible
and hopefully travel more if she gets used to the car.
If you've ever considered free flying your bird
and you have a bird, I would say do it,
because it's gonna be beneficial for your bird.
If you ever have to recover it, it gets out by accident,
but also to their overall health and well-being.
I mean, think of kids locked up in a house
with a bunch of energy all day
and they have no way to really direct that energy,
but flying, they're born to do it.
Why would you keep that from a creature like that?
Jamie and Dave did something new with me
this kind of go around and they chose to fast track me
through the course.
I think they recommend typically three months
of working with them to get to where you can go outside
and free fly.
But I had already kind of established some
really basic prerequisites, which was the diet.
With Sailor I had to not only wean her,
I had to also get her off of the Petco pellets
because I got weak in a moment
and that was the only solid food she would take.
And then it was just like basic recall
and getting her to, even if it was, you know,
using some kind of treat to lure her,
it was establishing that kind of foundation of,
I call and you come.
And so whenever I reached out to them,
since I had these basic kind of elements done already,
they were like, let's try and get you in six to seven weeks
and get you on the spring trip to Moab.
And it worked.
(hopeful synth music)
Thank you, Mom and Dad, you guys made this possible.
So I appreciate you. - [Mom] Aw.