- Hey everybody.
Jamieleigh here from "Bird Tricks."
And today I have a special surprise
and somebody I want you to meet
is giving himself away a little bit, here on my lap.
You show them, show them who you are.
Meet...
(dynamic music)
Baby Beau.
Show us your face.
Where's your face?
Oh, we're playing with a toy.
Ooh, okay.
Baby, Baby Beau, Baby mouthy Beau, Baby mouthy Beau.
Baby Beau, Baby Beau, Baby Beau, Baby Beau.
Yeah.
So babies are mouthy.
Mostly it's soft and polite.
But we all know that that's gonna change down the road.
So try to avoid this behavior
and give alternative behaviors.
So I always seem to have a tiny toy with me
as a distraction for this little guy.
He's not that little though.
My goodness.
He's not that little, but he's the sweetest.
So, baby Beau is not my baby,
but he is a client's baby that Dave is raising.
That I'm just stealing every now and then
when Dave's not home.
'Cause it's easy and you're cute.
So cute.
So some of you might be saying to yourselves,
I didn't know that you raised birds for clients.
And we normally don't make it a habit,
but sometimes we get talked into doing it
because baby birds, 'cause babies.
So Baby Beau is one of those instances.
Dave got talked into it.
And so I get to reap the benefits
of hanging out with this little guy.
Tried to offer him a bath today.
So he has a couple wet spots and he was not into it.
So that got, that got derailed.
Okay mouthy, let's go play over here on the perch
where you can be as mouthy as you want to those toys.
And I'll make it so people can see you.
There.
Now you don't care.
How about this one, has a bead on it.
You like 'em.
A wooden bead, by the way.
Okay.
So some of the things that Dave and I have been doing
with Baby Beau is we started off with the hand feeding,
which we don't usually recommend to people to do.
As a lot of you know, that are familiar with hand feeding,
it's feeding out of a syringe.
And there's just a lot that can go wrong.
It's not a super complicated process,
but it's simple enough that if you mess it up,
it can be really detrimental to birds.
And a lot of people just aren't for it, so.
What are you doing?
Where are you going?
What are you doing, where are you going?
Face you this way so you're less likely
to fly onto the camera.
And so anyways, he was so young when we got him
that we were doing the hand feeding.
And we were also, that means that we're also
doing the weaning process,
which is pretty cool because you get to
pick what the bird is going to eat as it gets older.
Which is awesome to do from when they are babies.
'Cause as a lot of, you know, that have older birds,
once they've had a really crappy diet for a long time,
that's kind of becomes the expectation.
So with Beau, I got to do the weaning process with him.
He's still on my seasonal feeding
with a mixture of hard boiled eggs or yams,
just to make sure that he's getting
lots and lots of substance.
'Cause he flies a lot and we wanna
make sure he's big and strong.
So it's not just the pure recipe yet,
but eventually as he's older, it will be.
And so he's doing great with that.
He also eats our pellets,
which is super fantastic.
And yeah, he's off of hand feeding now,
by the time of this video and doing awesome.
The other thing we've tried to instill in him,
for me, I just want a bird to be a bird.
So I wanna make sure that they're willing to bathe
and play with toys.
And toys was something that he was always
really, really good about from the get-go.
He destroyed many a tiny toy.
So I actually start baby birds with smaller toys.
I don't just start them with the giant toys.
Obviously he's a large bird, so you would think large toys.
But I started him with small toys.
And that's because they're softer textures,
they're easy for him to destroy.
And so if he has that initial experience with a toy
where he can destroy it,
and he's capable of doing things to it,
it's going to build his confidence to go onto the larger,
more destructible toys, which he is now.
So he does get all the big boy toys in his aviary.
He flies around the house.
All the things.
He hasn't had breakfast yet,
but the head bobbing is a typical baby bird behavior.
And he is over a 1,000 grams.
So those of you familiar with weighing your birds and stuff,
he's a big boy.
And that's just this morning without breakfast,
he's over 1,000.
So he's a big guy.
Yeah, you are.
Do you wanna work on this one instead?
There we go, we found a wood bead.
And you're kind of going to learn, with small birds,
you're gonna learn the textures
that they really prefer and like.
And the ones that they aren't so crazy about,
which has been really fun to discover with Beau.
So aside from weaning, and all the food related stuff,
and bathing, we've also been working on flight with Beau
because ultimately his owner wants him to free fly,
which is really exciting for us.
So we've been working on a lot of indoor flight with him,
which he is all about.
We've also been working on a small amount of socialization.
Are you out of here, are you leaving?
You look like you're gonna ditch me.
Are you ditching me?
Do you wanna go fly?
No, staying, okay.
So we have been working on a small amount of socialization
to make sure that he's not fearful of different people,
but he's also not overly like, hey,
I wanna get to every single human in the universe.
So there's definitely a balance to socialization
based on how social of a bird you want.
And so we've been working on that with him.
We also work on a lot of self entertaining
because it's really natural for people to wanna spend
all the time with baby birds 'cause they're so sweet,
and cute, and cuddly, and tolerant.
But when that becomes an adult bird
and that expectation has been set where they expect you
to spend all your waking time and minutes with them,
it can create a very dependent bird who suffers maybe
from anxiety down the road,
and just doesn't understand how to self entertain.
So that's something that we really try to instill early on
with the young birds, for sure.
Oh, good job.
Look at you, you are so strong.
So destructive, you are.
Good job.
And this is one of the toys from our toy line.
I've been bugging Hannah to make it available to everyone.
She made it special for Beau based on the fact
that he was killing all my hourglass toys
from my tiny toy box.
And so she made him a big one, which I was like, oh,
we gotta offer these to people.
Right?
Do you wanna destroy that one anymore?
No.
One of the things that I'm really adamant about working on
with baby birds is them going on their back
and feeling comfortable about it.
Some of the hard things about working with young birds
is that they don't really have a food reward yet.
And so that's kind of the case with him.
He's not really taking to nuts yet,
but I use praise, and petting, and attention
as my form of reinforcement.
So I'm gonna see if he will show you guys
how he goes on his back.
He's not really doing it without letting go of my hand,
I'm trying to switch him to my other hand,
which is totally okay, that can come later.
And he's better about it in my lap.
So I'm gonna see what he's willing to offer.
You ready?
Oh, a little uncomfortable.
So he like leaned into it
and then he got a little bit nervous.
It's okay.
You did really good, it's okay.
Can we try again?
Yeah, try closer to the body.
Oh, good job.
It's okay.
You're okay.
So as you can see, he's still a little nervous about it.
You wanna get back up?
I'll lift you back up.
He really sinks he's into it,
so he's just kind of dead weight.
It's pretty cute.
But he still gets just a little bit nervous.
And so you gotta kind of work through it
and build up his confidence about it.
Make sure he's comfortable.
He's a very naturally cuddly macaw.
So I'm able to use quite a bit of that to my advantage.
Just keeping him closer to my body tends to
make him more comfortable about the whole thing.
So some of the things we've had to teach Beau
is how to be okay with bathing and showering.
Just merely how to step up.
'Cause baby birds are like,
what do you want from me, I don't get it.
Woo, we've been working on lots and lots of flight training,
lots of toy playing and destruction,
understanding when to get back up about things.
So obviously baby birds, just like young humans,
get hurt trying things and doing things.
And not letting that really phase his confidence too much.
Also baby birds are very mouthy.
So I don't know if you can see,
but if I have him here long enough
and I don't offer him some form of distraction,
he'll just start chewing on my fingers.
And because I know that that is a thing that's gonna happen
I try to keep these toys everywhere,
or some form of distraction.
So, there we go.
So he's being very gentle, and he's just kind of
checking things out and exploring.
However, you guys,
it always escalates into a behavior that hurts.
So avoid it, distract it, give them an alternative behavior.
Do what you gotta do to keep the bird from biting on you.
I made a rhyme.
What else did we do?
We've been working on lots of stuff.
Yeah, lots of training.
It's mostly, like I said, this is Dave's project
so I haven't been as involved.
But of course I push myself in every now and then.
I did all the back training, 'cause I love that stuff.
So yeah.
You good?
But anyways, I just wanted this to be
a fun video for you guys to meet Beau.
You're gonna be seeing us do more videos on him
because we created an entire baby bird course
with Baby Beau, and Halo,
who you've seen previously on the channel as well.
So our baby bird course is coming.
It's coming soon.
And if you guys watch this video much later
then it might already be out.
So check the link in the description
and I'll make sure that I put it in there
when the baby bird course is available.
It's how to raise baby birds right.
Do everything right from the get-go
so you don't have to fix the problems later on.
And you know what to be aware of
so that you can always kind of be ahead of the game.
So, even though it's kind of hard to do with birds,
'cause they're always a lot of steps ahead.
You wanna go fly?
Yeah, gonna go?
No, yeah, no, yeah, no, no, no.
Hug.
What do you wanna do?
You don't know.
You just wanna cuddle, is that what's going on?
Yeah, you just wanna be close.
I can feel you like stepping on me.
Can't get any closer.
We are close.
Can't get closer than this.
You're like a head pillow right now with how close you are.
Is this close enough for you?
He seriously has like a grip on my neck.
You're here, you are here.
You are close.