- Hey guys, I brought home a Caique! Meet widget.
(upbeat pop music)
(laughing)
Can you give a kiss?
(smooching)
or just go upside down?
Perfect
woo! good job.
Are you gonna do it again? That was awesome
Do a little flip around.
Good!
(laughing)
So I'm going to take you guys
through Widgets journey of coming home with me
on day one and exactly what that looked like and what I did.
I get asked a lot about what day one should look like,
how long you should leave your bird to settle in
and I don't believe at all that you should leave
your bird alone in it's cage to settle in for days on end.
I believe you should have the opportunity
for your bird to interact with you
present all the time on that first day one.
So I drove an hour and a half to pick
up Widget from her
previous owner
and she traveled in my truck with me
in the exact carrier that she traveled
on the airlines with, with her owner.
Now, this is a clear carrier. I love these
because you can see exactly what's going on with the bird.
And widget had one toy in there given
to her by her previous owner that had plastics on it.
It has one of those pear shaped, quick links that can
you've just probably heard horror stories
about little bit of frayed rope on it.
I'm all about natural materials for toys, so,
this has lent for me to make my own toys
and I do offer them on my website
but this is one of the very first things I did for widget
because I noticed she was picking
at the duct tape inside her travel carrier
and I wanted to give her something good to do
versus worrying about her ingesting any part of that tape.
So I immediately had to pull over and get gas anyways
and while my tank was filling up
I introduced widget to some of my
handmade tiny toys from my own bird tricks line
and she took to them amazingly well, I was so happy.
This is a tiny toy
and you'll play with it.
I'm going to take this one out
Do you wanna play with it? Oh good job!
Isn't that so much more fun?
That's awesome!
Widget we might have to name a toy design after you
I'll make you a special one.
Okay I'm going to see if I can put it up like that for her,
There you go!
Oh my gosh, look at that
she's just loving it, okay now I need to
get this duct tape out.
Holy crap, that's tight.
Huh! I was just trying to get it out,
I just don't want you to play with it, but I guess
if you have something better to play with, you'll be good.
Okay, do you wanna try another toy?
since you're just so brave.
Nice!
Wow!
Way better
Good job! Good job, keep playing.
A lot of the times when we feel like birds are not receptive
to toys or don't play with toys or fearful of toys is
because we're offering the wrong types of textures.
When you offer things that can't be destroyed, especially
to smaller birds like plastic beads or even plastic chains
rubber type materials
or foam
or things like this that shouldn't be given to birds.
You're kind of asking for them not
to necessarily play with them but just kind of bump them
and, and not really use them.
So I look for textures that birds literally go crazy
for and play more into their natural instincts.
Like the materials used in my toys,
day one I find it really important to offer these sort
of natural behaviors where your bird has
the opportunity to play in numerous areas
around your home and not just confined to one space,
IE, their cage.
So I actually don't offer the cage at all
on day one until it's time for them to go to sleep usually,
and then I want them in a safe space, but for the most part
the cage doesn't even play a role in my day one
of interacting with a new bird.
Now on the way home since I did have
about an hour and a half drive,
I was actually told that Widget did not eat any sort
of pellet or parrot food mixture of any type.
She was mostly just eating the scraps
from her human, her humans foods
and so I decided what the heck the previous owner
gave me a bag of my own pellets that was unopened
so I went ahead and opened it
on my drive and just offered widget a pellet
and I offered her pallet after pallet, after pallet
which she readily ate.
So everything that I had been told
about her refusing pellets was kind of
out the window for me
and she was completely receptive
from the first point that I offered it.
So you might need to get creative with this
and find a way to offer food that your bird
doesn't like to eat in its cage
maybe outside of the cage and change the environment
which usually changes the behavior.
Now for me, the most important thing to establish
on day one is that you're in a new place
which gives you a new diet
and usually it's the healthiest one
that I can possibly offer.
So in the midst of making food for myself
I included widget in that
eh, experience
and she readily started playing
with all the food stuff that I had out
and so then I just kind of snuck in my bird food
that I make which is my natural feeding system
and it changes seasonally
I just kind of snuck that in there
and she immediately started digging into that as well.
So diet went really smooth for me
because it happened so naturally for her where she
if you can just get a bird to play with food
it will always lead to them eating the food.
Now, another important aspect for me
on day one is always getting that bird's weight
and based on that weight that I get on day one
that's kind of the range I tend to stick to
or try to aim for, with the bird in my care
knowing that they came from a certain weight
and I want to keep them around that weight to know
that that's probably where they're used
to being at,
of course, undergoing a vet check,
you'll be able to know if your bird's
in good body condition or not.
But for me, I was just going off of
the weight that the bird came to me on.
I did find out later that I actually wanted to put weight
on Widget because it was not only affecting her behavior
but it was kind of making her a little bit frantic.
So I actually ended up upping her weight
which I'll probably talk about
down the road in other videos over on Patreon
so that I can really dive into detail.
Now I think a lot of people, when they hear me talk
about day one and how I interact right away
it doesn't mean that I'm necessarily forcing myself
on the bird and saying, hey let's be best friends
but I am open for opportunity all day
for that bird to come and interact with me.
Ideally the bird is coming to you
for the interaction versus you constantly going to the bird.
So I like to offer a lot of natural behaviors
of playing on the foraging trees around my home
and eating the really good foods
just so the bird's feeling pretty comfortable and
like it has plenty to do and get up to and things like that.
I also like to change the environment a lot
so if the bird ends up on the floor or ends up
in a position where it can step up pretty easily for me
I'll change the location that I put it back
to just to get it used to different spots
and areas around my home that are kind of my bird zones.
You look like you want to be on the tree.
She's like, let me have it, man that looks fun.
Can I help you?
Good job.
K, I'll put you on the tree
but I want to see how much you weigh first.
There we go, good job!
I'll put you on the tree after K?
one four, two.
Okay, do you wanna go on the tree?
Let's go on a tree.
You can't fly there! You can't fly!
(wings flapping)
You can't fly,
okay,
how exciting is that?
Oh my goodness, you are an active little bugger.
Do you wanna come see the pellets they put
over here in here for you?
Come on over,
do you need help?
Yeah, good job!
One of the really cool personality traits
that I've found popular with Caiques is
that they don't tend to be one person birds just naturally.
So they tend to be more open socially to numerous people
around the home and go to pretty much anybody.
At least that's been my experience with Caiques
which is something that I really appreciate.
So I made sure to introduce widget to my husband
and to my daughter and make sure that on that day one
she got to know everybody in our family unit
so that nobody was quite an immediate stranger
or anything like that.
The funniest thing about this is that
my husband Dave was not expecting this
project bird to come along and Widget,
it seemed like really fell in love and took a liking
to him and just started following him all around the house
which was the cutest thing ever and
I think he was quite the fan of her too.
(emotional music)
What in the heck?
- I was just laying here
- Oh my gosh!
- Yeah!
- Did you give her a treat?
- No, I lost it.
(laughing)
Where's the hand?
(laughing)
Found it!
(laughing)
- One of the interesting things about the difference
between me and my husband is that I tend
to move quite slowly with new birds.
Whereas Dave, he's a lot braver
than I am and he'll usually push a little bit harder
which either gets him
100 times ahead
of where I would actually be
or obviously it can backtrack you
if the bird isn't receptive to it,
but in this case of Widget
she was incredibly receptive to him and his handling
and he was immediately able to do so much with her
that I would have never even tried on day one.
And it was pretty amazing to see that transformation in her
and it just immediately seemed to make her
a little bit more comfortable in our overall zone
and Capri and I were able to handle her a lot similarly
to how Dave was as well and it was just
a really cool kickstart to our relationship
and something that I haven't actually had happen
on one of my day one experiences with project birds
mostly because Dave's never been so involved.
- Oh, so cute! She gave you a kiss when she landed
Now the biggest surprise to me about widget
was her screaming, she just incessantly would scream
whether we were with her or not.
But especially if I left the room, she was doing this very
horrendous scream that none of us could handle at all.
So the biggest bummer about widget is the screaming,
Woof! The screaming is brutal,
I'm having a hard time with the screaming.
I think the rest of the family is too, but
they're
(Widget screaming)
They're being pretty cool about it.
I tend to lock myself in my room
(Widget screaming)
and play music or something to tune it out.
(Widget screaming)
So, screaming is difficult because it's not
like I can just be like, hey, day three, screaming is gone.
Screaming
(Widget screaming)
is something that has been reinforced
over time to create that bad habit and that bad behavior
and it's something that has to be uncreated
over a lot more time.
So the time that it takes to create a screamer
you have to multiply that by like a hundred
to
(Widget screaming)
get that behavior to go extinct.
So
(Widget screaming)
we are doing what we can and not reinforcing it,
but it's gonna
that's going to be something that even the new owner
of Widget is going to always have to work at undoing
because she's going to keep trying and see like
will it work today? Will it work tomorrow?
Will it work for this amount of time or that amount of time?
And it's hard because we feel locked in our own house where
we can't come out because we
don't want to accidentally reinforce.
(Widget screaming)
And we have to wait for a nice amount
of quiet to be able to go out there and see her at all.
So
pretty freaking brutal, you guys
pretty brutal and she'll do this.
She's done this like on my lap to of
screaming. So
who knows
(Widget screaming)
all the ways it's been reinforced? I've no idea,
but undoing it, it's not going to be fun.
Em, also settling her down for the night
proved to be pretty hard we ended up
putting a baby monitor up trying about
three times to get her to settle.
And it was brutal.
She screamed for a straight hour just trying to
get her to go to sleep where most birds,
once they're in the dark will usually settle quite quickly
and fall asleep easily.
She was not having it, we tried settling her
down cage less we tried settling her down.
Eventually what worked was in her travel cage
that she came in I thought that would make her
the most comfortable because she was most familiar with it.
So we actually ended up using that
for the first three nights and then eventually I
switched to a larger cage in a different location
to get her to settle.
So again, all of the stuff that we really struggled with
like the screaming and the settling down for nighttime
and even the food going into great detail with that,
I will make other videos about which will be over
on my Patreon, just so that I can spend a lot of time going
into the nitty-gritty details of how long each process
each part of the process took.
So you guys can really understand the expectation
that was there, but she's a lot of fun and the whole family
is now enjoying the heck out of her.
And so I'll leave you with this last montage of
a little bit
of what she's learned since and even her
bathing response has come a really far away
(shower running)
and I'll give you guys an update after cause, ah!
Good bathing response!
(chirping)
Grab a treat,
Good job on that bathing response!
Look who did amazing on her shower!
She was
so good
and very chatty.
You were very chatty,
yeah!
What a good job!
I just want to end this video by saying a big shout
out and thank you to my project bird patrons.
They sponsor project birds like Widget
so that I can take them in,
give them the time that they need to eventually
and the training that they need to eventually be put
into a forever home.
And I love keeping you guys posted with these journeys.
So, join me over on Patreon
if you want to be part of Widgets journey.
Thanks so much for watching.
(laughing)
- Oh! Somebody else wants to see the birdie
- Okay,
- Let's see the birdie
- Look who had a shower!
- Aww!
- Doesn't she look great?
- Aww, so cute, can I hold her?
- Yeah
- Aw, it smells so good in here.
- Try your other hand
There you go,
- It's okay!
Good girl!
- Good job!
- You're soaked!
You're adorable soaked!
(giggling)
- Did she take a shower with you?
- Yeah!