- Anyone else want to puke?
(laughs)
- Well, hello everybody. This is a great intro.
Anyone else want to puke?
Hey guys, we are on a surprise trip.
And it all started because a fan wrote us a message
asking for us to critique her
beginner's guide to owning a pet parrot.
So we replied
and she doesn't know this yet,
but we're going to go surprise her.
And how old is she?
- 13. - 13.
So We offer a surprise trip all the way out to
not tell anywhere,
but we're going to stay in,
in Spokane tonight at the hotel near the airport,
and then we're going to fly out
first thing, bright and early tomorrow morning
to go give a little surprise visit.
- This is day one.
(electronic intro music)
- Okay so, today is the day we are going to surprise
Gabrielle.
She's a 13 year old fan of ours
that wrote us a very long letter
and asked us for our help on,
kind of critiquing her beginner guide for bird owners.
And so we started doing that.
I had a Zoom call with her that was pretty long
and we still didn't make it through the entire guide.
And so I kept telling her that we would make more time
to go through the rest.
And so here we are,
we've made more time to go through the rest.
Only she has no idea that we've come this far.
- We thought it'd be really cool way to,
to reach out and help,
really, I guess, kind of like
the next generation of bird trainers.
And she's somebody who's incredibly passionate about,
about bird training and birds.
And so coming all the way out here to North Carolina
was, from Idaho, a very long trip,
but I think it's going to be a ton of fun
to be able to help her in-person,
and I cannot wait to see the shock when she sees you.
- I excited to see her reaction when
she sees us.
- Yeah, definitely.
Her mom kind of warned me
that she might be really, really reserved about it.
She might be nervous,
but I'm hoping since we have a couple of days here
that we'll really get to know her
and get her to warm up to us.
And I think it's really important to
let the younger generation know that people are reachable.
So when you see people on Instagram or YouTube
or wherever platform that you're seeing them
like remembering that they're people
and don't put them on this super high unreachable pedestal
because they're relatable and they're human.
You know? So I know for me.
I know for me,
having other people
that have larger accounts than me,
larger following who I've been following for a while
and like really, really respect
when they acknowledge me, it's really big deal
and a really good feeling.
And so it's humbling
and I want to make sure that we pass that feeling on.
- Which is funny 'cause it's like 300,000 subscribers
and then someone with 1.2 million, it's like,
it seems like such a huge difference when...
- You feel like a small fish in a way.
And so being recognized is like really good feeling.
And I want to make sure I never lose that
and that I always may able to pass that on to somebody else
and also to encourage her to continue on
'cause I'm sure if there's people that she admires
in any industry, I want her to feel encouraged
because she remembers this one time she wrote a letter
and somebody responded.
- I'm excited. It's gonna be a cool story.
- Yeah.
- Hi, my name is Gabrielle.
I first got into birds because of my rescue Finch, Baybay.
And ever since then, I've been obsessed with learning
all that I can about birds and specifically parrots.
That is how I got introduced to the BirdTricks channel.
I just love all their content and their birds.
And I just wanted to learn all that I could about
being the best parrot owner I could.
And BirdTricks is how I did that.
I now have four finches
and a blue peach-faced lovebird, Lexa.
And I volunteer at a parent rescue in my area
and I was a quarantine home for them,
which required over 15 hours of parrot training classes.
(whispering)
- Hey! We wanted to work on the rest of your book.
- [Gabrielle] Hi!
(laughs)
- I think you're having a great time, right?
Nice to meet you!
- Nice to meet you too.
- [Dave] How you doing?
- Good, how are you?
- Good.
- This is our daughter, Capri. Capri, this is Gabrielle.
She's the one that we told you has a little lovebird.
- [Gabrielle] It's nice to meet you.
- She's really excited to meet your lovebird.
And this is my husband Dave.
(laughs)
- [Dave] Good to meet ya!
- [Gabrielle] Nice to meet you too.
- Awesome. Thank you so much.
- [Gabrielle] She told me it was my uncle.
- [Dave] Thanks for being sneaky.
(laughs)
- I've had my lovebird Lexa for about 10 months now.
We had a rough start with her because she came to us
with a severe upper respiratory infection.
It was hard thing because she was only eight weeks old
and I was constantly dealing with the fact
that she might not necessarily make it,
that may have been the reason
that we immediately bonded so much
was because I,
I just knew from the beginning that I couldn't lose her
and with us spending every second together
because I had to keep close eye on her all the time.
I think Lexa just really got used to me very quickly.
It took about a month of a strict regimen of medicine
and a few vet hospitalizations before she fully recovered.
- [Jamieleigh] Oh, Capri look, they're out.
- [Dave] Oh, man. - [Capri] I know, nice, huh?
(faintly speaking)
- [Gabrielle] They're always trying to find stuff
for their nest.
- [Jamieleigh] I imagine. It's really cute.
- That's Pip and that's Baybay
and then Cheerio is upstairs being quirky.
- [Dave] So Pip and Baybay?
- Yeah.
Baybay was my first bird and he is a rescue.
She has a lot of personality.
- [Jamieleigh] Smile Capri.
- She knows what she likes and what she doesn't.
- [Jamieleigh] Super cute.
(lighthearted music)
- So, the diet just to be some seasonal feeding system
in the morning and then pellets of the evening
or swapped.
So you can do pellets in the morning
and seasonal in the evening.
But when you do that,
When the diet line up right,
then you just get so much more leverage
out of the treats that you do have.
And so, that might,
that alone might face a little challenge,
like 75% of the time she flies.
But then if you still have a problem,
that's where I would set up
where she could potentially fail.
It's like, okay,
I know she's not gonna fly from this distance,
but she'll fly from this distance.
So we'll do a couple of reps here
and I'm going to step back and ask for recall,
she's probably not going to do it.
So I'll go shuffle papers for 30 seconds,
come back and do it again.
What that will teach her is that
if she refuses to do it,
you don't just sit there and keep calling.
She lost her opportunity to get that early high value treat
and it's a higher value
because it doesn't exist in her diet anymore.
- Okay. Thank you.
- Yeah. Does that make sense?
- Yes, sir.
- [Dave] So good?
- Mm-hmm.
- [Dave] How long do your flight sessions usually go?
- Only up to 15 minutes?
- [Dave] Can you do that one again?
- Spin. (tongue clicks)
Good girl.
- For flight sessions,
we usually try to go not off the time.
So it was kind of a trick question.
So what I look for is developing their skills
in a very specific way.
And then push people more and more towards
going off the repetitions and getting perfect repetitions
as opposed to 15 minutes for the flights.
And so what happens is you build the anticipation more.
If you get five perfect repetitions
and you only reward the perfect ones,
let's say, you get,
there's another one mixed into that
and it wasn't exactly what you wanted
and you just reset it?
What it'll do is it'll keep her anticipation really high
for flight training,
but you'll get a higher quality,
even though you're doing fewer reps
because you're only rewarding the exact
perfect ones that you want.
So, and like you said, you know,
you keep it to a certain time
because you want to make sure that she has interests.
She's so cute.
Just stare at me like she's listening.
(laughs)
But yeah, so keeping it shorter to like
a certain amount of reps.
I think you'll find will be more beneficial.
- We all learned a ton from BirdTricks visit.
I really appreciated Dave's diagram for training,
Jamieleigh's help on my book,
their advice on getting ahead of hormones,
and in general, their incredible level of knowledge
when it came to any questions that we had.
Some of the things that were in Lexa's cage
or her training environment were causing hormonal triggers
that for now were slight,
but in the future, would have caused bigger reactions,
such as biting and aggression.
They would have had,
we would have had a very hard time figuring them out
without BirdTricks.
(uplifting music)
- [Robotic Voice] I'm gonna measure you.
You are five feet, three and one half inches tall.
- Ah! I got shorter!
(Jamie screams) (laughs)
- [Dave] What you got there?
(indistinct)
- I have done a ton of research and had a lot of training,
but still learn so much from BirdTricks visit
and Lexa's life is better for it.
Since BirdTricks came, I have moved around several toys.
We have all been very careful to watch Lexa's body language.
I've changed her food bowl so that she can't nest in it
or exhibit nesting behavior in it.
And she is extremely happy and healthy
as she is fully converted onto BirdTricks pellets.
Lexa can now fly up to 60 feet
and she's very playful with her flying
and she likes to show up, which I find that very funny.
She's getting really good at target training.
And I love the training tools that BirdTricks gave me.
And Lexa is crazy about the pellets
and the toys that we got from BirdTricks.
I still just can't believe that BirdTricks care so much
about encouraging the parrot passion of their fans,
that they would come so far just to surprise me.
It was very inspiring and educational at the same time.
(uplifting music)