Above all, take care about what you are teaching the bird. Stay away from profanities. Some hand-fed birds are known to live for over 40 or 50 years and if you teach your pet unsavory words, you will be forced to listen to it all its life. If necessary, one can get help from the many bird books and magazines, available on the subject. It is possible your area may have bird clubs where you can interact with others not only to enhance your knowledge on the subject but also to get help to solve problems. Though excellent mimics, some varieties of parakeets do not have the ability to learn speech; at the most, they may learn a couple of words. African Gray Parrot, Yellow-naped Amazon, Mexican Double Training And Taming Yellow-Head Amazon, Yellow Fronted Amazon, Yellow-Crowned Amazon, and Blue Fronted Amazon are some varieties that learn fast, and become fluent talkers. Though they have this inborn quality, the amount and quality of the parrot's speech would, more often than not, depend on the trainer. Observe the bird and find out at what time of the day it likes to chirp or sing, the most. Select that time, to start your work. Lessons should be repeated, at least twice a day. Even if there are more bird enthusiasts at home, insure that training is undertaken by just one person. Starting with a normal greeting, like “Hello Polly”, usually helps. It will be convenient to have a bi-syllabic name for your pet. Don't forget to reward the bird when it succeeds in mimicking you. It helps for the bird to associate rewards with the sounds it makes. Start the second word only after the bird has learnt to repeat the Right time to train your bird…. Training And Taming Observe the bird and find out at what time of the day it likes to chirp or sing, the most. first word successfully. Follow it up with simpler words, limiting the number of syllables. After the bird learns “hello” and two-syllable words, progress to three syllable ones like, "how are you?" or "Hi sweetie," and build its vocabulary, as you would a child's. Never force a bird to learn from tape-recorded speech lessons. The bird may learn to speak fluently, but only when nobody is around. It may say nothing when people are nearby. What you need is for the bird to speak, when you prompt it; that is when you ask: “how are you?” or “what's your name?” The bird should be able to respond. That comes when you talk to the bird whenever you are doing something like cleaning the cage or doing some other work, in the presence of the bird. To teach it to respond to your queries, first teach it the response, and then follow it up, with the question. You will have to spend a lot of time to get the right response, and each time the bird responds Training And Taming But if you try to teach two different things at a time, the bird is likely to get confused. And take care to see that there is no music or television sound in the background, while teaching it. properly, give it a food reward. Work on it, until the bird is consistent, with its answers. The process is more difficult and time consuming than mere imitation, but worth every second spent on it. If the lessons are continuous, one can expect the bird to develop a good vocabulary. Male parakeets are generally more likely to speak successfully. They also learn more quickly. As in the case of any animal, get a young bird which will generally learn more quickly. The first step in any training is to win the trust of the bird, and make it feel confident that you won't hurt him or her. Otherwise, it will always be flying around the cage, to try and escape from you. |