Pet Forum / Birds / Birds / March 2008

Thur 0124008  22.10
SF,CA,USA

We got Oliver from a good pet store in San Francisco several months
ago; he still looked pretty young. Ever since then I've been trying to
work with him to make him feel at home and tame him. I have had
budgies before and usually managed to have them finger tame, unafraid
and feeling friendly within a month or less by using the gradual
introduction method: getting them used to my hands and then getting
them to perch on my finger, taking them out and letting them try to
fly away before gravity and their clipped wing feathers brought them
to the floor, then getting them back onto my finger or a perch. This,
along with talking a blue streak to them and lots of millet treat
bribery, worked really well with the other two parakeets and two
cockateils I tamed.

Oliver, on the other hand, is still very leery of my hands at the best
of times. If I go up close to his cage and talk to him he looks very
nervous and gets on the highest perch in the cage and often turns his
back on me. He'll only take millet sprays from me once in a while and
won't get on
my finger or a perch I offer him without a whole lot of fuss and
flapping around the cage like hke thinks I'm going to geek him or
something.

And he won't hardly ever come out of his cage unless I practically
chase him out. Once he's out it takes a whole lot of coaxing on my
part to get him to perch on my finger or a perch, and this always
involves him taking off and trying his best to fly away and going all
over the apartment so I have to go after him and coax him onto the
finger or stick. All the while, I'm speaking to him very softly and
gently and patiently. He'll sit on the perch I've offered him but
usually he's fairly obviously looking for an opportunity to bolt (NB:
his wings ARE clipped of course, so he can't really take to the air
very well, but he can put the whole of our apartment between us very
quick) .

I've tried taking him into another room. While sometimes a change of
scenery appears to calm him down for a while it doesn't always. I've
also tried covering up his cage so he wouldn 't just fly back to it,
but he still doesn't want to hang around me or my partner. Bribes and
sweet talk and ignoring him for a little bit don't work; at the first
possible moment he will try to high tail it.

And he's frustratingly unpredictable --sometimes he will stay with me
for a while and seemingly enjoy having me talk to him (doing that
listen-close thing with his little head tilted so he's looking at me
with one eye very closely). Occasionally he even lets me nuzzle him
with my nose and face; he seems to enjoy this at times, to the extent
of bowing his little head so I can nose at his neck, but at others he
tries to dodge and acts scared or annoyed, and *never* lets me stroke
or scratch him with a finger.

What really maddens me is that twice (I remember these times very well
because they were so uncommon and made me think we might be having a
breakthrough) he's actually reached out and given my nose a
friendly-seeming little peck or poke with his beak. In between those
times however he has remained heartbreakingly skittish acting and
cage-stuck. I leave the door to his cage open a lot in the hopes that
he'll at least check out the outside world on his own but he doesn't
venture out on his own except under duress.

I've even, out of sheer desperation, tried the "drastic approach" a
few times and held him cupped in my hands for a while, talking gently
to him and letting him bite the heck out of me until he gets it that
I'm not going to do anything awful to him; this hasn't done our
relationship any good at all. The only times I've had any occasion to
be coercive with him at all were one time trimming his wings.

What can I do? I really want to make friends with Oliver, and I'm sure
he's smart enough to have figured out that I won't hurt him by now.
But he acts like I am the scariest, awfullest thing in the world or at
best a major annoyance in his life, and sometimes it makes me real
sad.

One last thing: he seems pretty happy in his cage most of the time,
for whatever that's worth: always chattering away in the morning after
he has his breakfast and singing along to the radio or CD player a lot
of the time. He has toys -- a ball, and a bell with beads hanging from
it -- but he never seems to play with them.

So does anyone have any suggestions or advice or bird-befriending
spells to give me?