Ideas for Hand Training

User Question
I bought a parakett in August. I got him from a good store, he is very

healthy, and according to the information I was given, he should be about

five months old now.

He's starting to sing quite a bit for me and gets really excited when I

play instrumental types of music (it's his favorite), but he is still

terrified of me.

I was told he was "hand raised"...obviously not true. I feel really bad

for him, I hate it when I clean the cage because it scares him so bad. I

try to move really slow, and I put the cage cover over three sides when I

clean it so he only sees me from the front of the cage.

I probably shouldn't have done it, but I went ahead and bought him a

mirror. I hated for him to be alone while I'm at work, and of course he

loves that little bird in the mirror.

Do you think he'll ever come around trust me where I can actually touch

him? I read the notes on your web site, I'm going to work on "step 1" of

training for a long time before trying the next step. I have him located

on a bar top in my kitchen over the sink. When I'm cooking or doing

dishes, or anything in the kitchen I talk to him. He can also see into

the den where the TV is...and he does like to look at the TV.

Any other ideas? Should I just be patient and hope he'll come around?

Thanks for reading this and your web page is really nice...good job!

Lisa's Answer
Definitely patience is the key here. It's great that you have him in a commonly used rooms, parakeets love company. The more time you can spend with him, the better. He'll be very fond of his mirror friend, but the mirror friend won't make any noise :) So he'll also be quite fond of you. Definitely if you work through the training steps, he'll eventually become hand trained!

The kitchen location IS difficult in the sense of safety. If you take him out of the cage, you will have to make super care that there are no open vessels of water (pots etc), no hot surfaces, no sharp knives out, etc. And of course NEVER ever cook with teflon!

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