Jumping into Hand Training

User Question
My girlfriend and I recently purchased (about 6 weeks ago) a parakeet from what you call a "Bin-o-budgie" type pet store. Everything is ok in terms of behavior since he sings quite a bit in the mornings and at other random points during the day.

The problem is that while trying to hand train him, we are noticing a few things. Prior to finding your training instructions, we used to sort of grab him out of the cage and he would sit there next to us on the desk with no problem and perch on our fingers. I realized that this may not be the best way and I searched on the internet and came across your website. When either of us sticks our hand in the cage, he sometimes has a tendancy of flying to the back of the cage and waiting for us to retract our hand. Other times, he just sits there and lets us pet his feet or his chest. Sometimes he perches on my girlfriend's hand but as she tries to take him out of the cage, he usually jumps on to the cage wall or his perch. Also, the few times that we had grabbed him and taken him out, we've notcied that while perched on our fingers, the second he sees his cage, he flys to it (or at least tries).

We have even left the door to the cage open for hours with some millet by it and he doesn't even try to venture near it (and of course he loves the millet but not when it's next to the door).

Is there any reason for his nervousness all the time? I might as well add the fact that lately (actully, ever since we've bought him) we have been needing to move his cage back and forth to different apartments because of all of the hurricanes hitting Florida since we live on a third floor apartment. I'm assuming this is contributing to his nervousness but is there anything else we can do to help him?

There was only ONCE that he actually perched on my girlfriend's finger and she was able to take him out of the cage (after he hesistated a moment, he didn't fly away). Once she had him out, he was very social with the roomates. He was perching on everyone's fingers and singing away. Any ideas as to the source of his nervousness?

Sorry if this is a little long but there is one more question. Being college students, we have late schedules and we tend to be up till at least 3-4AM. However, we do cover him with a towel at around 9-10PM. We try to turn off the lights at around that time but sometimes it just doesn't work out since we need to do classwork and other things. We also sometimes wake up late (around 11AM-1PM) and end up uncovering him at that time. Is this bad for him? The second he is uncovered, he begins to sing like crazy for about 20 minutes. He also tends to have this singing and then screeching type noise (like if he's trying to get our attention). Any ideas? Thanks for your help!!

Lisa's Answer
You talk about grabbing your parakeet and forcing him to come out of the cage when he doesn't want to, but then you ask why he's being afraid :) Judging by your descriptions, the bird isn't hand trained. And if he's not hand trained, he hasn't been taught to trust you, and is therefore afraid.

I have full hand training instructions here -

http://www.lisashea.com/petinfo/articles/bird_hand.html

you really have to go through it slowly and patiently for it to work. You can't trick him with millet or try to rush things. Parakeets are very intelligence and you have to win them over fully.

Birds are sort of programmed to fall asleep at dusk and wake up right at dawn. So if you keep the bird up past dusk, he'll sort of get cranky and off his built in cycle. On the other side, if you keep him covered up for 6-8 hours after dawn, he sort of feels like he's being "punished" and ignored - that the world is up and awake and doing things, while he is trapped in a dark room with nobody to be with.

Definitely parakeets are flock animals and always want to be around a flock member that is paying attention to them. So if you ignore or are away from the house for a long time (or asleep for long hours while the keet is awake and lonely) it gets rough on the little bird. Maybe you might think about getting him a companion, and finding a room in your apartment that the birds can be put in to sleep by a window. That way it'll be dark and quiet at night because nobody will be in there - and when morning comes they'll get the natural light and be happy, even if you guys are still sleeping.

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