# Training and Bonding with Budgies with Different Needs



## Nausicaa (Jul 22, 2021)

Hello everyone, I hope you and your budgies are safe, healthy and happy!

*Long story short:* I have two budgies and they have different backstories, yet live in the same cage. Their taming and bonding requires different approaches, but I can't do these things since they share a home and one bothers, plays or gets upset with me while I'm trying to train the others. Any tips? Please and Thank you!

*Long story long: *Iris (green) is an adult female budgie that flew into my room in late February this year. She was perfectly healthy, but not trained or tamed, and probably kept in "wrong" circumstances, since she has no idea what a cuttlefish bone is or how to interact with toys. We started training with millet and by April she had even stood on my finger a couple of times while eating the millet; many more she had put one foot on my finger. She sort of knows the command "(want a)bite", which means both 'would you like to eat this' and 'this is edible, try it', "step(up)" (sorry, it's hard to translate, Greek is a compicated language, not particularly suitable for training animals) which means 'take a step closer'. Finally she recognises "good birdy" as praise for what she's doing, and turns around if you call her name. That was until April. Then moulting started, and it was like training never happened. She was afraid of my hand, she was afraid when I passed by. I let her half-moult and then we started again. We haven't reached the sitting-on-finger yet, but she's certainly not that afraid of me and she will do a huge chest-dive to reach the millet in my hand by resting her chest or even belly on my finger and stretching her neck. She also remembers the commands. 

In the meantime, I bought her a friend, Dawn (greywing), who is about a year old, hand-raised from a gentleman who had just gotten a promotion and could no longer care for his large collection of parrots. The breeder he had bought Dawn from had clipped (wrongly) her left wing and toe beyond the nerve, so she was unable to fly for real, but she did do the downwards chicken flight. Anyway, she seemed like an extremely sweet and friendly bird so I figured she'd be the perfect friend for Iris and vice versa. Dawn would show Iris people and toys aren't monsters and Iris could show her how to fly. Forgot to mention that Dawn had spent most of her life free in the room, on a park which I also purchased. Due to my mistakes of inexperience, we got offon the wrong foot with Dawn, going from her being fearless and sitting on my bun, to being terrified and VERY bitey. Until a few weeks ago all my fingers and my right wrist had tiny bitemarks. What I did, and I'm ashamed to admit it because I knew I shouldn't be doing it but freaked out, was that Dawn escaped right away when we arrived home due to a miscalculation of the cage's door, and hid under a very dusty place, so I grabbed her like a, well, a lemon. Not hard or anything like that, but I'm sure it was traumatic for her. After that I tried the stick method for taming and it seemed to be working along with millet. She would hop on the stick by herself and I would say "step" but after she did it and was already stuffing her face, because she would do it so quickly, and we even got to the point where I'd move the stick around, first inside the cage, then in and out the door and finally outside to take her to the park or wherever she wanted to go. For the record, Iris HATES sticks and hides behind the largest toy in the cage when I try the method, she prefers fingers. 

Moving on, quarantine was over and I brought the girls in the same room. Dawn went bananas when she saw Iris, to the point she shot herself inside her food bowl and got stuck (it's plastic, so she probably thought she'd get out of the cage). Once more, I panicked and opened the bowl's flap. She got outside and started climbing around her own cage, then jumped on Iris's cage. By a devilish coincidence Iris had managed to unhindge a branch (it was problematic from the start, it wasn't the first time this had happened) and I had one door open for adjustments. Dawn found the door, liked it and never left again. I wanted to introduce them far slower, but they seem to be getting along fine, so I thought it'd be far more stressful getting her out and then back in. Anyway, they get along very well and they really are a good influence on each other. Dawn has shown Iris how to play with toys, Iris has taught Dawn how eggfood is eaten and much much more. The problem is, I can no longer train them, since they respond to completely different methods. In the last couple of weeks Dawn's biting's calmed down, but she;ll still pinch me if I'm only feeding Iris, even though Iris is more or less the dominant one (she's the one getting fed by Dawn and not the other way round). Iris hates sticks and Dawn, despite accepting a finger lift when she flies away and can't fly up again, doesn't like my fingers close to her food unless it's nails. If I'm handfeeding them millet, it's got to be one hand one bird, so there's no room for them to step up. I've tried doing a bit of one-on-one training when one's absorbed by something, but it's not nearly enough and it's random, there's no schedule to it. I really want them to be able to have some time of free play in the room and not be confined to the cage, plus training helps a lot with boredom, but I don't know how to cater to their specific needs. 

I'm sorry for such a long post, just wanted to have all the info out there. Any advice welcome. Thank you very much!
PS: I've got to point out that the park is missing a rod, so there should be one behind Dawn in the first picture. Usually I add a tightly rolled piece of A4 paper, but only Dawn dares go there, even if Iris can fly to the top of the bookcase.


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## FaeryBee (May 9, 2011)

*I just now saw your thread. I love that you included the backstories and pictures, thank you!

My first question is:
Are you able to move one of the budgies to another room so that you can work on training one-on-one?*


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## Nausicaa (Jul 22, 2021)

FaeryBee said:


> I just now saw your thread. I love that you included the backstories and pictures, thank you!


Thanks, usually people say I write a lot 

Anyway, back on topic, sadly no. As you can see in the pictures, the house is basically a library, meaning if Iris (or Dawn in the future) flies up there, there's no way I can get her down but wait until she decides to do so. In addition to that, rooms that don't have bookshelves up to the ceiling, have hidden lighting features, which are basically death traps for small animals. They could get stuck, electrocuted, it's probably really dirty up there too, you get the idea. Plus, and that's more relevant to Dawn, who can't fly up yet, though she's been making progress, is that the floor is usually dirty and full of traps, since my maternal grandparents died within months of each other recently and we're slowly emptying their house, which surprise surprise, is also full of books that date back to the 1910s. My grandma also happened to be a smoker, so century old dust plus three-quarters of a century of smoke isn't good for budgies, it's why I picked Dawn up like a lemon, because she hid under a very dusty pile of my grandparents' papers and was worried she'd inhale or even eat the dust and it might be poisonous.

In addition to the architecture of the house, they still don't trust me enough to hop on my finger and be transported elsewhere. Dawn allows me to do so when she's flown to the floor, and most recent the curtain, but that's because she can't get enough lift from her missing wing feathers to fly back up. She flutters back to the top of the cage or park just as soon she can make the jump. As for Iris, the last time she sat on my finger was April, and it took a lot of millet to get her to do that.

If that's okay with the forum's rules, I could try and record some of my attempts of training and upload them on YT, if that'd be helpful.


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## FaeryBee (May 9, 2011)

*You are welcome to post videos of your training sessions. 
I will be happy to see if I can come up with any possible solutions to help with your attempts at training.

This link will explain how to display videos in your posts.
*
*FAQs - How to Display Video in your Posts*


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