Treats

          I mostly use Pine Nuts and Peanuts in shells for training. 90% of their treats are Pine Nuts and when I feel that they deserve a special treat for performing very well (for ex. coming down from a very tall tree) I give them a whole peanut in the shell because they just love to destroy them and get that much more satisfaction out of them, then just simply eating the treat, but for regular treats they are quite big, messy and also it takes the birds long time to finish them so for most trick training whole peanuts are not really the best choice. For flight training they have their use tho. I will cover that in the Recall Training article.  For smaller parrots most people use sunflower seeds, I sometimes use them too and for even smaller birds you might use Millet.

          How to use a Treat?

Well it sounds simple, but many times its not. Sometimes your bird will not want to take the treat you are offering and there might be few reasons behind it. I mentioned in my Feeding a Parrot chapter that it is important to introduce some kind of feeding system to your bird. You might want to read that. But basically if your bird has nuts or seeds included in his daily diet it will not be anything special for him and why should he perform for you to get what he has for free, you might even have more success having him do it just for scratches then and forget about treats altogether. My birds get nuts mostly while training, when Im not training that day then they can have them in the food. Remember you dont really need to have a formal training session, just have a treat handy every time you go by the cage and tell them to turn around or say something you teach them to say on a cue, you might even find out they get too many nuts then, like mine sometimes do.

It is also important how you present the treat, with some parrots more then others, Kaja our GW Macaw is much more fussy then Molly about treats. He eats them, but he still likes to ask me if what he did was good or blabl something before he takes it :) But most of the time when you reward a bird with the treat act excited and very happy, make a big deal out of it, make him feel that it is his very yummy special treat and dont be shy to look like a fool :) I always say, you can even eat one in front of him so he see you - monkey see, monkey do LOL.

Also your bird should know what it is you are giving him, if he never had a peanut in his life before obviously you just dont use them as a treat yet, let him have some first a day before so know what it is.

          How to find out what treat I should use?

From my experience almost every Macaw will take Pine Nuts and Peanuts and almost every mid sized parrot will take sunflower seed. If they dont then there is a chance that the problem is somewhere else and probably in your feeding system. For smaller birds it might be a bid harder because their treats are sometimes tiny. Best way is to use shallow wide dish and offer them a mix of all. Then just watch which ones he eats first and those will be the best treats for you to use for training.  If you have the exceptional bird that will not like any of them you can try things like orange juice and you can still reward him the same way, except you would offer a juice from a glass instead of seeds, the theory is the same, just the delivery is different.

          How big should the treats be?

That depends on what you are working on, but most of the time you want them small enough so he can just eat them quick instead of sitting there and play with them for few minutes. There are exceptions tho, for example sometimes you might want the bird to take longer. Maybe he doesnt like to sit on his T stand very much so you can offer bigger treat, then he has to sit there and hold it with his foot to chew on it, pretty soon he will realize that sitting there isnt that bad ;-)

Kaja eating his Pine Nut treat