Well, I'm back after being gone for nearly 6 weeks, first on the Kaufman Puppy Mill deployment with UAN, and then with my regular work I was in Granbury helping to manage wildfire response across Texas.
I missed my animals hugely and was sought of worried about how Puff was going to react to me being gone so long.
But... while I was away I learned a bit more about the video function of my camera.... so here are a couple of videos of Marnie doing some of her behaviors.
Turn, wave and shake
Go to her door perch
Showing posts with label Turn Around. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Turn Around. Show all posts
Monday, September 21, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Training Update 03/08/2009
Time for a training update... it's been long enough!
Lucha is still in his hormonal amazon season and is very difficult to work with. I was lucky to get a few repetitions in of the taking liquid from a syringe behavior the other day before the eyes and tail flashed and the whining started.
Darwin is still working on his recall... he's still a little hesitant, but I am happy to say that with patience and a few repetitions of the request he is coming down from the very top of the playscape every time. I will of course be continuing to work on recall, but would like to add specific areas to cue him to.
Marnie surprised me today. Normally when I attempt to target with her she gives me the "why?" look. So when I decided to start the taking liquid from a syringe behavior with her I was unsure of how well we'd progress.
So I showed her the syringe, she touched it with her beak, I bridged and reinforced. After a couple of slow repetitions I decided to add liquid to the syringe (some lukewarm chamomile tea, one of her favs). Well that turned out to be great for Marnie. The first time she touched the syringe tip with the liquid, she lost all interest in the chopped almonds in my hand and proceeded to drink the whole 1cc of chamomile tea in one go! I refilled with water and got exactly the same reaction :)
Thinking back this should have been obvious, as Marnie often demands a taste of whatever I am drinking and hissy fits are thrown if I am drinking something like coffee and deny her request. So even though the liquid was in a syringe and not a cup, it was still hugely reinforcing for her to get the contents...
... but with sucess comes failure. I asked her for a turnaround and she stared at me...
Marnie giving her patented "Why?" look
Lucha is still in his hormonal amazon season and is very difficult to work with. I was lucky to get a few repetitions in of the taking liquid from a syringe behavior the other day before the eyes and tail flashed and the whining started.
Darwin is still working on his recall... he's still a little hesitant, but I am happy to say that with patience and a few repetitions of the request he is coming down from the very top of the playscape every time. I will of course be continuing to work on recall, but would like to add specific areas to cue him to.
Marnie surprised me today. Normally when I attempt to target with her she gives me the "why?" look. So when I decided to start the taking liquid from a syringe behavior with her I was unsure of how well we'd progress.
So I showed her the syringe, she touched it with her beak, I bridged and reinforced. After a couple of slow repetitions I decided to add liquid to the syringe (some lukewarm chamomile tea, one of her favs). Well that turned out to be great for Marnie. The first time she touched the syringe tip with the liquid, she lost all interest in the chopped almonds in my hand and proceeded to drink the whole 1cc of chamomile tea in one go! I refilled with water and got exactly the same reaction :)
Thinking back this should have been obvious, as Marnie often demands a taste of whatever I am drinking and hissy fits are thrown if I am drinking something like coffee and deny her request. So even though the liquid was in a syringe and not a cup, it was still hugely reinforcing for her to get the contents...
... but with sucess comes failure. I asked her for a turnaround and she stared at me...
Marnie giving her patented "Why?" look
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Training Update 01/13/2009
I am continuing to work on getting Marnie to pay closer attention to the specific behavior I am asking for as opposed to just offering the first one she thinks of.
Doing two 10 minute sessions a day she is improving greatly, and getting the correct behavior 90% of the time. She seems to be favoring the Wave behavior at the moment, and will occasionally shift her weight as if to start the Wave, before turning.
I plan a few more days of this sharpening of skills before moving on to a new behavior.
Darwin is going through an increase in aggressive behavior around his cage at the moment, although he is still very sweet out of the cage. This increase in aggressive body language and behavior means I am going back to basics with him and working on targeting around the cage. Although I am not sure exactly why he has changed his behavior, I am determined to work through this by using positive reinforcement, at the same time as examining his environment for any differences which could have set him back. I am giving him 3 short sessions a day of targeting around the cage at the moment.
Lucha is still a little on the hormonal lovey side. In an effort to get by this I returned to working on the Taking Liquid from a Syringe behavior, which he already knows fairly well, to see if he would focus better on this than the new behavior (the Turaround).
Lucha is pretty good at this behavior and quickly targets the tip of the syringe when he sees it. However, I had gotten poor results when water was added to the syringe. So this time I thought a little more about setting him up for success. Because Lucha consumes more water than the average bird, I decided to remove water from his play gym a few hours before the planned session. Sure enough as soon as he realised that water was in the syringe he started drinking it from the tip and in essence receiving reinforcement from the water as well as the verbal and pecans. Next time I plan on doing the same, but take the water away an hour before training, with the end view of not needing to remove the water at all in a few more sessions as I will be able reinforce when he takes the water now.
I have also been thinking more about his difficulty with the Turnaround. I am wondering if part of the reason why he's slow in picking up this behavior, is that he really does not want to do it because his balance is poor. He has been a little unsteady since I have had him, and often walks using his beak first or has problems maintaining balance while climbing... and here I am asking him to turn in a circle on a perch. This hardly seems like setting him up for success.
So I think maybe the best option with Lucha is to examine the behavior from his point of view before deciding whether or not to teach it to him, and to work on something that is more focused on improving his daily life.
Lucha takes a well deserved post training session nap
This blog is turning out to be a very useful way of working through my thoughts and making sense out of them for the benefit of my birds:)
Doing two 10 minute sessions a day she is improving greatly, and getting the correct behavior 90% of the time. She seems to be favoring the Wave behavior at the moment, and will occasionally shift her weight as if to start the Wave, before turning.
I plan a few more days of this sharpening of skills before moving on to a new behavior.
Darwin is going through an increase in aggressive behavior around his cage at the moment, although he is still very sweet out of the cage. This increase in aggressive body language and behavior means I am going back to basics with him and working on targeting around the cage. Although I am not sure exactly why he has changed his behavior, I am determined to work through this by using positive reinforcement, at the same time as examining his environment for any differences which could have set him back. I am giving him 3 short sessions a day of targeting around the cage at the moment.
Lucha is still a little on the hormonal lovey side. In an effort to get by this I returned to working on the Taking Liquid from a Syringe behavior, which he already knows fairly well, to see if he would focus better on this than the new behavior (the Turaround).
Lucha is pretty good at this behavior and quickly targets the tip of the syringe when he sees it. However, I had gotten poor results when water was added to the syringe. So this time I thought a little more about setting him up for success. Because Lucha consumes more water than the average bird, I decided to remove water from his play gym a few hours before the planned session. Sure enough as soon as he realised that water was in the syringe he started drinking it from the tip and in essence receiving reinforcement from the water as well as the verbal and pecans. Next time I plan on doing the same, but take the water away an hour before training, with the end view of not needing to remove the water at all in a few more sessions as I will be able reinforce when he takes the water now.
I have also been thinking more about his difficulty with the Turnaround. I am wondering if part of the reason why he's slow in picking up this behavior, is that he really does not want to do it because his balance is poor. He has been a little unsteady since I have had him, and often walks using his beak first or has problems maintaining balance while climbing... and here I am asking him to turn in a circle on a perch. This hardly seems like setting him up for success.
So I think maybe the best option with Lucha is to examine the behavior from his point of view before deciding whether or not to teach it to him, and to work on something that is more focused on improving his daily life.
Lucha takes a well deserved post training session nap
This blog is turning out to be a very useful way of working through my thoughts and making sense out of them for the benefit of my birds:)
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Training Update 01/11/2009
Well having a chest infection is getting a lot done at my house. Not only have I finally got this blog up and running (I've only been putting it off for 6 months), but I have been able to do a lot of little training sessions.
Lucha is headed into hormonal mode, so training is getting harder with him. He would much rather get some beaky rubs and do some puffy dancing than learn how to turn around. Because of this I am going to try and go back to some behaviors he already knows like taking liquid from a syringe and improve the quality of that behavior as opposed to attemtping to teach him something new. I'm not sure whether this will help or not, but it's worth a try.
As for Marnie, well she's coming along leaps and bounds.
Yesterday evening we did another training session focusing on the "Wave" behavior. I introduced a visual cue in the form of my index finger, paralell to my body and waggled from side to side along with the verbal cue "Marnie Wave". She picked this up straight away :) So in response to using the verbal and visual cues she will lift her left leg and waggle it up and down.
This mornings session started with a recap of the Turnaround behavior. It took a few goes to get her back into it as she would offer the Wave behavior instead. However, with consistent ignoring of the Wave behavior and reinforcing the Turnaround behavior when paired with the verbal and visual cues for Turnaround, she soon got the idea.
This made me realise that I needed to work on getting her to differentiate between behaviors, so that she learned that she had to offer a specific behavior for a specific cue to get the reward. To do this I switched up which behavior I asked for and only reinforced the correct one. First I would ask for a turnaround, then a wave, then a turnaround twice in a row, followed by a set of waves. By the end of the session she was watching my hand closely for the cue and was performing the correct behavior with only the occasional slight hesitation.
This is obviously something that needs to be worked on. So for the next few days I plan on doing the same kind of mixing it up session as this morning, before moving on to another behavior.
Lucha is headed into hormonal mode, so training is getting harder with him. He would much rather get some beaky rubs and do some puffy dancing than learn how to turn around. Because of this I am going to try and go back to some behaviors he already knows like taking liquid from a syringe and improve the quality of that behavior as opposed to attemtping to teach him something new. I'm not sure whether this will help or not, but it's worth a try.
As for Marnie, well she's coming along leaps and bounds.
Yesterday evening we did another training session focusing on the "Wave" behavior. I introduced a visual cue in the form of my index finger, paralell to my body and waggled from side to side along with the verbal cue "Marnie Wave". She picked this up straight away :) So in response to using the verbal and visual cues she will lift her left leg and waggle it up and down.
This mornings session started with a recap of the Turnaround behavior. It took a few goes to get her back into it as she would offer the Wave behavior instead. However, with consistent ignoring of the Wave behavior and reinforcing the Turnaround behavior when paired with the verbal and visual cues for Turnaround, she soon got the idea.
This made me realise that I needed to work on getting her to differentiate between behaviors, so that she learned that she had to offer a specific behavior for a specific cue to get the reward. To do this I switched up which behavior I asked for and only reinforced the correct one. First I would ask for a turnaround, then a wave, then a turnaround twice in a row, followed by a set of waves. By the end of the session she was watching my hand closely for the cue and was performing the correct behavior with only the occasional slight hesitation.
This is obviously something that needs to be worked on. So for the next few days I plan on doing the same kind of mixing it up session as this morning, before moving on to another behavior.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Training Update 01/10/2009
I plan on using this blog to track training so here's what happened since yesterday.
With one more session Marnie has learned to turn around to a verbal cue "Marnie Turn". She is still offering it without the cue, but I am not rewarding her for it unless it is done after the cue.
Since she's so interested in learning now we have done one session on learning "Wave".
I started by putting a single finger out as if to ask for a step up and giving the cue "Marnie Wave". She started by lifting her foot to touch it to my finger which I bridged "Good bird" and reinforced her with some pecan. After a couple of repetitions she was quickly moving her foot to touch my finger as soon as I gave the cue. The next approximation was to move my finger an inch higher. She quickly targeted her foot to my finger, so I moved my finger up to her eye level. Again, she quickly targeted her foot to my finger. So for the next approximation I moved my finger slightly away from her head so that she could not reach it with her foot and again gave the cue "Marnie Wave". This time it took a few hesitant lifts before she lifted her foot to her wing level and slightly dropped and raised it again. For this I gave her a jackpot, as she had lifted her foot high, without touching it to my finger and had moved it up and down slightly. I asked for one more repetition which she repeated the last approximation before she started rubbing her beak.
Because I wanted to end on a positive before she got full, I ended the session there.
With one more session Marnie has learned to turn around to a verbal cue "Marnie Turn". She is still offering it without the cue, but I am not rewarding her for it unless it is done after the cue.
Since she's so interested in learning now we have done one session on learning "Wave".
I started by putting a single finger out as if to ask for a step up and giving the cue "Marnie Wave". She started by lifting her foot to touch it to my finger which I bridged "Good bird" and reinforced her with some pecan. After a couple of repetitions she was quickly moving her foot to touch my finger as soon as I gave the cue. The next approximation was to move my finger an inch higher. She quickly targeted her foot to my finger, so I moved my finger up to her eye level. Again, she quickly targeted her foot to my finger. So for the next approximation I moved my finger slightly away from her head so that she could not reach it with her foot and again gave the cue "Marnie Wave". This time it took a few hesitant lifts before she lifted her foot to her wing level and slightly dropped and raised it again. For this I gave her a jackpot, as she had lifted her foot high, without touching it to my finger and had moved it up and down slightly. I asked for one more repetition which she repeated the last approximation before she started rubbing her beak.
Because I wanted to end on a positive before she got full, I ended the session there.
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