If flying birds has piqued your interest, you might have a question or two about the various types of telemetry devices on the market and how they integrate with your training program. A quality flighted relationship with your bird relies on your understanding of how...
When we talk about giving animals "control" in training, we stumble into vague territory. Control is a hypothetical construct. It's abstract, unmeasurable, and it shifts the conversation away from behavior and back into feelings and intention. Let's ground ourselves in what we can observe and influence:...
Every trainer has faced it: a behavior that should work on paper but falls apart in practice. You've done everything right: high rate of reinforcement, clear criteria, incompatible behaviors. And yet the problem persists or even worsens. This is where the constructional approach reveals something...
Is fear an action or an emotion? It's a question worth sitting with. Because how we answer it shapes everything about how we respond when a bird displays fear or aggression in training. Emotions as Contingency Descriptors Here's a reframe that might change how you think about this:...
Choice and control are buzzy words in animal training right now. But what do we really mean when we talk about choice? And are we actually offering it? Are we really performing a functional assessment to see what true choice means? And doesn’t B.F. Skinner’s...
If you've ever found yourself stuck in a training session thinking "why isn't this working?", the answer might not be your mechanics, your timing, or even your reinforcer. It might be that you never clearly defined what you're actually training for. Let's talk about why clarity...
October is usually our busiest offsite program month. Be it the spooky season, and people can’t get enough of our owls or school programming getting into the swing of the year. That means our birds are on the move. Our staff shifts our training goals...
Feather destructive behavior is one of the most difficult challenges we face as bird trainers and caretakers. It’s frustrating, heartbreaking, and complex. And if you’ve been there, you know there’s rarely a quick fix. At Avian Behavior , we’ve been living this reality with Rio, our...
When training feels stuck, it’s easy to zero in on the behavior itself — reinforcing more, adjusting criteria, or shifting mechanics. But often the real breakthrough doesn’t come from tweaking the behavior at all. It comes from stepping back and looking at the bigger picture:...
When we see a bird lunge, bite, or shut down, it’s tempting to label them: moody, stubborn, bossy. It’s a habit most of us have fallen into at some point. But those labels stop us from asking the right questions. Frustration isn’t a personality trait. It’s...