17 Oct 22 To Clip or Not To Clip Your Parrot
The concept of leaving your parrot flighted or clipping its wings is a huge topic with much debate. There are many opinions going both ways based on health, safety, welfare, and psychological benefits...
Podcast
14 Sep 21 Conversation With Paige Davis
In this broad conversation, Paige Davis, a curator at the World Bird Sanctuary in St. Louis, Missouri, and I sit down and talk about bird of prey training, falconry, species differences, weight management, and social media. We covered a lot of ground when it comes...
04 Sep 20 Myths in Raptor Training
You know I love a good myth-buster series. At the risk of going down the road of talking about what people do wrong instead of how to do it right, we look at a few practices that circulate raptor training circles in both falconry and...
24 Aug 19 Myths in Companion Parrot Care
There are lots of myths and easily perpetuated narratives about how we should care for and manage our parrots and their behavior. Many of these narratives are not rooted in science or academic information but something that is worse (eep! sorry scientists): that which looks...
14 Jul 18 Anthropomorphism and its Impacts on Our Relationships With Animals, Training, Conservation
Anthropomorphism is assigning human like qualities to non human things. This can be animals, planets, plants, even computers. Anthropomorphism isn’t all bad, but it’s important to understand how it influences things like our conservation choices (choosing the cute animal over the less cuddly one, regardless...
07 Jul 17 Grief, Empathy, and Animal Relationships
In this episode, we speak frankly about death and the loss of an animal. We talk about the body’s response to emotional pain and research that discusses animal-human relationships. We also discuss some complicated topics about empathy, accountability, and responsibility in the animal world, for...
27 Jun 16 Are You Stopping Problem Behavior or Solving it?
In this broad reaching podcast, we tackle the problematic way we solve behavior problems that is still so prevalent on community forums in social media. This podcast gives three important questions for you to ask and enact right away that will help you vet and...
26 Jun 15 What Makes Owls Hard to Train?
Owls are iconic, mysterious, and deeply ingrained in our culture. They make important conservation ambassadors, albeit challenging ones. Our Masterclass on How to Raise an Ambassador Owl focuses on how to work through the specifics of these challenges as well as why this makes a good...
25 Jun 14 Case Studies in Trust Building with Parrots
Losing trust is a big deal. It can lead to our parrots spending more time away from us, even in their cages or aviaries in order to bite us less. It can make us do what seem to the outsider as funny things, like wear...
23 Jun 13 Q&A Part 2: Flight protocols and Raptors continued
In this episode, we go over three most important things to master and work on first to use operant conditioning, raising screech owls as ambassador birds, and what we believe is the most important thing to consider when setting up a new free flight bird...