It gets Loud in here.

I have talked before about how Cockatoos can be loud before, but they are not the only ones.

”Whose loud? Not me.”

There are quite a few species in my flock, and all of them have their moments. It can get loud here, especially at dawn and dusk when everyone has to say hello/goodbye to the sun. There is really no sure fire way of combating the noise, but there are some things that can be done to tame it down a bit.

Since my Too had the capability of being the biggest problem in the flock I'll talk about her. When she was a baby she hardly made any noise. I showered her with affection, letting her roam around as long as I could keep an eye on her. She was a serious cuddle muffin so she was always close to or on me.

When Trouble screamed for the first time she scared me out of my skin. She was so loud that it actually echoed through my house. It was at that moment that I knew I was going to have to do something to train her to be quiet before this became a regular occurrence.

Trouble was actually relatively easy to train because all she wanted in the world was to be with me. If she got loud, I would put her in her cage and walk away. Sometimes I had to go to my bedroom and close the door because she would scream continuously, trying to get me to come back.

This went on for about a month or two. She would scream, get put in the cage where she would scream some more. When she calmed down she would come back out again. Slowly over time, the time she was in the cage due to being loud was shortening. Her vocal tantrums became shorter and shorter, to the point that now she only lets out a protest scream if she feels ignored. These don't happen often, but when they do I do not react to it. I ignore the outburst and only give her attention when she is being quiet. So far this has worked beautifully and my eardrums are thankful.

I have found this technique works better for younger birds. I am still trying to make this work with Duke, but he has this alarm clock noise down to a science and does not seem put off when I ignore him. He is rather indifferent to my presence and that is putting a cramp in his training. So I may have to find something else to try and see if that works.

Have any of you had to train your parrot from doing something? What have you tried? What worked and what didn't? Let me know in the comments.