 Okay guys, watch this. Whoever wants to come out of the cage, say, I. Did you guys hear that? I'm coming, baby. You wanna come out? Of course you wanna come out, the boo-boos. My name is Marlene McCohen, and this here is Jersey, and it looks like you could see Leo there. I wanna welcome you to my channel. Don't forget to subscribe, because if you like animals, you don't even have to like birds. If you like, yeah. If you like animals, then you are gonna have so much fun here. What's going on, Jersey? Is everyone gonna have fun? Come on, guys. Yeah, go ahead. Just doing exactly what I'm trying to make a video of before they get crazy on me. Let's do some shout-outs. So these shout-outs are to my amazing flighters. Thank you so much for basically making my content happen. Jersey, do you wanna say a shout-out? Some shout-outs to Seth Wilson, Stacey Bacon, Cherry Droughts, and Gabriella. We have a new member of our flighters club. Yeah, we're just like, united, joined our flighters club. Megan Beverage, Trixie Rose, Julie LaPorte. Jersey's like so excited, she's prancing around. I gotta do this. Melissa, and Ramona Buzzard. Those are my shout-outs for the day. Okay, so today, guys, I thought we would do something fun and interesting, and here we go. Tell them what we're gonna do, Leo. That's what, just saying naughty words. Since when do you like to talk in the videos, Leo? I thought that we could stress on the subject of engage not cage, since we have touched on the subject a little bit lately. And I would go over some ways that I like to engage with my birds. We're gonna have a little chat first, and then we're gonna play with the birds. And this chat's gonna be kind of informational, but a lot about my point of view on why I like certain types of birds and how I like to play with different birds in different ways. The first thing you guys need to know that I think is really important. I guess you could say this is my opinion, but this is, I grew up with birds, guys. This is not something that I got into in my adult life. When I was a kid, and I got my first bird, I was seven years old. It was a cockatiel named Dooley, yellow bird. We didn't have cell phones back then. We didn't have other things to occupy ourselves. We had to be like self entertaining human beings, okay? The word I'm bored didn't exist, because that would be your own problem. You couldn't create something for yourself. I was very busy studying and learning about birds. And the more my bird did, the more fascinated I got. I mean, the one thing about getting a bird if you've never had one is like every single thing they do is fascinating. Mostly because you don't expect birds to do these things, right? A lot of people don't. I mean, look at how much they do and how they behave so much like we do. Like they have such human behaviors and human tendencies sometimes that it's fascinating that it's not like more widely known. Here comes another visitor. Monty's already mad. Ooh! Somebody came over to my house, bird person. And a lot of bird people that come to my house say the same thing. And the two things that I hear a lot of people say is, wow, your birds are so human like. And the other thing that I hear people say is, wow, your birds are so quiet. Cause like until they get the cue that like this is play time, they are pretty quiet birds. But what struck a chord with me was when somebody said to me yesterday that she noticed that when birds come into my care their personality changes and they become so much like people. And I thought about that and I'm like, yeah, I mean, that's not news to me. I mean, if you go on parrot station on Facebook, you see so many amazing people with all of their birds. I feel like there's a lot of great parrot companions in the world, right? What I did notice about what I do differently than a lot of people is that I really treat them like members of the family. And that's the first important thing to engagement, right? Because when they are members of the family and there's a little less structure, then your bird's gonna adapt a lot better to your lifestyle and really take on your personality. Another thing that people tell me is that wow, your birds are so entertaining and they really are. And I'm gonna tell you how I get my birds to be so entertaining because I think that as much as I can go over all the different types of games to play with your parrots and I'm gonna do that and we're gonna play with these birds in a bit. The most important thing is discovering what it is that they do, you know? Like whenever I get a bird and they come into my household, I really just like to try different things with them. Some of the basics that I love to do is like see if the bird likes to sing, see if the bird likes to dance. So are they physically responsive animals or are they intellectually responsive? Now, if you know birds really well, you're gonna know that African grays tend to be very intellectually responsive, which is why they're pretty much my favorite kinds of birds besides mustache parakeets because that's something that I really enjoy. You should introduce lots of different things and games to your birds. You should test their reasoning, their logic, their memory. A lot of these things are so much fun to do with parrots. So when I think about games and engagement, which is the most important thing that we're talking about here just to reiterate, engage not cage means that you are giving your bird engagement, enrichment, your focusing, and you're paying attention to your bird. And that doesn't have to be with an extremely complicated trick or a complicated game, it really doesn't. I like to see what my birds enjoy and go with that. So yeah, at first we try a lot of different things, but if they show me that they enjoy something like Vinnie and is dancing and Jersey and her music and dancing and Rocky and is singing, that's what I do to make them happy. So there's different types of ways for your bird to be engaged, not just with you, but even with themselves. Cause keep in mind a bird being engaged with themselves is also very important. I don't know if you guys saw me on Birdtricks channel, but I mentioned that I have made the mistake before of giving my birds so much love that they don't know how to play with and engage with themselves. And that is something that's very important. You wanna make sure that your birds do know how to occupy themselves so that they can be intellectually stimulated all the time. And FYI, pluckers, birds that pluck aren't always a result of being an abusive family. And I'm gonna do a video specifically on this, but there's so many other different reasons why birds pluck. Them not being able to play with things on their own because they rely so much on the owner's love that when the owner is away or changes anything, they can't focus. Sometimes it's the most loved birds, honestly, that pluck because if you don't start them out with enough enrichment and engagement, and if you rely on just loving them, then that is something that can cause plucking. Toys are really important for your birds, not just toys that you play with with your parents, but also toys that your bird can play with themselves. The next thing is foraging toys. I've put that in its own category. That brings us to the subject of boxes, okay? Some people love to hate on boxes. And there's good reason for that. Like if your bird is creating nesting behavior with the box or becoming aggressive to you, or if your bird kind of sits in the box and doesn't use it as a toy. And if your bird's not getting enough exercise and your bird is prone to egg binding, by the way, a lot of exercise and flighted parrots can prevent a lot of those problems as well. But a lot of people use boxes to create foraging for birds. For example, a lot of my birds love to chew up boxes mostly from the outside. Vinny's obsessed with making holes in them. He's not too obsessed with going inside them, but he does like all the like little tissue paper and stuff that I put in there. And I hide almonds in there, which I think is what he's really after, to be honest with you. And it's the same thing with a lot of my birds. Whether it's even a shape of a box or not, sometimes it's just cardboard. They just love cardboard pieces. So if you're afraid of your birds chewing up boxes, you can just kind of give them cardboard pieces. But this is really about foraging. So you could take like things like the inner tubes of toilet paper rolls or paper tower rolls and put tissue paper in there for them to chew up with almonds. All these things are very stimulating. You can of course buy expensive foraging toys, which I do have in my Amazon store for you guys to check out if you're interested in that. But you can make a lot of things yourself, which is so much fun. I always find things and put them together. And those kind of toys are really fun for birds to play with and the best thing about them, the best thing is if you need a little peace and quiet, you give your birds something like that and they're busy for hours. So for example, Merlin right now, I'm gonna show you him. I wanna show you him, but like these two are gonna be so mad if I even try to put one down. Merlin's naughty. Merlin wants to tear up the baseboards, okay? Like it's a total of another Vinny. So I gave him like a little box to play with and I put some tissue in there. Not tissue, it's kind of like paper bag-ish type stuff. And he's just been playing with it and that keeps him away from the baseboards, that keeps him away from flying around and getting himself into naughty things. And that keeps him away from eating things that he shouldn't be eating because apparently Merlin has some issues with that. I mean, not like poisonous things, but like tearing stuff up, like other stuff, that's what he does. So foraging toys in any which form are really fun and exciting for your birds because parrots are smart, okay? And that's why they can have a lot of behavioral problems because they're too smart to just sit around and not be able to entertain themselves or be entertained and engaged with. And then there's the things that I just call pure fun, like dancing with my birds and singing with my birds. Honestly, I test all my birds out when I get them, see if they like to dance. That burns calories for them, it's exciting for them. And honestly, music is in the soul. Do you know that they had this test? I think it was actually, it could be wrong, but I think it was snowball the dancing cockatoo that set this whole thing off. Back in the day, this cockatoo was famous for dancing to something and someone realized that he danced on the beat. If I have the wrong bird, forgive me. So somebody else after they saw this was like, hmm, can I send you a sped up version of the song that snowball likes to dance to and a slowed down version? I wanna see if the bird actually dances on beat. You know what they found? That most of the time the bird did dance on beat. So they started testing other animals and I think they found something like, my numbers are off here, but something like 36 animals that have the ability to move to the beat of music. And do you know that most of them were parrots? So I always test my birds and see who likes to dance. And usually those who don't dance sing, which is always so much fun. For example, Amazon. Amazons are, in my opinion, the great singers of the parrot world. If you watch, like you'll see, it's always an Amazon that's doing like an amazing song somewhere on some talk show. Here's why. Amazons are great at being socially vocal. So whereas African grays might be too shy to do things when new people are around. Amazons, they work really great socially. So those are the fun things I like to do with the birds. But then the most thing I love, oh my God, this is why I love African grays, is intellectual stimulation. African grays will be content studying you as much as you study them. I didn't know all the things I know about myself now until I had my African grade, George. He used to, right before I would say, okay, he would turn and say, okay, which meant that George could recognize a certain moment or a certain vibe or a certain emotion that he felt that I would feel and respond to it in that manner. Like, okay, right? It wasn't that he was waiting for me to say it. I have him on video. He would say these things at the exact same time. He would know if I'm gonna say his name. Like I'd be like George, which means he has to be able to recognize my behavior in those milliseconds before I say something to know that that's what's coming up. Even crazier, George would tell me things that I was thinking. Like one day I remember, I've told you guys this before, where I was just so upset and like hadn't showered. And then I went like this and went, and he goes, okay, time for shower, which means that somehow he was aware that that was supposed to happen and that thing did not happen. There is a lot that if you didn't really grow up with birds and you don't spend a good amount of time analyzing them, you might be shocked to find out that they can understand certain things. And a lot of people are, there are scientists that study birds and are not aware of Parrot's full potential. Trust me on that. Some other things you could do with birds are reasoning games. Let's say you have a bunch of cups and then you put something under a cup and you move it around. Will the bird get it? But don't give up on your bird because if they don't get it, it's still fun for them. So for example, this toy right here is one of Jersey's favorite. She loves it. I had this one toy with these three sticks and she would put the things on really well. With this one specifically, she likes to take them off. But I recognize that she's very sensitive if she pulls it off and I go, no Jersey put it back on. She doesn't want to play anymore. But if she pulls it off and I go, yay Jersey, then she continues to want to play. Of course that means I'm positively responding to the wrong outcome that I'm looking for. But for me, it's more important that she stays engaged. Okay, so let me just show you how I play with these birds, all right? And by the way, loving on your bird and giving your bird head scratches and sitting with your bird while you're watching TV sniffing the bird is also good time for you and your parrot. The process of playing and learning can get exhausting for them too, which is great because they have like such a good sleep. So it's just like having like kids for me anyway. Are you showing some interest in this? This is heavy, so I'm not gonna start with this one, but you wanna play with it? So sometimes with birds you have to show them that the activity is entertaining. And you have to play with it too. This might be a little heavy, even though Leo has thunder thighs, this is more of a toy for Jersey. Leo doesn't chew things up, which is really cute. So I'm gonna try some different things with different birds. And the other thing I want you guys to understand is you can relax, you don't have to make everything so complicated. You can teach your birds tricks and that's amazing and that's fascinating. I love doing that, especially with this. I'm working with Merlin right now to put them in the basket, but you don't have to make everything perfect. You can just play, just to give them things that they enjoy, right? So let's take a look at Leo right now. So he's got something that he's playing with, you know? And the great thing about Leo having little something to chew up, this would fall into the category right now of let's put in the basket, put in the basket. No, almost, you have to watch mommy do it. Put in the basket, yay! They don't do it perfect. A great thing to do, obviously, is to give your bird a treat if he does it correctly. So the reason I don't always work with treats is because I want them to kind of just play, honestly. But if you want them to be really skilled and they are food-driven and Leo actually is food-driven, then you can totally give them a treat. But in my world, they found their treat is me giving them praise, because they do like it. And also, you want to associate the words with the activity. So it's very important that every time he here is put in the basket, he sees something be put in the basket. Yeah, by the way guys, this is not, what I'm doing here is not trying to show you professional training. I'm trying to show you regular engagement for a regular person and also some of the ways you can control their behavior. So for example, what I'm trying to stress on is the importance of just engaging. Because I don't want you guys to ever feel pressured to play with your birds in a way that they have to achieve some major tricks. If you could do that, that's fantastic. And I'm showing you little ways of getting them to learn what it is that you want. But I also am trying to stress on the fact that playing with them and letting them be really, really helps them develop in your house as a family member, right? When you grew up as a kid, there's certain things you want to achieve and you want to be rewarded for and there's certain things you just want to do, right? So I'm just trying to show you that. And also I'm trying to show you how they behave with one another. So for example, if you saw when Nelly got on the basket, she didn't really want to be on the basket. But if I wanted to teach her and make her feel comfortable on anything rolling later on, let's say I wanted a teacher to be on a skateboard, right? Or even on this basket and even have another bird push this basket, which would be really cute, right? So she got on the basket mostly because she wanted to get away from Leo. Once she was there, if I would have picked her up, then she would have just jumped off and that would have been the end of that. But I thought it's an opportunity to get her used to the rolling of the basket because that's something that can really frighten birds. And why she took the opportunity to be on the basket rolling, look how jealous Leo is, is because she realized that I kind of started focusing on her instead of Leo. And so that was enjoyable for her. She was like, oh wow, me and my flockmate get all the attention out cause they're fighting for my attention, right? So me and my flockmate, she likes when we do this and if I like it and I give her attention for it, she's gonna like it, right? That is just kind of like some mentality to establish some control over your bird is really just understanding what it is that made them do the thing that you wanted them to do. Jersey's been watching us play. I bet she wants to play a little bit. She loves these. Leo's gonna get so jealous. But let's see, Leo likes the basket. So we're gonna keep playing with Leo in the basket. You wanna take something out of the basket, Leo? In the basket. Do you see that guys? How like me playing with it got the bird engaged. So that's another important thing. You don't just wanna be like, oh here's a toy, how come you're not playing with it? You wanna make it look fun too. Remember when you were young and the other kids were playing with stuff, that's what got you excited about it. It wasn't the box in the corner that no one was playing with. It was like you wanted to fit in, right? So Leo lost the pink one. Leo likes the pink one, which is another important thing to recognize, right? What's left in here? All these small balls, right? Leo isn't really going for the small balls. I have to have the ability to recognize Leo likes the big balls and not only does he like the big balls, but he apparently likes the pink balls, all right? And if you wanna take this a step farther, if your bird is in African gray or any bird, you can do this with any bird, just say purple. Color, purple. I like to use categories like that, like color, so they kind of get an idea of what I'm introducing. So later on, if they're consistently hearing this, you can say color purple and they'll give it to you. So the main thing here I want you guys to learn is to watch your bird's behavior. Always be figuring out. Don't just not notice things. He picked out the purple. Does he always pick out purple? Let me try to give him a green. Does he like the green as much? He likes green. Let's put purple, green and yellow. See what he likes. Wow, he never picks up the yellow. Most of the time they're gonna go for the yellow. They love yellow. I've tested this numerous amount of times on birds. They love yellow. What color do you wanna play with, Merlin? These things are so great. What about you, baby? I'm gonna play the game Blue Anything Like This. Let's see if Blue actually chooses something. Okay, Blue took it and Blue is playing with it. Wow, Blue likes it. Blue likes it so much he's gonna take it over there. Okay, that's something that you have to know that birds do. When they like something, they like to take it back to the nest. That's wherever they feel comfortable that no one else is gonna take it, basically. Jersey's very intelligent and she likes two things. She likes if you put two things together. So she wants to figure out something to do with them, which is why they're so smart. So look, he's looking at me like, what? There's a straw here, but also, but also I have this for you to try to put together. So with Jersey, she's a little bit smarter than just the straw. She needs a lot more to be stimulating. And so she wants the straw and something else. Jersey will actually thread things, okay? If you give her something with a hole in it and a piece of fabric, she'll put it through and through and through. Jersey needs that kind of excitement. So look at these kind of things that we've done. We've taken like the bags for lemon and put toys in there so that they can figure out how to get them open. So Vinny likes to be engaged both on his own and with me. Right now, he's basically been very engaged with this box. But if I wanna involve myself and play music, he will. You like that beat? About being in the other videos? Well, I don't know why you have to say things like that. Vinny, how do you like to be engaged? You like to be engaged with music, right? We just did some beats. You also like to be engaged with talking, right? Because when I talk to you, you respond, right? You wanna do some music, some bad beatboxing? Yeah? Okay. I wasn't so good at that, huh? And see like for Nelly, this is the engagement that she wants, some head scratches. But you have to try to get birds like that involved and entertained by other things. So another thing is like you could give your birds breaks but you wanna come back to the activity pretty soon so that they don't forget what it is that they are trying to do. And also so they don't forget the positive feeling that they had associated with the activity. If there was one, if there wasn't one, it's not gonna work. You're scared now because she's already on me. And so before it was a way to get to me, right? So we gotta put her down and let her know that this is the way to get to me right now, right? So. Yeah, look at that. We wanna keep the side where she is farther away from me so that she always feels like she's coming towards me. Ready? Yeah. Look at her getting more comfortable on it. You could tell. No, the wings. See the wings, that means like she's not just comfortable. It's more like she wants to try to get to me. See, and that direction, she doesn't. It feels like we're doing it together. So basically she likes this. Look, she likes us going together. I'm gonna put a string on this and see where we can go with it because I think that would be so fun. So now we started discovering like a trick. It's not an official trick yet but it'll be cute when we make it happen, right? Give her a reward. I'm right here with you. I'm right here with you. This is fun. It's just me and you, right? This is me. Yeah, you did that so well. George just got home. Hey, George. Yeah. Can I just tell you something? What's up? Somebody asked me where to order that savant shirt. Don't you think maybe you should be wearing my merch? I promote whatever I do. I need to do both. No one knows what savant is. We're playing. Let's both see. This is engagement. Oh, I love when he puts his foot here. It's so cute. Yeah. He's a good boy. He look at him using his muscles. You can see his foot using the muscles to stay there. Check out the calves on this little guy here. He's got calves of a champion. This video is not intended to be any kind of official training or trick training. This is just really how to play with your parrot without judgment, without anything. Just play and entertain. Really entertain your bird and see what they teach you. Oh, guys, I have to show you how I taught Jersey to sing much. My logic was if I do that, so Jersey just danced straight to that song for like four or five times and I don't stop until she's tired because first of all, you need to know that burns calories and she's not a flighted parrot. Her own doing, right, baby? That's how she burns calories and if she ever had a lay an egg or anything, she'd probably be strong enough to push it out. So now she's tired and she's gonna have a great sleep. She's gonna go to bed without FOMO because she like had fun. So George is working what he's including Rocky. So they're not like in any active engagement, but he's being included and feeling like he has one-on-one time, basically bonding with George in that manner. So that's like, I guess what you would call secondary engagement. So like I would call primary engagement, all the things that we did today and then there's secondary engagement, which is inclusion. So just like being able to have your bird around you comfortable, which is also important because that's what creates the flock within them. In the wild, birds are with their flock. They hang with their flock. They do things with their flock. They forage with the flock. They fly with the flock. In our house, they don't have the same opportunities to do things that they get to do in the wild, right? But if you're working and that's what you do and you include your bird, then they start saying, oh, this is what we do as a flock. You know, it's not exactly the type of things that birds do in a flock in the wild, but like if we're eating, they're eating. If we're showering, they're showering, right? That's when you're able to kind of like turn your birds into relaxed beings because they're also not afraid that they're gonna lose you. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe and check out all my links. If you guys wanna become a flyter, join my Patreon, get videos earlier. If you wanna stock like celebrities on Cameo, that's what I like to do. You can check it out. I'm on Cameo. Not that I'm a celebrity, just that I'm there, but I like to stock it and watch other celebrities. It's so much fun. George is on my Cameos. He just weasels his way into it. Marla, Merlin, did you just say Marla? He did fantastic, Merlin. Yeah, I love you guys so much. Bye.