Taming Sydney, Part 3

It's been quite a while since I last posted an update about Sydney and getting her to like people.

There hasn't been much change. I've worked with stick training her a bit. She refuses to step up. If I can get her to fly off the surface she is on, she will land back on the perch I am holding. That's the best I've been able to get her to do.

Up until this past week, I haven't really done much with Sydney other than letting her out of her cage and being in the same room as her. This week though, I got brave. When I was letting her out of her cage, I didn't wait for her to come out. I reached in and grabbed her.

I had never held her before then.  I expected that I would be bit and she would struggle to get away. Not so. I discovered that I can pick her up and put her on my shoulder. I can simply hold her cupped in my hands. She doesn't struggle. She doesn't bite.

Read those previous two sentences again: She doesn't struggle and she doesn't bite. She does struggle just a tiny bit sometimes, but it's the not biting that amazes me. She is actually extremely careful to not bite me. The other day, I was picking her up and she was going to use her beak to grip my hand a little better. I would have no problem with her doing this. But she open her beak, put it on my hand, and then just as quickly removed it.

So, I tried something else. I held her in my hand with her feet on my thumb and my palm over her back. I flipped my hand over so that she was on her back. She didn't struggle. I only made her do that for a second, but she let me do it more than Lenore lets me.

I am just amazed by how she acts. She doesn't bit me, and once I pick her up, she doesn't try to get away. When she first came home, she acted like she had never been out of her cage. I don't believe that to be the case now. I think her previous owner loved her quite a bit and spent a lot of time teaching her to be nice.

I still can't get her to step up. When I offer her my hand and tell her to step up, she just sits there. I wonder if her original owner wasn't American as her son's name was José and had some sort of accent, but not Mexican. Maybe Spanish. I wonder how Spanish people tell their birds to step up.