I'm So Proud of my Conure

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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We have an adorable green-cheeked conure (if you’ve ever met one you know that the “adorable” is installed in the egg). She’s smart, too, knows several words/phrases, and is totally in love with my husband and very affectionate towards me as well.

But that’s not why I’m writing this thread.

You see, birds poop. We all know that, of course. And the First Poop of the Morning is by far the worst. You’d think the bird just extruded its entire internal contents and produced a poop equal in weight to what remains after the FPotM.

We started hanging her butt over the trashcan for the ceremonial FPotM, while saying “Poopy! Make poopy!” And she’d sit there on a finger trying to figure out what the heck the featherless bipeds wanted from her. Eventually, of course, she’d poop, after which we’d shower her with praise and affection.

She’s catching on.

Last two mornings when held over the trashcan she produced the FPotM pretty promptly. We’ve also managed to get her butt over the can several times during the day, too.

In other words, I think we’ll be able to housebreak her. Or at least trash-can train her.

I’m so proud of her!

Now if only we could get the cockatiels to do that… (although their poop is much less obnoxious)

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Congrats! I know how tough it is. My tiel will manage two in a row over the paper, but then gives up.
Kudos!

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Hey, congrats, Broomstick! I’d like to do that with my lovie, too, but I don’t want to concentrate on training too many things at once, and right now I’m working on retrieves. (She won’t “step-up” so I’m treating it like a retrieve, to get her to hop to my arm. Fingers are evil.)

I just ordered thist-shirt, in the meantime. :wink:

Can you post a picture of your GCC?

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I’ll ask the husband about digging up our pics and see if there’s room on my website.

And I love that shirt!

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Cool. :cool: I love birds. I’m a member of the parrot_lovers community on LiveJournal and one of my favorite things is when people share photos and videos and funny stories about their babies. :slight_smile:

Here’s my little Sunshine.

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I have so tried to get our Jardine’s to do this. I’ll hold him over paper and just keep saying “Poop! poop! poooooop! pooooop!” Complete fail, though. He might just be too old for new tricks like that.

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Came here hoping for photos!!

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Nice technique! Think it’ll work with my preschooler? :smiley:

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potty training african greys:

  1. Steve- Successful unless he knows you don’t know birds are trainable
  2. Zahzoo- Semi successful, he wants to be on a perch to do his business
  3. Mikado- Successful unless he is emotionally overwrought
  4. Princess Pollyfufu- The opposite of success. Target poops on the cats
  5. Richard Birdzilla- Too early to say. He can only step up on hands backwards
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Ok pictures of Murphy and Another.

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Awwwww. Half moon?
This morning, I took Sunshine out of her cage and leaned over the trashcan and said “go poop”, and she left her FPotM in the can instead of on my shirt! Yay! The toilet-training–it begins!

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Bwahahaha! I love Greys! And your birds have AWESOME names.