How to teach a budgie to talk?

[carmele]

I am a new user from SA, hi everyone...
I have bought a beautiful male baby budgie that is 8 weeks old & I want to teach him to be tame and to talk. Could you please give me any tips. Thank you in advance.

[avinet]

Hi and welcome to the Forum.

A young budgie is easy to tame - but allow it a few days to settle in to the house, before getting it out of the cage. Spend time talking to it during the settling in period, but don't push things too quickly. Once it is happy for you to be around the cage, looking pretty relaxed about things, and chattering away it is time to start handling the young bird.

Initial taming is much much easier if the bird has been properly clipped so that it can only fly to the ground and not fly upwards. If it is fully flighted you will spend a lot of time chasing it around the room and find training very hard. If you wish to have a flighted bird it will moult in new flight feathers when it is around 4 to 6 months old and by then it will be nicely tame. Make sure the clipping is done properly - both wings need about the outer 5 or 6 flight feathers cut - see my article at scas.org.au/html/wing_clipping.html

Also start the initial taming in a room with a soft carpet and not tiles - the baby will try to fly away a few times, and you want it to have a soft landing.

I like to start by holding it to my chest, talk softly to reassure it, and gently stroke it with both hands alternating to that the bird can't actually escape form you but doesn't feel like it is being too constrained. Usually after a minute or two the bird is relaxed enough to step onto a finger and stay there. You can then teach it to step from finger to finger by gently pressing a finger onto its chest so that it will have to step up to avoid losing balance. As it steps say "step up". Pretty soon it will happily step from finger to finger without trying to fly off. If it does fly off pick it up immediately - it will soon realize that it is OK to stay on a finger, and besides talking quietly and reassuringly to it I also give it some gentle neck tickles as a reward.

When I had my pet shop I sold literally thousands of baby budgies over 20 years - I would give most an initial taming before the customer left with their new baby, It was rare that I had a baby that would not be finger tame within 3 or 4 minutes, in fact if it wasn't finger tame in that time I would usually suggest they chose a different baby.

I suspect all this probably is difficult to follow - it is the sort of thing that is far far easier to demonstrate than to describe, but if you do have any questions please get back to us.

As for talking - some budgies are great, some will never learn. Which you have is a matter of luck. To try to teach a young budgie to talk, once it is very relaxed and happy to sit on your finger you can start. Have it sitting on your finger about 30 or 40 cms from your face and looking at you. If it isn't watching you and paying attention then it won't associate the sounds it hears with you talking to it. If it loses interest and is looking around the room then don't waste your time. That means sessions are pretty short usually - two or 3 minutes often, but have several a day.

Decide on what you want to teach it - "pretty boy" for instance is traditional. Keep to an initial couple of words no more than 4 syllables. Repeat these several times, 3 or 4 seconds between each repeat. Again if it isn't watching you then don't waste your breath. Don't confuse it by trying to teach several things at the same time - let it learn one phrase or word before moving on to the next. If it is going to be a good talker then it will quickly get the idea and start to copy all sorts of stuff - including some you might not want it to learn

Also budgies seem to learn from a woman better than a man - the pitch and tone of the female voice tends to be closer to budgie speak They can learn from a man but usually it takes a bit longer to pick up those first words.

The other tip I can give is to make sure the baby gets a good diet - hopefully the place you bought it form gave you good information about feeding it - good quality seed and plenty of fresh food is very important - again have a look at an article I wrote as a hand out from my pet shop before it closed - scas.org.au/html/pet_parrot_care.html

cheers,

Mike

[heletia]

Wow that is such great info, thanks Mike. :-)

Helen xo