Cheerio is a tame bird. I can give him head scratches. I can feed him. He can sit with me on my shoulder perfectly fine.

The only thing is that he developed a habit...a really bad one that can jeopardize our relationship...

He won't step up! If he sees my finger coming for his belly to step up, he will panic. He will completely act wild and will do anything to get away. Unfortunately, I haven't been helping the situation because I'll get frustrated because HE KNOWS HOW TO STEP UP!!

I'll usually chase him until I grab ahold of him. Usually, he will squirm out and get free from me and the cycle would continue until I finally close him and put him in his cage. He is clipped, but he will still use his flight to get away.

Here's the nutty part! He for some reason knows when my hand is coming for step ups, or head scratches. I do move my hands MUCH slower now when approaching for a head scratch and he is PERFECTLY fine. Once he feels cozy with the hands, I can use my other hand to pick him up.

One thing: if I come to him slowly like I do for head scratches but switch to ask him to step up. He'll freak! It's impossible to get him off my shoulder because he won't step up. It always ends in a negative experience for him. I'm afraid to take him out because I don't want to put an even more strain on our relationship.

Please help me save our relationship! I know he likes millet if that helps. I want a permanent solution. I don't want to bring millet 24/7 because I can't get my bird off me. That's ridiculous. And very messy. I want to break this fear and continue oir life like normal.

Last point! He just started this a week ago. Might I say, he's hormonal. He tries to masturbate to my head.

Birds can be very quirky about hands. Frodo has loved head scritches since day one but is fearful of step ups. Snowy is a huge scritchie ho but tends to run away from step ups, and I raised her from an egg.

Will he step up on a stick? If he will, that's a practical solution that will serve the purpose while you try to gradually work through the fear of hand step-ups. He's likely to come around eventually if you feed him treats from your hand and gradually make him reach over your finger to get the treat, then eventually have to actually step up on the hand to get it.

Some birds are less fearful if you offer them the whole hand to step up on, instead of an outstretched finger. Or the back of the hand instead of the palm. Just experiment and try to be calm and patient.

Obi hates a hand..... if I say step up he
flies to my shoulder.... he use to step up but
just stopped.... guess it's patience....which I don't have
a lot of......

I swear by clicker and target training for getting a bird to step up with no force necessary. I have used it with very small birds as well as cockatoos and Amazons and it's been very successful for me. As long as you give the clicker value to start with. That would be easy as he enjoys taking millet from you, you've got your reward already so you don't have to spend ages finding that haha

There are a ton of videos of it on YouTube teaching you how to get started if you don't already know how

Weird. He's stepping up now, but he'll get mildly fussy about going back to his cage. All I do is coax him in with a nutriberry and he gets happy! Me doing less grabbing and force is definitely improving our relationship.

Parrots don't like it when we get too domineering. There's a widespread rumor out there that wild parrots have a pecking order, where some birds outrank others and get to dominate the birds that are lower in the social structure, but it's not true. The flock structure is actually pretty equalitarian, and any bird has the right to get feisty with any other bird.

So they don't take it very well when we try to make them obey our every command, because they don't agree that we have the right to tell them what to do. They think they have just as much right to get bossy with us as we do with them. So it works better if most of the time we treat them as equals whose feelings deserve a reasonable amount of respect, and save the bossiness for when we really need it.