If you liked following the adventures of a clueless girl trying to gain the trust of a stubborn cockatiel or the incomplete sequel where a dove learns to befriend a cockatiel and mildly tolerate a human, then get ready for the somewhat-exciting-but-not-really adventure of "Slow Path to Trust III: Budgie Edition"!

In this thread you will be following along the on-going story of a budgie named Georgie, who has been raised by his bird parents and grown up surrounded around by his bird siblings. Now finding himself without his flock in a strange room where the only animal who seems interested in being his companion is one of those giants he saw at the strange place where his former caretakers took him too that lead him to be separated from his budgie buddies.

Georgie will learn to tolerate a human touching his face and maybe even enjoy it, as well as why exactly this giant insists on putting her finger in front of his stomach. Is there a reason behind this giant's madness? Or is this just a common practice for all giants to do with birds? Find out in this almost-exciting-but-really-isn't progress thread!!

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Okay now that's out of my system... This is just to record my progress with Georgie as I try to tame him. I made threads like this for both Lucy and Joey, Licy eventually becoming the attention-seeking scritchie-hog she is today, and Joey... Wasn't much of a success. Actually I stopped when he moved in with my mom's finches. He appears satisfied as is right now so I'm probably not gonna try and start that back up with him now.

Georgie though, I'm determined to get him to trust me. That is why he's in my room, other than for quarentine purposes. Unlike my time with Lucy or Joey, I have a much better idea on how I should go about this.
It appears it might not be as hard as it was with Joey, given Georgie isn't as afraid of my hand.

In fact, either he's starting to trust me already, or this budgie is just extremely tolerable. What I'm doing right now is taking a few seconds each day to condition him to my hand being so close. He already sirs still and allows me to pet his face, and his foot. Ironically he seems to be more tolerant of the foot touching since he sits still longer as I pet his foot as opposed to the side of his face.
He only lets me do it once a day though. Limiting my privelages, I guess.
Today specifically, he even let me touch his belly, which is how I'm going to condition him and eventually transition into teaching him to step up.

During these times, he's never bitten me either. If he's tired of me petting his cheek, he'll shake his head. If he's tired of me petting his foot, he'll shake his foot (although he'll do it in a way to make it seem like he's trying to slap my finger away. ). I didn't touch his belly enough to know what he'd do to tell me to stop though.

I'm going to also work on getting him to eat from my hand too. Just recently bought some millet spray, so I'll update this thread as soon as I try offering it to him.

Whelp, an interesting bit of progress has happened two hours I posted this.

So it appears that Georgie doesn't quite know what a millet spray is, which is surprising. I mean, even Joey started eating from the spray almost instantly when I first showed it to him.

So I decided to just leave it in the cage for him to inspect by himself.

He does recognize loose millet though. I got one of the bowls from the cockatiel playstand and filled it with hulled millet, then put it in there for him to try.

I decided to let him out of the cage and out the bowl of millet in the bed next to me to see what he'd do.

He did indeed fly right to the bed, though he didn't eat the millet.
Then he flew back to his cage, then attempted to fly out the window (he's lightly clipped and also the cage is right next to the window so he wouldn't have enough distance to hurt himself), then flew to my dresser. I struggled to get him to step up since he was insistant on running away from me, but he eventually did, and I got him back to the cage.

Managed to get a picture right before he flew to his cage though! Even though if he does just look like a blur.


I should say that this isn't his first time out of the cage. I let him out two days ago, but that was a disaster. He kept trying to hide under my bed or behind my dresser, and trying to get him to step up took forever. So I realized he wasn't exactly ready to work with out of cage, and so I let him stay in yesterday, then let him back out today.
It didn't take nearly as much time for him to step up as it did last time so that's something.

He appears to be healthy. Several days from now when I know for sure that he's healthy, I might introduce him to either Lucy or Alex (or both), and they could set an example, which would help a lot.
I mean, Lucy did set a bit of an example for Joey back then.

Once he sees the tiels eating millet spray he'll know what it's for! Ernie doesn't know step ups either, although he's very willing to sit on my shoulder or my chest. It took MONTHS for Dweezil to learn step ups. He simply had no clue what I wanted him to do. But now he's a champ at it... when he wants to be.

He sounds like he has the potential to be trained, unlike my budgies who pretty much hate human contact. I've never made that progress with any of my budgies so I think he'll do fine.

My 2 budgies are semi tame.....
I can't touch them..... it's a game of catch them
in the towel if I need too..... there use to this, it doesn't faze them
at all.....
Would be good if I could teach them to step up.....
May try through the winter time.....
Your doing really well with Georgie...... Good luck

I look forward to seeing his progress! I find that English budgies are very tolerant of handling and are usually quite willing to hang out. I'm sure he will be stepping up in no time

Have you thought of trying clicker and target training? They're my essentials if I want to work with a hands off bird

yes, and I will as soon as I can get him to accept treats from my hand. Either that or learn to play with the pendant watch I wear, much like Lucy and Alex. Then I can provide some kind of reward for him in order to clicker train.

So a short update: Georgie will step up while in the cage, but not while out of the cage.

In fact, he's still trying to hide behind things and under my bed when he's out of the cage. Also he'll try and fly out the window, but given he does this when he's on top his cage (which inches away from the window itself), there's not enough speed or distance for him to hurt himself.
Oddly enough, Alex does that too. I wonder if he'll end up being similar to her in any way.

I brought the cockatiels to the room... That was a disaster. First it took forever to get them there to begin with because apparently they don't seem to remember being in this room countless times before, so they'd always fly back if I even began to walk down the hall. Eventually I had to distract them by letting them play with my pendant watch, and moving only when they were busy playing with it and not aware of where they were being taken to.
Then after I do get them to my room, it took forever for them to calm down. In addition, they don't quite know what to make of Georgie. It almost seems like they don't know that he's a bird, nor vise versa.

So there was one point where I did manage to get them close to each other. That lasted about two minutes before there was a bunch of flapping chaos.

So couple days later I decided a different approach. Georgie's cage is small enough to carry, so I decided to take him, cage and all, into the room with Lucy and Alex. That way they'd be in a room they're comfortable and Georgie would be in the comfort of his cage. That worked really well. They were able to watch each other while feeling safe, and I even got Lucy and Alex to eat some millet and veggies in front of Georgie.
However, he still doesn't seem to understand that millet and veggies are meant for eating... He might get there eventually.

Though today I was playing guitar and he started singing along. So that's something.

Lucy definitely doesn't have any prior experience with budgies, except for probably seeing them when I took her to the bird mart and sold her to you. I wonder if they were reluctant to go to your room because they had heard Georgie in there and didn't know what he was. He could have been a big monster with a little squeaky voice for all they knew.

It sounds like you're making progress!

They're probably all feeling a bit confused, it must be daunting meeting new flock members! I usually find that my budgies are little bullies when they're around the cockatiels Can he be housed in the same room as them anyway or is he going to always be kept separate except for hanging out? Just curious