Flying Blind: People Assume I Can See My Effing Bird!

The second article in Bianca Rose Peterek’s Flying Blind series

When I first started working with RockyHorror, I of course developed an interest in parrot care and training. There are so many interesting videos and resources out there for people to find on all of the socials. 

You'd think it was easy and that there are a lot of interesting resources right? Well yes, but also not really. 

The problem with videos for me is the visual component. People assume you can see everything that's going on. There is dialogue but there is also a lot of emphasis on watching for certain signs that your bird is doing this or that. Also a lot of the training methods assume you can see. The Power Pause technique is something one of the channels likes to use a lot but again, you have to look for the signs of agitation and they aren't always going to be audible. 

Then there are the ways people will explain techniques, using visual aids and not saying how you should hold your hands or present treats or even the right way to do the parrot grip or to teach the bird to step up. This presents a lot of challenges and, if you are the sort of parrot parent who wants to do everything like in the training, not having things explained in a non-visual way can feel like you're being intentionally sabotaged. 

I was extremely lucky to have a mentor who got to me first before all of the you-twit-face madness and she was able to actually take my hands and physically show me the right ways to hold birds; to teach them to step up; to examine them if they were sick and even to put cornflour on bleeding wounds. 

I will be going to a parrot training academy course later in the year and I am hoping that it will give me some extra knowledge from a different perspective. That is not always going to be the case with learning opportunities, especially if people do not take accessibility into account. If you are on a pension for example, you have to plan where your pennies go and spending money on places where accessibility is not even recognised means those pennies are wasted. That is not to say that the course I am going to will be like this. The people there know more or less who I am and are talking to me about my needs, but that isn't always the case and I have to keep that in mind when figuring out the right people to work with, whether it be for parrot training or for something else entirely. 

- Bianca Rose Peterek