Quail Training :)

[jbobs]

LOL will do!

The bobwhite I raied in the house (his name was Cory) was so friendly until he reached puberty. Then he got so mad about being kept in a cage when I wasn't home and when he was out he attacked my slippers all the time. I thought this was cute so i encouraged him to do it until he got so mad that he started to go after people's faces LOL I tried putting him in with the others but he was terrified of them and they were terrified of him - he had no bird social kills. So i ended up putting him down. I was flabergasted about how intensely social he was with people and how stressed he became when he was left by himself. He was literally just like a parrot, Here's some pictures of him:


This was his favorite stuffie toy lol





He loved to lay on top of the incubator!

 

[TwoCrows]

My lord are they cute!! When I first got into raising quail, I never considered them as indoor birds and being that I am stuffed full of parrots in the house, the quail were going to have to be outside birds. But after 5 years of keeping Bobs, I can see how I should have made house pets out of a few of my favorites. And as you had mentioned about how Cory stayed quite friendly til puberty, I also had a few birds over the years of hatching that would get on my lap and even learned to get on when I patted my lap with my hand!! They would eat seed treats in my lap, and I suppose that was the incentive to get on me at all. I think the taste of the gamebird food was so boring that they would do anything for a seed treat!! LOL

However like your Cory, Simon was babied to death as a baby also. And now because he sees me on his level, I believe that he needs to keep me in his pecking order! He too will fly at my face quite often and I have to be careful when I am bending down in the aviary that he does not bite my face! But he also to had NO social skills and at 9 months old started terrorizing everybody in the aviary. I kept him caged until breeding season and he also had no courting skills either!!! He would violently chase the females around and bowl them over, biting them, and they became so terrified of him that there was no way he could ever have a mate!! So I kept him caged until mid summer. However there was one female that was desperate for a mate and would sit along side his cage, although still terrified of him.

This went on for weeks until one day I got the courage to put her in with him. I stood watch for an hour to make sure he was not going to kill her, LOL and it was love at contact! But Simon is an
in your face" kind of bird. Here he is attacking the camera lens...



There have been times that he has latched on to my skin and causing me blood shed and I have considered serving him up for dinner!! But Simon is such a character in my aviary, that with out him, the place might seem very empty.

Your pictures are adorable! And from the sounds of it, your household is a much better place with all the quail living amongst you!

 

[jbobs]

I think bobwhites are by far the biggest characters. I like them for that, but I like the coturnix as house pets because they are so laid back. When I had Cory I also had several other in the house including a blind silver coturnix roo named Bob who was my celebrity bird - he went to all the class presentations, fall fairs, etc and was even on the local news - and I had another brown coturnix called Barbara who had an injury as a 3 week old and I brought her into the house to heal her up and just never brought her back outside (four bobwhite chicks I had at the time adopted her as their mom even though she was only a week older than they were!) and I had a solid white coturnix who was completely blind - to the point where her eyes were sunken into her head. I kept her for about a year and put her down because she seemed to be suffering. Barbara had a button quail boyfriend who persistently tried to make babies with her. Plus I had about a dozen buttons for a while. Not to mention all the bobwhites, coturnix, valleys and gambels outside LOL. I like having one in the house - just not a bobwhite every again, they are too needy.

 

[Eyeheartquail]

Man, this totally brings me back to an APDT convention I attended. Go Ian Dunbar!

I wanted to get into dog training for a second but quickly veered down another path

. The convention was very informational though. I LOVE your videos and love me some quail!!!

Good job!

twocrowsranch, thankyou! I know they are just "dumb quail" kinda like "dumb chickens" but they do have the capacity to learn easily - mostly because they take everything at face value.

Good to hear that you have a system for your birds - our chickens do the same. They have learned that when the net comes out, everyone better haul a** back to the coop or they are going to go for a ride! Your birds have associated the sound of the click with being chased by the net, so now everytime they hear the click they make the next step in their mind and work to avoid what's comming next. It's a good system and it works - but it actually isn't clicker training!

Animal behaviourists recognize two different kinds of learning: operant learning and classical learning. Classical learning is like Pavlov's dogs (and like your trained bobwhites!) - when the dogs were fed, a bell rang, and they paired the ringing of the bell with food and began to physiologically react to the sound of a bell by salivating. The bell meant food! Just like when you're sitting on the bus and someone opens a bag of chips, we suddenly want chips (well, I do anyway) When your birds hear the clicker, they immediately go on alert and a second later run into the coop because they associate the sound with the unpleasantness of being chased by the net or going for a ride in it.

Clicker training is a type of operant learning. Operant learning involves some classical learning too, at least at first. With a dog or horse or any animal - let's use a quail, for example - the sound of the clicker has to be paired with something pleasant and desireable - something the bird is willing to work for. A dog might work for a treat, or a ball, or a belly rub, or simply a "good dog!" but a quail doesn't care about anything but food, so that's what I use. I also start them off hungry, so they havn't eaten in a few hours. With Brita i use mealworms now, because they are a very, very awesome food according to her and she'll work harder for them than for silly layer crumbles. (As any binge eater of cookies and chocolate will tell you, eating good food makes you feel good, because it releases endorphins). So I click and then immediate feed her a bite. And do it again and again. I always stop before she gets full so she doesn't lose interest. But after a few days of this, the sound of the click means FOOD IS COMING YAY! and physiologically, in the brain, endorphines like seratonin are released when the click is heard BEFORE THE FOOD EVEN COMES. This part is purely classical learning, the same way your bobwhites learned that the click meant NASTYNESS IS COMING! RUN HIDE!

So now what? When I hear the click, I get food, thinks the quail. But now I only click and feed at certain times - like when her foot is touching the green square on the floor. The first few times she doesn't know what she's doing, it's random. She accidently steps on it, she gets a click and treat. But when she doesn't step on it, nothing happens. She wonders why suddenly she isn't getting a steady stream of click treat, click treat, click treat. Somewhere along the way the quail (or, whatever you are training) makes a HUGE discovery - "it only clicks when my foot is on the green sqaure. Hmmm." and as an experiment, she PURPOSELY puts her foot on the green square in an effort to bring back the click. And it works. At this point, a lot of animals will visibly do a little a happy dance and get really excited when they discover that they actually have control over the click and can make it happen any time they want - just by stepping on a green square. It's funny because you can actually see this with Brita and her green square - she looks at it, looks at the clicker, looks back at it, and just deliberately puts her foot on it then looks to the clicker to see if she is right. And she is. And then she can't stop doing it. They call this Operant learning because the animal has become the operator. So now if I put a green sqaure in front of her, she steps on it. if I take that away and put a red ball in front of her, she pecks it. She knows the objects are different and that she has to do different things to them in order to get the click.From her perspective, it's like she is training me. "How can I teach this dumb human to give me food?" "See how well trained she is - all I have to do is peck this ball and she gives me food."

With dogs its a little more complex because they view us differently and actually have an emotional bond with humans, but with a quail - we're just food dispensers. If I give Brita enough food eventually she will stuff herself and lay down and not peck the ball anymore because the food is no longer desireable.

NOW, about bobwhites... I hatched one alone once and raised it by hand in the house and I swear it was as intelligent and sociable as a parrot. It ran free in the house and could not bear to be away from me. I think that somone could do some crazy stuff with a bobwhites quail, they are just so... alert, inquisitive. I would love to see what a bobwhite could do!

 

[jbobs]

Yeah i don't mind training dogs - the dogs are the easy bit. It's the owners that are a tad hard to train and as for other trainers - completely unmanageable LOL. I wouldn't mind taking on the odd case here and there with people who are actually going to listen, put effort in and not waste my time, but I wouldn't want to train pet dogs as a career. Howeveer, I would love to train professional dogs - ie Bird Dogs and search and rescue dogs.

If there's anything I love as much as birds, it's a bird dog

 

[Eyeheartquail]

When I was really into it my goal was to rehabilitate shelter dogs. Ehhh....Ohwell.

 

[Mike Winters]

does Brita have preferences yet. like have both objects together. red ball = bird seed, green square = meal worm and see if she prefers one food over the other or is just pecking or standing on the objects just for the food reward and dont care what she gets as long as its food

 

[jbobs]

I havn't tried to determine if she has a preference yet, though that would be an interesting experiment. I'm willing to bet she would learn pretty fast which one gets her the mealworms! She definetly gets way more excited for them and will work longer for them.

 

[quailswiss]

Do you have to use a clicker? can you use you voice instead?

How long do you think it takes a japanese quail to learn, say, to go into a certain part of the coop? That would be so useful for cleaning!

Can you train jap quail to come to you when they are outside of the pen?

I guess the trick is to find food that they love, right? And work when they are hungry. Do you have to work with one quail at a time?

Will quail learn from each other?

I would love my jap quail to learn:
1) go to a certain part of the coop
2) come when called

Any hints?

 

[someusername]

2 is easy, use a call when you have treats(NOTE: only works with young intellegint quail, young = less than 10wks)