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[Fortun Bawa]

Ijust began target training our new Congo African Grey, Cressi. She caught on super fast to it and is learning the clicker more and more at the same time. She's still hand feeding but should be fully weaned soon enough. She's so smart and it's neat to watch her learn and grow. She is already mimicking the parakeets and Bondi, our galah.

For those of you that may be unfamiliar with target training, it's a really great behavior to teach to birds who may be nippy and bite a lot. It gives them something to bite in the training process and saves you from being the one to get bit in the process. It's best to "clicker condition" your bird before target training.

Here is what a variety of what clickers can look like! If your bird is scared of the noise a clicker makes (as some birds aren't properly desensitized) you can also use a verbal cue or a whistle as your event marker. It is, however, best and more efficient for your bird to use a clicker so it's best to get your bird used to the sound it makes. Even if you have to have someone else click it from another room and work their way closer, click and reward until your bird associates that clicker's noise positively.

To clicker condition your parrot, simply set your bird on a perch and click and reward. All you are trying to do is teach your bird that when he or she hears the click of the clicker, he or she gets a reward. A clicker is an event marker to signify the exact moment when your bird does something correctly. Once your bird starts looking and anticipating his reward (whether it's a sunflower seed or small part of a peanut, the reward should be your bird's favorite treat) then you know he understands the click. This when you can move on to incorporating the target stick. My personal preference of a target stick is a brand new set of chopsticks!

However, a target stick can be a number of things. I've seen videos where people use the eraser part of a pencil, the cap of a pen, or even a laser pointer. Anything that won't be harmful to your bird, you can use as your targeting stick. Target training is so much easier than people think. It's almost so simple that it becomes over analyzed. Simply hold the target stick in the proximity of your bird; do not poke your bird or bring it too close. Simply just have it within reach. When your bird leans forward towards it or even comes close, click and reward.

Eventually he will come closer and closer and once he touches the end of the target stick with his beak, click and reward. This is the behavior you want. Larger birds tend to try to break the target stick so be careful not to reinforce destroying it if you have a larger bird (such as a macaw or cockatoo) you just want them to touch the end of the stick. Targeting is used on a lot of different types of animals. People use this method of training to get horses to go into trailers and such things. The purpose of teaching your bird to target is so that you can tame and train your bird.

Targeting can happen while your bird is INSIDE his cage! You can start by targeting your bird around his cage first, and eventually out onto your hand. Once you are ready to move onto a training stand, set yourself up for success by offering a stand that is sturdy and free of distractions to help your bird focus on the session. Sessions should be short, just 3-5 minutes is the recommend length. Make sure to not push too fast and to end the session with success, being careful to not go to the point that your bird loses interest.

Birds will be a little resistant the first time, but eventually you can get them to comfortably stand on your hand via targeting. Make sure to target them OFF your hand as well, so all is safe to them and they realize they can do both. Eventually, you can lift your hand and click and they will slowly get used to being held up on your hand. If you bird is fully flighted, you can flight train your bird using targeting.

For birdwatchers, identity is everything. From feathered creatures' reptilian origin to current taxonomy, we go to extremes to know, understand, and label the things we see. Attaching names is critical. Even as some of those names come into question because of associations with racists or other ne'er-do-well human beings, our avi-centric world is one of pigeon-holing. We classify, lump, split, and list. Then we debate it. And even as we're assailed by the life and death struggles of a global pandemic, climate change, devastating political policies linked to catastrophic losses in birdlife, and social justice being meted out inequitably by color line, many try to distract themselves, forgetting all the troubles by watching what the birds are doing.

Although I've built a life that pays me to pay attention to birds, the world since mid-March has made that living hard. As a Black man whose life is calling the birds as I see them, I feel compelled to write about my own self-identity caught in the same grind between all these struggles. Increasingly, I find I'm spending more time talking to those who are not Black, explaining why race even has to enter into the equation. Those conversations mean identifying confusing fall warblers might get bypassed to address failures of society at large and the conservation community specifically, to intentionally (and sustainably) confront institutional racism; to see it as essential as habitat protection or climate change.

I sat in somewhat of a spring migration daze those first few weeks of quarantine from mid-March through mid-May. My university shut its doors and I sheltered in place with the virtual world my new reality. But as news of Ahmaud Arbery's death and Breonna Taylor's death and George Floyd's death and Elijah McClain's death and the resultant protests rose above the persistent fear of viral death for me as a Black man, the usually pleasant questions of which warblers might show up on the next morning's rising sun dimmed with worries over my own identity costing me my life. Already identified by race and health status as being many times more likely to die from COVID-19 than a white person, I was reminded by ongoing scrolling deaths of unarmed Black people that no matter who I was or what I did or how many birds might be on my list, that my skin color was a target for some to reduce my being to a lump of non-living flesh.

The timing of unfortunate horrific events and a captive quarantined audience looking for good news provided an opportunity for a re-sparking with the fuel of global protest for racial justice. Where before the fire had little fuel or oxygen to feed it, the spring and summer of 2020 provided more than enough. The week was a conflagration that spread to other nature-based hobbies and occupations. It's a movement within a movement, the Black Naturalists' Emergence, and like many outdoor-centered efforts of the past, birds are the conduit for enlarging the conversation. It's timely, and it's about time.

Somehow, the environmental and civil rights movements, though running parallel in time and some shared agenda, never merged. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rachel Carson should've sat down to talk about things at his marsh cabin in the South Carolina Low Country. Clapper Rails would've been an appropriate audience for a conversation about human rights and environmental justice.

If you attended BBW then you did so virtually/remotely. This was obviously a function of the pandemic and the necessity to keep people safe, but then it also proved how rapidly and effectively a movement can spread (a weekend or two). More people got to listen in and engage than at any physical meeting that might be convened. Thousands watched, listened, and hopefully learned. If you didn't get to attend BBW, go back and watch the panels. They are available online. Find the older efforts as well. Some of the work done with the original Diversity in American Birding efforts set the stage for what is happening now. Read John C. Robinson's Birding for Everyone. Don't forget the ground that's been made a little softer for the new seeds that have been sown. Embrace this new generation's genius with an open heart and mind.

Each one of us must take stake in our vocation or avocation and look circumspectly at it as something we hope to move forward in ways that broaden the enjoyment of watching, but also widen the capacity for conservation. All policy begins with personal agenda. Movements are the means by which agendas might wind toward some greater good. Here we have the opportunity as bird lovers to be a part of something greater that serves humankind and birds. Selfishly, it also makes ornithology and bird study at all of its levels more appealing and relevant.

It seems that not much is changing, yet here we are in the midst of a wave of unwelcome change wrought by a global viral pandemic. We are forced (hopefully voluntarily, following the science) to quarantine. To stay at home. To mask up and socially distance to protect ourselves. Even as spring migration, breeding season, and now the autumnal return south has filled three-quarters of the avian annual cycle, those of us bird-obsessed have sat and watched the human world surrounding us shrink wrap itself around hard issues that sometimes would seem disconnected from feathers and wings. I would argue that if we drop our binoculars for a bit, the connections to all of it might just come into clearer view. Birding can't afford to look away any longer.

There is an elemental joy in watching the birds at the feeders each morning. It is an invitation to be still. To be curious. To notice small things. And yet it makes me feel I am also doing something, an important thing for my productivity-obsessed mind.

There is a ritual to the watching. I wake. The water is set on the stove. As it warms, I go out to the tin bucket of black-and-gray-striped seeds. They smell of a grain and feed store, dusty and earthy, like an old barn. Going out into the cold morning with a scoop of birdseed, standing high up on toes chilled by the morning grass, I experience that first brush with sensation and discipline. The feeders are reached for, taken down, and filled. The seed makes a satisfying clatter as it funnels in and fills the cylinder. Coffee is steeped in the press and poured into the mug with a chipped rim.

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