Biting Quaker

Welcome!

I'm sorry to hear about your biting troubles with your little one. Luckily, with some effort and patience you can usually correct it.

There's always a reason why biting occurs. Sometimes it's hard to figure out why, but there's always a reason. It's easy to reinforce the wrong behaviors with parrots... There's a possibility your bird finds something about biting to be desirable. They generally can't tell the difference between a happy exclamation and an angry one, so, for example, if every time someone is bitten, they react in a way that the bird might find exciting, it can reinforce the behavior. They aren't being mean spirited, they just know that when they bite you, you make that exciting sound.

There's also the possibility that hormones are starting to kick in. Quaker parrots hit sexual maturity around 1-2 years of age, generally, and during that phase it is typical for them to choose a favorite person and defend them against everyone else. Correcting this behavior takes time and patience -- this is typically the point in ownership when first-time parrot owners have the most trouble. Most breeders and pet stores aren't going to warn you about hormones, but it's a huge part of having a parrot. It seems a little early for you to be running into this problem, but if you see any favoritism developing, this may be what you are facing. Either way, it's worth researching, because you'll get there eventually. Lots of forum threads on the subject if you do a search.

Anyhow, the basic rule with training parrots is to reward good behavior and to ignore bad behavior. When they do something you do not want them to do, you want to react as little as possible. I'm not saying do nothing when you get bitten, but when it happens try as hard as you can not to yell or exclaim anything (I know this is hard), calmly say "no biting", and immediately put the bird down and ignore her for 30 seconds.  This works because these birds crave your attention-- anything more punitive than this will not work. You want to create situations where you can repeat this learning process. It takes a lot of time and repetition to get through to the bird. 

If none of this rings true, we'll probably need more details to figure out what's going on. There's many different reasons why this could occur... I covered some of the most common ones above, but there are definitely others. If you want to give us some more specifics as to what happens before and after the bite, we'd be happy to try to interpret.

Hello Kerryann! All the advice that was given to you above is really good. My Maya is nearly a year old now and is displaying a few hormonal instincts. She's getting a little more cage aggressive and can be a lot freer with pecking and nipping. As yet, she has only broken skin once and that was because someone she didn't know was annoying her, despite my warnings, and I had no sympathy for him. As a result, I don't have a lot of experience to offer, but I CAN recommend a few books I've read:

Rebecca O'Connor's 'The Perfectly Trained Parrot' is really good and includes lots of behaviour correcting ideas
Michael Sazhin's 'The Parrot Wizard's Guide to well behaved parrots' is also really good, although he has very strong opinions about things like clipping.

A regular training routine might also help to reinforce the hierarchy in your house. Maya has a ten minute training session with me at least five nights a week. She is clicker trained, and will target, step up, jump to finger, go to perch, turn around on her perch and allow me to lift her wings. I don't know, but I think this might massively have reduced any hormonal behaviour as it has helped to establish a clear relationship with her. obviously, correcting the biting behaviour is very important before you embark on training, but once you've worked to reduce the biting, training may help to manage hormones that come later. The key with quakers (and all parrots) is to not react to bad behaviour, but make a HUGE fuss of good behaviour, even if that good behaviour is just sitting quietly while you watch TV. Good luck! I'm sure you will be able to teach your parrot the right way to interact with his human flock!