Potty Training Cockatiels Or Any Pet Bird – Is It Possible?

Is potty training cockatiels possible?  First, we normally train our Cockatiel to whistle or talk.  Don’t get me wrong that is all fun stuff too, but how about something different, something much funnier and something to your advantage. Teaching him to poop on cue and yes it does work.  Now you can let him sit on your shoulder without worrying that you will have bird droppings dripping down your clothes.

This is how it happened, I thought how neat it would be to teach your parrot to poop on cue, why? So you have little, or no mess at all to clean up, so I went on a long search – a very long search on the internet and found heaps of neat tricks, as well as a lot of help from a course I bought a while ago called Parrot Secrets.

Today I wanted to share a step by step guide that I found and used myself to teach my cockatiel to poop on cue. All you have to do is follow these directions and put it into practice on your bird. Potty training cockatiels worked on my cockatiel but should work on any pet bird.

So let’s get started, before we do just be aware that cockatiels, in fact, all parrots are extremely smart, they actually have the intelligence of a 2-year old child, so teaching them new things is actually easier than you think.

What I did initially is this, you can start off by using this if you like it as well, or just go ahead and follow the steps below only.

Cockatiels poop as soon as they wake up and might I add very big poops, in fact, they store it up overnight and drop it all in 1 big hit. So every time I let Zanadu (that’s my cockatiel’s name) out of his cage I found myself cleaning up his messes, so I started saying to him “do a poop and I will let you out.”

Zanadu would hang on the door of his cage waiting and I wouldn’t let him out till he did the job when he did I praised him really loudly and opened the door immediately, this took about 5 days and it became natural to him, problem solved.

I advanced from there and used a prop to poop on, what did I use? Well believe it or not he has a blue cushion he “LOVES” to sit on, this pillow is his safety blanket and every time he gave me the signal he was about to poop I would call him to his pillow and he would then poop, it worked every time.

After a period of time, he started flying to his pillow by himself to relieve himself, the war was won. The only problem with this is I had to take the pillow everywhere if we visited someone, so I placed a piece of newspaper onto of the pillow and weaned him slowly off the pillow and onto the newspaper. Here are some more training tips on potty training cockatiels.

Cockatiel Training Step 1 – Teaching Your Cockatiel To Poop On Cue – Chose a word, or word and prop. As stated above use that technique to start off with, or just follow these directives.

Either pick a word like ” do a poop, or sit, etc. whatever you like to get him to poop, or use a prop such as a pillow, or garbage bin and the word you have chosen. Keep in mind if you use a prop you will always have to have that prop with you.

Cockatiel Training Step 2 – Teaching Your Cockatiel To Poop On Cue – Observe your cockatiel motions to see how often he goes, mine is about every 15 minutes or so and if he eats a bit sooner. Most normal parrots go about every 15-20 minutes as a guideline. When it is time, take him to the prop, or say the word chosen.

Cockatiel Training Step 3 – Teaching Your Cockatiel To Poop On Cue – Praise his him every time he does the job, make a huge deal out of it but remember no treats, if you do you will find him pooping more to get a treat, believe me, they are that cunning.

That is it, so simple do this over and over till it becomes second nature to him, anything between 5 days to 12 days for a slow learner is all it will take. This is honestly one of the best ‘potty training cockatiels’ tips that I have found along the way.

For more training tips, try out this course.

Please feel free to comment below if you have had any experience with this or you can add to this article.