Parrot Tricks: Teaching Parrots with Positive Reinforcement

Tani Robar is a professional animal trainer who has spent years training performing animals and teaching others to train their animals. She has been acclaimed for her ability to develop and perfect unique training methods that allow her students to teach their pets an almost unlimited variety of skills and behaviors. For the last fifteen years Tani has been putting on bird shows, giving lectures, and helping others to teach their birds to do tricks. Besides appearing on TV and writing articles on bird training, she has produced four videos/DVDs to help people visualize how to teach their parrots a variety of skills and tricks. These videos are sold internationally. She recently appeared three times on Animal Planet’s Pet Star TV show and won the top place on one of the segments with Cassie, her Black-headed Caique.
Tani’s outstanding results are obtained by knowledge and skill, never by cruel methods. The adoration her birds so obviously show is further proof of the worth of this kind of training. Her performing birds are also her companions and share her life, including sharing meals with her and her family.
Growing up with many animals, Tani found that the most interesting part of owning animals was training them. The first pets she can remember were bantam chickens, which she carried around with her, taught to come when called, and trained to pick at spiders discovered in the house. Soon the neighborhood dogs were coming when she called and were performing simple tricks she taught them.
Finally she got her own dog, a pint-size, wire-haired fox terrier, and they became inseparable companions. She started honing her skills, and soon the dog was performing an amazing number of tricks. She won her first contest at age seven showing all the tricks her dog could do at a pet competition. She never looked back. She has trained enumerable animals since then and won many prizes.

Diane Grindol grew up in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. She met a male cockatiel named Clement when she moved to Monterey, California, in 1982 and within a couple weeks acquired her own normal gray hen, which turned out to be a life-altering event. Dacey lived for twenty-two years and added her wisdom to many projects.
Diane wrote a pet column for the American Cockatiel Society for six years and produced a set of videos about Cockatiel care and breeding in 1988. She founded the Monterey Bay Cage Bird Club and was its program coordinator for ten years. She edited and published a companion bird journal, Bird World, for two years.
Diane traveled to Guatemala in 1993 with a UC Davis field biologist to observe parrots in the wild, an inspiring and treasured experience in her bird life. Since 1996 Diane has coordinated companion bird seminars in California, Seattle, and Chicago.
She frequently speaks to bird clubs and at national conventions or seminars. Since 1995 Diane has written a column for Bird Talk Magazine. She currently is the Web editor of BirdChannel.com for BowTie, Inc. Her other books include The Complete Book of Cockatiels, Cockatiels For Dummies, Birds Off The Perch, and Teaching Your Bird to Talk. Diane lives on the Monterey Peninsula, California, and shares her life with a small flock of Cockatiels, a Blue-headed Pionus parrot, and a guinea pig.