Continuing on from my last post, here are some pictures showing our third shaping lesson with the tunnel. Each session is only a few minutes long, but we have made a lot of progress. Our first session, Sophia spent most of her time running and playing on the bed, and I spent a lot of my time waiting silently for her to interact with the tunnel. I was able to click a couple completed tunnels and some other play behaviors with the tunnel. The second session went better with only a moment or two of playing before she started noticing the tunnel. The second session had Sophia offering a lot of behaviors with the tunnel - pushing it, biting it, tossing it. By the end she was going through the tunnel on her own. Here is our third shaping session ...
Remember to have your prop already in place before you bring your bird to the training area. Here, as I put Sophia down, you can see she is already interested in and is orienting herself to the tunnel. My clicker is in my hand and ready to use. I don't want to miss an opportunity to reinforce her.
At first, click even for your bird approaching or looking at the prop. With shaping, it is important to get your bird interacting in any way with the prop and to continue rewarding that interest. After awhile, you will begin to see certain patterns of behavior emerge. Then you can start to narrow down which behaviors you will click.
At first, I would click Sophia for approaching the tunnel from any angle, even if she ended up facing the middle where there was no opening. But I slowly began to withhold my click until she got a little closer to the opening, and then a little closer, until she was finally poking her head to look into the opening. She is already past that stage here, but I was able to stop the tape to make it look like she is peeking in.
Then I stopped clicking for any other behaviors. I only clicked for behaviors that brought her head to the opening of the tunnel. Sometimes that meant I clicked her for nibbling on the tunnel opening, but I wanted to keep her focused on that tunnel opening.
During this process, I am not saying anything to Sophia except to praise her after the click and while I am feeding her. I am standing far enough away from the training area that she is not distracted and coming to see me. I am not luring her with my hand or a treat. I am just allowing her to figure out on her own what gets the click. Here are some various click points ...
Looking into the tunnel, poking head farther and farther into tunnel.
Walking farther into tunnel. When you click at this point, the bird can either keep going through the rest of the way, or she may pop back out backwards. Either way is correct and should be rewarded because you clicked.
A little bit further through ... actually I clicked during the last photo and she is continuing through the tunnel to get her seed. You can see my hand already coming in to her with the reward.
Make sure to click for going in both ends of the tunnel. Otherwise your bird will learn to only go in from one direction. I am also turning the tunnel during our session so it is at different angles to me.
Here she comes ...
And gets her reward! Good bird, Sophia!
Isn't she just too darn cute?? She is a ham for the camera.
Next steps? I am probably getting close to being able to add a cue, but first I want to take the tunnel to different areas in the house and do some shaping there too, so she knows that whenever she sees the tunnel I want her to go through it. Once I know she can do it in other places and with some distractions, I will come back to her quiet training area and add the cue to the behavior.
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