You might hear parrot trainers talking about avoiding high levels of arousal, especially during training or when interacting with a bird. This might seem like odd advice - why would we want to avoid parrots being excited in a pleasant way?

We know from experience that seeing behaviors that are indicative of a high level of arousal are correlated with the chance that we will see very intense and often sudden behavior. The tricky thing is that excitement is easy to spot in parrots, but determining the "type" of that arousal (valence) is very often far from straight forward.

A common mistake is that we confuse arousal for valence, or we group them together; "calm and content", "happy and excited." Signs of arousal that a parrot might exhibit in a situation we interpret as pleasant might be indicative of a very different valence in another situation. Singing or very persistent vocalizations, especially in some species, is one example. As a vet tech I have met a lot of amazons that sing their hearts out when arriving to the clinic. Many people interpret this as the bird being happy, but that is not necessarily the case at all. Singing or loud vocalizations in parrots is a behavior we can observe in a myriad of different situations, depending on the species. It is often a sign of arousal, not a pleasant valence, and a lot of these birds that sing in a clinic setting are simultaneously showing behavioral signs of distress. This is something we will be exploring more in the following parts.

There are multiple accounts of people playing with their parrot when it suddenly starts regurgitating and tries to copulate with their hand, and even more accounts of people engaging in what appears to be play with a parrot when the bird suddenly bites them. In other words, it seems like parrots (and many other animals) quickly "flip" from exhibiting some signs of excitement to others.

With that in mind, the reason for avoiding a high level of arousal in interactions with parrots is (at least) two-fold:

It is sometimes difficult to accurately tell if excitement is indicative of the parrot having a pleasant or unpleasant experience; if it is stress or eustress.
It increases the likelyhod of unwanted behaviors like biting and sexual behavior that can have negative effects for both people and parrots

More on this in part 3.

My Items

1.10 Arousal

1. Summary

1.9 Specied-typical

1.8 Breeding and parenting

1.7 Vocalizations

1.6 Preening and bathing

1.4 Wings and feet

1.5 Beak and tongue

1. What to look for

1.1 Eyes

1.2 Feathers

1.3 Posture and movement