From Avian Behavior Conservancy
A big part of our birds’ jobs is going to programs confidently and being able to handle unpredictable conditions. Training for this starts at home, helping them work through different puzzles and challenges that aren’t straightforward, like crating voluntarily.
Aldo is demonstrating how “motivation” to get into the crate works. I use the same sized bit of food and change the conditions for entry. So it’s not that he wasn’t hungry or motivated enough, he just didn’t have the skills for what I was asking him to do.
Crating him and working through simple behaviors in programs won’t always be straightforward. It will have unforeseen distractions. Teaching him to handle imperfect conditions builds up his confidence!
There was treat on the log also.
From what I’ve read, the snackies are more of a positive reinforcement than a motivator, if that makes sense.
Back when they were trying to learn if owls could see in the pitch dark or if they had super hearing, they had issues getting the owls to do anything, even for food when they should have been hungry. If the owls didn’t want to participate, they just wouldn’t.
I’m not even sure exactly how food rewards work with how their digestive system works. Since they don’t exactly poop the way a mammal does, if they’re already forming a pellet in their first stomach, I don’t know how adding new food on top of that works, so food may not be appealing to them at that stage.
After I made this post, I came across another video of someone crate training a Burrowing Owl to go in and out by tapping an object outside to make it come out to investigate the sound, and then on the back of the crate to encourage it to go back in to explore that sound and no food look to be involved, at least during the training.
Kind of like when they tried to “race” cheetahs against those racing dogs. Cheetah just chilled in his box.
“I’m not here for your entertainment…”
Owls have a very poor sense of smell but they can taste food. Some owls will even hunt skunks, which points towards this strange sense combination!
For humans our sense of smell is so intimately tied in to our sense of taste that people mistake smells and flavours all the time. For owls the food reward may simply come from the taste of the food, not the smell.
The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh has this really cool display of a Great Horned Owl hunting a skunk!
They obviously get some satisfaction from eating, but I always wonder what it must be like, considering, as you said, our sense of taste is so tied to smell. Same with how they see and hear. We probably wouldn’t recognize the world if we’d swap senses with some of these animals!
Wow that is gorgeous! Thanks for sharing!
It’s really quite bizarre to imagine. One of the favourite examples is to imagine what it’s like to be a bat and all the weirdness that entails. I think it’s just as hard to imagine the Owl’s perspective, even though it’s not as bizarre as a bat!
They had quite a number of owls on display, ranging from this one to some pretty rough ones. If you’re interested, I did a post at the time I was there rating them all out of 10.
It also has this adorable little Ookpik (toy/souvenier of a Snowy Owl) made by IIRC Native Canadians!
I don’t know if I could handle being a bat. All that upside down stuff and eating bugs… I just looked it up, and at least they go back upright before they go to the bathroom. 😅
I know very little about bats, though possibly I will get to learn some this year, pending results of my rabies antibody test. My uncle used to be a park ranger at Carlsbad and give bat talks, but I wasn’t much interested back then.