Course II - Criteria and Cueing - Day 1

Course II is seven days long and started today. Some of the people who attend to this course are the same people that attended to Bob Bailey course I with me - some are totally new people that have attended to course I some other time like Jari who came to this course too.



The course started with basic training skills again to warm up our training. In thirty seconds we had to present the feeding cup in top of these numbers (picture above) that were laying in the table. I did otherwise well but when I had to present the cup to the furthest point on top of two I usually got off the rhythm and was behind from then on.



Before we started to work on birds we had to choose our new birds. I did ask that could I have the same birds that I had last week. Mr. Bailey said that he strongly suggests that we don't choose the same birds that we had last week. It would be good for our learning to experience new chickens which behavior we now have to observe.

So here are my girls for this week: Chicken nro 82 and nro 53.



Chicken 82 posing




Picture taken by Jari

Chicken 53 posing



Picture taken by Jari

By noon we started with chicken - first just clicking and feeding them. We did time the feeding and we also had to count how many times we can present the cup for bird to feed in 30 seconds. I did it 27 and 26 times. That was pretty good considering that we did this same exercise in the beginning of last week and then I counted 20-22 food presentations to chicken. So I have developed my skills since last week.

After training the mechanical skills Mr. Bailey showed us the first task on this course. The end behavior will be evaluated by Mr. Bailey on Wednesday or possibly even before if we can get it done before.



The end behavior is that bird should wait 20 seconds to her cue - the red laser light - to appear on board and the chicken should peck immediately small black dot when she notices that the red light is on.





This is a hard task. There is so many different parts that you have to handle in oder get the training done:
- the laser light on/off
- clicker
- feeding cup
- board in correct position
- watching the chicken's head bob to have it clicked just right time when she pecks

Here is the laser light.


Here is me setting the board in correct position to get the bird peck the dot.



I set the board straight to the table on vertical position and both of my birds pecked it with really good hard pecks. I did few rounds that my chickens were pecking only the black dot. With chicken 53 I had to start to change the spot little bit in different positions, since she was not pecking right at the dot. She was pecking little on the left side.

To chicken 82 I already introduced the red light. I did a practice round without chicken, but I noticed that I needed more practicing. So I had my new partner Jackie to pretend to be a bird. She would peck the dot with a pen if I had the red light on and then I would click and treat her (the pen would also peck the feeding cup). I was having hard time with my thumbs because they wanted to work together at the same time and not separately as supposed to. I had to press the clicker at different time that I pressed the laser light with my other thumb.

Since the camp chicken are egg layers we got today some eggs to take home with us.
Thank you chicken for tomorrow's breakfast!