Training your pigeon makes your life with your bird easier by allowing you to safely and effectively move them around your space without grabbing them. The basic skills are recommended for all birds—especially if you have a bonded pair—but there are endless tricks you can teach your pigeon for fun!

Training takes a general course, and skills are built off each other. Feel free to tweak the process to you and your bird's specific needs.

<aside> 🐦 Pigeon training—or most animal training, really—is based on resources used in dog training. Feel free to find information on dog training and use it to train your pigeon! Additionally, Flock Talk is a good resource for parrot training, and some of it will be applicable to pigeons.

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Basic Rules

• Move slowly. In the early stages of training, your bird is very unsure of you. Especially when introducing a new skill, move very very slowly.
• Do not train in your bird’s cage! Unless your pigeon is already letting you pet them and inviting you into the cage to nest, they will be territorial and aggressive in their cage. They will not be receptive to training in their cage. If anything, it’ll hinder your progress.
• Keep training sessions relatively short, around 15-20 mins max. Let your bird be your guide: are they still engaged? Are they still excited to work with you?
• End training on a positive note. Don’t push your bird until they’ll disinterested—or past! End on a really strong repetition. If something goes wrong, don’t end right then and there. Take a short break, and then try to get at least one good rep in before ending the session. Of course, sometimes this can’t be avoided, and that’s ok too.
• Once you master a skill with your bird, it’s a good idea to keep reinforcing it through training sessions on a regular basis.
• When training in later stages, it may be helpful to have a small pouch that attaches to your belt to hold safflower seeds. This allows rewards to be mobile, accessible, and not a distraction to your bird compared to them sitting out.

Training Concepts

Food as a Motivator

Without establishing a social and emotional relationship with your bird, food is a strong motivating factor to engage with you, and a shortcut to them feeling safe and comfortable around you. Training is easiest in the mornings, before your bird has had breakfast, when they are hungry. Common advice is to let your bird out in the morning, clean their cage, and then have a training session.

Food is used as a reward whenever your bird does what you command. If they do something you like, reward them with food! You can use their general seed mix, or find their favorite seed and use that as a reward.

Later on, the method which you use to reward your bird can differ. It can be by holding a bowl of seeds, offering seeds in the palm of your hand, or individual safflowers pinched between your fingers. The latter requires more trust and connection with your bird.

Cues and Reinforcement

Pigeons have excellent pattern recognition. Because of this, cues—words associated with a certain event or behavior—are a great way to communicate with your bird. Pigeons can pick up on cues incredibly fast.

Cues are established by saying the cue word at the same time as:

• A behavior you want occurs