People often determine that they want to buy a bird likely to talk. How do you go about choosing one out of a cage of young birds? The first problem you face is determining the sex of the birds. All cockatiels look like females during their first 4-6 months. This makes it really difficult to select a male, the gender most likely to talk. Here are three potential ways you can determine if the young bird is a male:

• Buy from a store that has older birds. You can tell an older male cockatiel because it will already have a yellow face. Most males begin acquiring their yellow face when they molt from juvenile to adult feathers. It may take two molts for the transformation to be complete. Liberty, my male cockatiel, still has a partially grey crest and some gray spots on his face.
• Listen to the birds in the cage. Select one doing a lot of calling and general chirping. Males tend to be noisier than females. [Example: Jubilee, my female let out only two or three very soft calls when I was choosing her. Unfortunately, I based my selection on her color because I wanted a Lutino bird (all yellow with whitish wings and orange cheek spots). Lutinos are extremely difficult to sex. I chose the brightest yellow birds, but after finding out what the parents were, a more experienced cockatiel breeder told me I had a female. DNA testing of her feathers confirmed this fact.]
• If you are buying your bird directly from a breeder, choose one with a talking father. Some young males already are talking when they leave the nest box if their father was a prolific talker. Liberty , my male bird came from a talking father. He uttered his first words at 4 months of age.

Teaching Your Bird to Talk

Some literature said cockatiels usually start talking at 8 months of age. Apparently Liberty hadn’t read this material because he said “pretty bird” at 4 months. I had been saying this to my birds and it just suddenly appeared amidst all his chirping and calling. I promptly reinforced it by repeating it to him whenever I caught him saying it.

I was amazed that four days after saying his first “pretty bird”, I was able to get him to say “Jubilee pretty bird”. A couple more days and he was saying “Liberty pretty bird”. Over the next few weeks, he expanded this sentence to “Jubilee is a pretty bird” and “Liberty is a pretty bird”. Then we added “girl” and “boy” to his vocabulary. Frankly, I was pretty surprised at just how quickly he picked these terms up. He learned these sentences and how to apply them to the correct bird in about 4 weeks time.

It took another 6 weeks of my constantly telling him “good morning” before he greeted me with “Good Morning” one day as I uncovered their sleeping cage for the day. It made me burst out laughing. Due to my own deafness, I can’t tell if he has practiced these words for a while without my being able to understand him. All I know is that suddenly he was saying “Good Morning Birdie” to me, and “Good morning Jubilee” and “Good morning Liberty”.

Conversations with Cockatiels

Liberty started a game with me after he had learned his first sentences. He’ll say “Jubilee pretty …..” and actually look at me and wait for me to finish the sentence. He often says sentences with me just like we were reading it together. One of my townehouse maintenance men has heard these conversations and told me that when he is in the house when I am gone, Liberty is quite willing to talk with him.

Liberty loves to follow Jubilee around telling her he is a pretty boy and she is a pretty girl. I actually have to make sure Liberty gets enough to eat by hand-feeding them from a paper plate on my lap because he gets so busy talking to her that he forgets to eat.

Recommendations

I have a teach your cockatiel to talk cd that I played several times a day. Liberty failed to pick up even one phrase from that cd. I've concluded these are a total waste of money. Liberty appears to pick up words he views as important to his relationship with Jubilee and me. It doesn't matter how many times I repeat other words, if they don’t have some kind of meaning to him, he just ignores them. He surprised me by saying words I use in my interactions with the birds.

My personal conclusion about teaching him to talk is that he will learn what he wants to. He seemed to learn them in the appropriate context. Sometimes, it felt like I was teaching a young child to talk. This really makes me wonder just how much real “understanding” of our speech a bird is capable of. It really doesn’t matter to me how he learns new words. I LOVE my daily conversations with Liberty. Having a talking bird makes it less lonely to live alone.

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