★Feathered Gems★

oh shit fuck it up

@why-animals-do-the-thing - why would a bird do this?

…I’m going to guess it’s a trained behavior, from two things: a) the bird is on a couch, so it’s obviously in an anthropic environment and b) it’s a very intentional behavior rather than a ‘whoops I screwed up that takeoff’. I can’t think of any reason that behavior would be useful in the wild, so occam’s razor would say it’s most likely a trained behavior (and a cool one at that - I can’t think of having seen other birds of any taxa do similar). 

I’ve had a dove who did this without any training or conditioning. It was a response to being startled. After she did it the initial time when she was startled and was doing it as a threat display to a new bird she would intermittently do it for fun. I never encouraged the behaviour. It was entirely self taught.

angel