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Patience, patience, patience

Budgies are wonderful birdies that are relatively easy to train....if you use a good dose of patience, common sense, and love.

There are many schools of thought regarding training - here's some of the most popular.

Clip Wings Prior To Training

Many people suggest clipping the parakeets wings prior to training, as they cannot then fly away from you.  My keets are always clipped in any event, so I would definitely agree with this.  Keep in mind this is truly an individual preference - there are many different schools of thought regarding it.  Check out these:

For Clipping:

• Animal Adventures
• About Wing Clipping
• Clipping Wings
• Tailfeathers Wing Clipping

Against Clipping:

• Lisa Shea's Site
• Why Your Parakeet Should Not Be Clipped
• To Clip or Not To Clip

General Training

Many people advocate you should gain the trust of your parakeet first prior to training.  Here are some great resources for that:

• How to Tame a Budgie
• Hand-Taming Your Budgie
  
• Talk Budgies Training Forum
• Lisa Shea's Budgie Training Forum
• Tame Budgies Forum
  

Another method of training is

Clicker Training

What's clicker training, I hear you ask?

According to the website, it's:

“Clicker training” is the popular term for the training or teaching method based on what we know about how living organisms learn.

Research has shown that any creature—whether a dog, cat, dolphin, parrot, fish, horse, llama, or person—is more likely to learn and repeat actions that result in consequences it desires and enjoys. So clicker trainers provide consequences desired by their animal in exchange for actions or behaviors desired by their trainers -- Clicker Training

It's also very popular in training parakeets.  There's a numbr of great resources for it online, including:

• Bird-click Mailing List
• ClickBirds Mailing List
• Clicking With Birds

Another thing folks love training their parakeets to do is:

Training Your Parakeet To Talk

Training your parakeet to talk really isn't that difficult - you simply have to repeat a word again and again and again and again and ...  :-)

Generally speaking, single parakeets will talk much easier than two or more.  My parakeets are in a flock of 9, so they can chat birdieStyle to each other.  I'm not holding out my hopes in all of them beginning to talk at some time, however.

There have been some very famous parakeets out there with huge vocabularies too!  Pipsqueak, the star of My Name is Pipsqueak,  is a budgie with the amazing ability to learn human language and use human words and sentences appropriately in context. Pipsqueak! started out with mimicries. Due to his extraordinary intelligence and his great connection with and shared love with his human, Cheri, his mimicries quickly advanced to full learning and application. He now speaks about 800 words in English. He learns new words daily on his own and creates new sentences on his own.... more....

Definitely visit that site!

Resources for teaching parakeets to talk include:

• Teaching a parakeet to talk
• Taming and Teaching Parakeets to Talk
• Teaching a Budgie To Talk

And of course, lots of books and tools exist to help you as well!  Witness: