Chicken Camp!!

Now, I know this is going to raise some eyebrows, but I trained chickens this weekend!

It all started when I got a call from an instructor at Teamworks asking if I wanted to attend the Teamwork's Chicken camp this weekend, because she signed up, but now had to work. Now they had an open slot. after rearanging my schedule, and determined I could attend.(Sorry to my wife that I was not able to make it to the airport to pick her up, I will make it up to you some how!) Thank you Renee W, for this great opportunity.

Chicken camp was started by Marian Breland Baily and Bob Bailey of Arkansas. Michele Godlevski, my, trainer, has taken all four workshops offered by the Baileys and has started one of her own in tribute to the Bailys.

The Teamworks workshop ran from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm on Friday and from 9:00 to 5:00 both Saturday and Sunday. It was an intensive workshop. On Friday, after introductions, and an introduction to behavior terminology and operant conditioning, we were introduced to our birds and shown how to handle the chicken. We also reviewed Clicker training and rewarding the birds. There were 8 people there with 16 birds.

The first thing that we did with our chickens was evaluate where they were. Since these Chickens were used in previous chicken camps, they still had some residual trained behaviors (yes, the chickens remembered from the last chicken camp a year ago!)

My first chicken liked to peck at bowling pins and knocked down the yellow bowling pin about 75% of the time. My second chicken liked the color yellow and could peck at the color yellow when 5 color samples were put down. She had about a 70% success rate. I was truly amazed at how much the chickens remembered and smart they were!

From evaluation data we had to decide what our goals were going to be for the workshop. My goals were....

For Chicken one, extinguish the behavior of choosing the yellow bowling pin and have her to select and knock down the Blue bowling pin by pecking.

For chicken number 2, I chose to have her select a triangle from among 3 cardboard shapes.

We divided up with partners and were given about 12 - 3 minute sessions throughout the weekend to train. Training was done through click and reward. After each training session, we discussed what are goals and results were and other ways to attack challenges. It was imperative to keep good records so you knew what your success rate was before you moved on to the next step. I was quite happy with the results of both birds after the weekend.

With bird one, after only a few sessions, easily extinguished the behavior of choosing the yellow pin and trained her to knock down the blue pin. By the end of the weekend she had the name "Search and Rescue Chicken" because she was able to actually search for the blue pin. We made a small maze out of rolls of paper towels and she navigated through the rols to find the blue pin, knock it down and still ignore the yellow. It really was pretty amazing.

Bird 2 was a little more challenging. The goal was for her to select the yellow triangle out of yellow square, triangle and circle. We stuck with the color yellow because that was her strong color in the color discrimination evaluation. We easily taught her to ignore the circle but she had a problem differentiating between the square and triangle. She liked the corners. She would choose anything that had corners. We tried many different solutions, such as outlining the edges of the shapes in black, so she could see it easier. We also tried putting a black garbage bag on the table to increase contrast. None of these worked. I finally solved the problem by rounding the corners off of the square and gradually moving her from oval to a full square. By the end we had about an 85% success rate.

At the end of the workshop we had to have our birds perform for everyone. It was funny that as soon as I set my "Search and rescue" chicken on the table to find the blue pin... she just stood there. She wouldn't do a thing. About 10 seconds after we gave up and put her back in her cage, she laid an egg!

It was really amazing what I got out of this workshop. I am definitely going to make some changes in my training style with Clover. The most important change is I am going to improve my record keeping, so I can track success rates etc. Hey, numbers don't lie! I often had my partner track the number of successful pecks vs the number of attempted pecks and the percentages often surprised me.

Another change that I am going to make is the duration and frequency of the training sessions I have with Clover. Currently, I often work for long period of time a couple of times a week. This weekend, the timed 3 minute sessions with the chickens forced me to be organized, work on a specific goal and not get sidetracked. The short sessions also helped sustain enthusiasm.

Unfortunately Michele said she is not going to schedule any more chicken camps, but if she has a lot of request, she will think about it... If you have an opportunity to take it, I strongly recommend it.

The weekend was incredible. I got so much out of it, including a Dozen eggs!!