Post by Scratchpost on Feb 13, 2023 3:19:50 GMT -7
Hi all,
I think I have mentioned that bedtime for Aka is quite a scene because it's about ten minutes of my husband and I saying "Is it bedtime for Aka?" for him to get the message that it's bedtime.
Well, for the past month or so, he is becoming more curious about what my husband and I do while he gets ready for bed and he wants to a part of the action. The ten minutes of calling and stating it's bedtime stretched to half an hour, and then a full hour before Aka decided it was time to go to bed (so he isn't left out of anything my husband and I do). I also noticed that the more we fuss over him and try to get him into his sleep cage (we call it his bed) or onto the perch we use to move him around, the more he drags it on, like a game.
Naturally, this is/was frustrating for my husband and I, and then for Aka towards the end because of us trying to coax him into his bed and him running all over the top of his cage to get away from us.
Last night, I tried something different. About an hour after he finished his supper (this is normally when he wants to go to bed), I asked him if he wanted to go to bed, he said 'no' by raising his wings (I figured raising his wings is a 'no' and when he wipes his beak on the cage or perches it's a 'yes'). I said "No problem", and I left him to his own devices. I started taking his bowls out of his cage to clean them, made coffee and started doing something on my laptop. Every time I walked past him I would ask the same question, and it was a no.
This went on for about an hour until he went to the toilet again and I asked him if he wanted to go to bed and I showed him the ladder. I could see he was tired but stubborn. He got on no problem and almost flew to his bed from the ladder. I closed his sleep cage without issue (he normally tries to climb out as soon as he is inside when I put the water in), and we carried him to the room. He turned around on his perch since he faces the wall when he sleeps, and he just sat there while we put the blanket over him, no chicken-scratching to get out, he didn't try to take the pins out of the sleep cage (he isn't able to because they are outside and his beak doesn't fit all the way but he still tries), no trying to bite us when we scratch him to say good night. He just turned around and started preening, getting ready for sleep.
Once Aka realised we weren't falling for his antics and saw that he couldn't eat anymore food to stall for time, he gave up. It took an hour for him to give up and I suspect that this will be how much time it will take in the near future until he realises that last night wasn't just a once-off thing, but hopefully bedtime will be a five-ten minute ordeal again, instead of an hour.
When he goes back into his cage after he has finished eating his supper (about half an hour), he doesn't actually eat anything. I thought he was but last week I realised he was pretending to eat because he knows we won't make him go to bed while he's eating. He was cutting the food up with his beak like he does when he eats, but then he would drop the piece of whatever he was chewing instead of swallowing it then start on the next piece of food to make it look like he's eating. Taking the bowls out means he can't do that anymore so less time is used on pretending to eat as a way to get out of bedtime haha.
