Interview with Steve Martin

Animal behaviorist-trainer Steve Martin was interviewed recently. His company, Natural Encounters, Inc., is located in Lakeville, Minnesota. His videotapes on bird training, "Parrot Care and Training and World of Birds Show" and "Understanding Bird Behavior and Training through Positive Reinforcement," are available by calling 1-800-999-2266, operator 102.

Q. What's the difference between a behaviorist and a trainer?
Steve Martin: The word "behaviorist" and the word "trainer" are synonymous to me. In order to be a trainer you have to be a behaviorist. You have to understand behavior before you can modify behavior. So to me, a trainer is on a higher level than a behaviorist. Right now anybody can own the title of behaviorist. All they have to do is say they're a behaviorist, and all that means is that they'll talk about bird behavior. There are absolutely no qualifications that go along with "behaviorist." But with "trainer," there typically are some qualifications. You usually have demonstrated that you were able to modify behavior to a point where you can condition birds or animals to do what you want them to do.

Q. Why did you decide to be a trainer?
Steve Martin: Ever since I was a kid, I was studying bird behavior out in the fields in back of my house. I was watching birds and gaining insight into why birds do the things that they do. When I was 7 or 8 years old, I got my first parrot. At that point, I started training the bird, modifying his behavior and teaching him to do the things that I wanted him to do. So I've been training birds for 35 years or more. I never made a conscious decision to be a trainer. I just happened to have birds and ended up training those birds.

Q. How did you get professional experience?
Steve Martin: For about five years, until I was 23, I worked with a veterinarian that was a bird specialist. Through the veterinarian, I met a guy that did film work, and he hired me to help with some research projects and work on some films. I worked on a number of different films with different birds. I was one of the trainers of Fred, the cockatoo on the Barretta series. I worked with the guy that trained Fred. There were actually five Freds. I trained one of them myself and worked with most of the others. Then the trainer I worked with got a contract to set up a Birds of Prey Show at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, which is part of the San Diego Zoo. I set up the show all by myself. It was the first free flight natural behavior bird show of its kind in the world. It still goes on. I was there from 1976 to 1980. I left the show because the other trainer and I didn't agree. He wanted high level entertainment, parrots riding bicycles and scooters and a duck pulling a cockatoo in a boat across a pond. I wanted to do free flight natural behaviors with a conservation-education theme. I wanted to educate people about these birds, but he wanted to entertain people with the birds. There was a big difference, so I left in 1980 and went off to set up my own shows. I worked all over this country and a few other countries.

Q. You 've worked with many species of birds. Are different species different to train?
Steve Martin: I've probably trained one hundred species of birds or more and close to a thousand individual birds. I've trained everything from ibis to egrets. I've trained many different types of birds of prey. I've been involved in hunting with hawks and falcons for 26 years now. The difference between parrots and birds of prey is that parrots are a lot more intelligent. You can teach them more things and more quickly than birds of prey. Birds of prey are rather basic in their thoughts. To teach them to fly from A to B is relatively straightforward, but you can't teach them to do many of the things you can teach parrots to do.

Q. I saw on your tape that you've done some research on Guatemalan native birds. Can you talk about that?
Steve Martin: For the new videotapes that I've produced, I went to Guatemala to study yellow-naped amazons, conures, and white-fronted parrots there. I wanted to study parrots in the wild and see how they interact with each other, studying their social groups and communications. It was their breeding season so I studied their breeding environments to give me some insight on wild parrots which I could apply to my videotapes. My philosophy is that much of the captive behavior that we see in parrots is driven by their instincts and that relates directly to the parrots' wild behavior. I was there for almost a week, out from dawn till dusk, just studying parrots and seeing how they interact in the wild.

Q. What do you like about your profession?
Steve Martin: To me, it is like doing my hobby and getting paid for it. The most important thing about my profession is that it fulfills two of my passions: one is working with birds and the other is educating people about the natural environment, about wildlife. Even though my primary interest is birds, it gives me an opportunity to tell people about all the environmental problems affecting birds and all the other species we share this planet with.

Another good thing about my profession: it's taken me to a point where I've been involved with many different types of animals in educational settings. I've set up elephant shows, sea lion shows, primate shows, and reptile shows. My business has expanded to the point where I'm doing consulting at zoos all around the world. I'm finding ways to enrich the environments of animals that live in zoos or exhibits so that they're a little happier and in more of a natural setting for them. I'm also doing consulting on training animals in exhibits for behavior enrichment. For instance, I teach an animal to come up and voluntarily give blood or I train an exhibit animal something simple like going inside its indoor housing every evening. All this is through positive reinforcement. You can teach exhibit animals many different things. If you want to teach a lion to come up and open his mouth so you can do an inspection of his teeth, it's not a difficult thing to do if you go about it the right way

Q. Why would you want an animal to voluntarily give blood?
Steve Martin: It's a desensitizing program that's associated with teaching an animal to participate in medical procedures. We train an animal to get on the scale so you can get a weight on it every day. We train it to come up against the side of a cage so you can do a full body inspection. Through positive reinforcement training, we can teach the animal to come up and lean against the bars of a cage so the veterinarian can listen to its heart or take its temperature with a tympanic membrane thermometer which is put in the ear. The vet can do inspections of the entire body whereas before you had to anesthetize the animal every time you wanted to do some sort of inspection of the animal. It's a very invasive procedure, of course. An animal has to first be knocked down or restrained in a squeeze cage or net, or however it is normally done. We can train virtually any animal to participate in these medical procedures by positive reinforcement.

Q. What do you dislike about your profession?
Steve Martin: There are very few drawbacks. Probably the most important drawback in working with animals is that animals don't live forever. When one dies for one reason or another, even if it's just old age, I'm losing a friend. I develop close attachments to all these guys; they're all my friends. When one of them dies, it has a major impact.

Another thing is that many people ask me, "How many birds have flown away; how many birds have you lost?" Virtually every bird in our show is free flight. I've trained hundreds and hundreds of birds, but in eighteen years of doing educational programs, I've never yet lost a bird. There are times where birds get up in trees, get spooked by something and won't come down right away. Sometimes they get flown out of the amphitheater in a heavy wind and I have to find them, or they end up trying to find me while I'm trying to find them. There are many anxieties associated with this job, but it's the highs and lows that make anything interesting. If you do the same job day in and day out, it's kind of boring. If you have some anxieties and some excitements and some frustrations, it's really where your sense of accomplishment comes from in any profession.

Q. What is the most difficult part of your work?
Steve Martin: The most difficult, probably the most frustrating part of my work, is dealing with the public. There are so many people that just don't have a clue about wildlife and the natural environment, the natural world, especially in a big city like New York, where people never really get a chance to go out and experience nature. No wonder people are destroying habitat all over the world; they don't have an appreciation for the wildlife that lives there. They don't understand that all species interconnect with all other species. It's a big cycle of life. If you destroy an ecosystem and turn it into a parking lot, if you take a swampland, if you take a little mini forest, or if you take a little wood lot and destroy it to make a parking lot, you kill those trees and you kill all the thousands of species right down to the insects and the worms that live in that little ecosystem. Unfortunately most people don't realize that all life is dependent on that bio-diversity. So when I try to educate people and tell people the importance of certain species, these intrinsically entertaining animals like the birds of prey that we have in our show, they can understand that a hawk is important because it kills mice. They don't want to have mice in their back yard. But they can't understand why a garter snake or a gopher snake might be important in their back yard, even though it's doing the same thing. They can't understand that beetles and lizards and every creature out there is important.

They just don't have that respect for wildlife, and it's frustrating to me, because I grew up as a kid respecting all wildlife. I could never harm critters when I saw them. I always wanted to watch them or photograph them. When I was a really young kid I wanted to trap them and put them in a cage and look at them and appreciate their beauty up close. I think that there are many people that see something alive and the first thing they want to do is kill it. It's a challenge to see if they can do it or something. That's one of the frustrating things.

With the parrots, a real frustration is that there are so many parrot owners that don't have a clue about their parrots. They don't know how to take care of them, how to handle them or how to train them. When I do a show, I talk to a wide cross-section of parrot owners. Most people that belong to parrot clubs are part of a rather elite group of parrot owners that want to find out more about their birds and understand them better. The average parrot owner would not join a bird club, but the average parrot owner might come to a show at a zoo. After the show he'll come up and talk to me about his birds, and I hear phenomenal things. I've heard someone tell me that if you want a parrot to talk, you have to split its tongue. That's just an old wives' tale that nobody in their right mind would believe. But imagine how many people still think you have to split a parrot's tongue to make it talk. There are so many parrot owners that say: "I don't know why my parrot won't talk. I've taken the food away. I've starved him for 2 days and I still can't make him talk." They think that you're supposed to starve a parrot to make it talk. It's an odd idea to us, but there are lot of people that think that's what you have to do to train a parrot to talk; you have to starve it to make it talk, to force it to talk. It's just incredible. So many people have asked me where they can find a chain to put on their parrot's leg so that they can take him outside and he won't fly away. That's an idea that we, as parrot owners, can't even imagine. But so many parrot owners think, "There surely must be something because you have to be able to control the bird, don't you?"

Q. How do you educate people when they have such horrible ideas?
Steve Martin: I spend a lot of time talking to these people about how to care for and how to manage their parrots. Parrots aren't dogs; you can't put them on a leash. So many people ask me: "How am I supposed to discipline my bird when he does something wrong? Do I hit him with my hand? Do I hit him with a newspaper? Do I hit him with a fly swatter? How I am supposed to hit him?" They automatically think, "Well, you're supposed to hit a parrot, aren't you?" It is horrible, but I hear this stuff all the time.

(The average parrot owner is far different from the people that I speak to at bird clubs. When I go to a bird club, I talk to the people that are the elite in the parrot world, the people that really have a strong interest and respect for their birds, the people that associate with others who also share this passion. That's not always the case with the average bird owner that I talk to at the bird shows.)

How do I educate these people? I have a new videotape that I produced. I give it out for free to those people who are so far gone from reality that it just pains me to listen to them. I've given out four or five sets this summer already. (Note: this interview was done in August.) I've only had the tapes for the last six weeks. My passion, my reason for being in this business is because I love birds so much. It just pains me to hear people that are so far off base, and obviously the birds are suffering.

Q. What would you like to do in the future?
Steve Martin: My future goal is to continue to educate people about wildlife. I do it in many different ways. A bird show is only part of it. I do a lot of consulting with zoos. I'm expanding that part of my company. I have three full-time employees that manage the birds and do the educational programs. I am going to expand that number this year so that we can "get the message out" a little better. There are different educational programs I'll be working on this year. I have projects in Mexico and in Singapore, setting up educational shows. I think that my future goal is to find more and better ways to educate people about wildlife.

There are many things that I'm doing now. I'm doing more consulting with all sorts of animals. My company does two bird shows. I do one of them and a guy named Wayne runs the other one. My bird collection is expanding. Right now I have 45 birds, both wild and domestic, from condors and eagles and vultures to pigeons and chickens. (I did not include pigeons and chickens with the 45 birds. I have 30 pigeons and 20 chickens that are all trained.)

Q. What professional training organizations do you belong to?
Steve Martin: There is a professional group of bird trainers and educators called the International Association of Avian Trainers and Educators (I.A.A.T.E.). I'm the President. It's been in existence two years now and we have people from all over the world. We're approaching one hundred members. I am also a member of the North American Falconry Association which has close to five thousand members. It is an international group as well.

Q. Can you recommend associations for further information about wildlife?
Steve Martin: The I.A.A.T.E., the bird trainer organization is focusing on educating people about wildlife using trained birds. It is a resource for information, and people can join and become members. For membership information, contact Joanna Watson at the Minnesota Zoo. She's the supervisor of the bird show and Secretary of the organization. Her address is: The Minnesota Zoo, 13000 Zoo Boulevard, Apple Valley, Minn. 55124.

There are many other good organizations. I'm a member of conservation groups like the World Wildlife Fund. I also joined the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo. They do wildlife conservation all over the world. The person to call for membership information is Nancy Riedel, at 718-220-2769. Or people could contact the Bronx Zoo.