There is a lot of confusion in this thread, which is common, because behaviorism is not clear-cut and easy. Mark did a great summarization.

There are a couple of things that I want to add to help those who are interested in OC wrap their heads around it a little better.

First, in behavior analysis, there are three quadrants: Antecedent, Behavior, and Consequence. Antecedents are anything that occurs before the behavior and they "set the stage" for behaviors to potentially occur. Cues are antecedents. You raise your glove and that is the cue (antecedent) for the bird that if she flies to you (the behavior) she will likely get a food reward (the consequence).

Falconers don't "choose" to use operant conditioning; instead, he or she can choose to learn about the underlying theories to help manage his or her interactions with the hawk, but he bird itself is learning and modifying its behavior at all times. The falconer is just one of many stimuli in the environment. Animals are always going towards things that they want and avoiding things they perceive as aversive; if they didn't, they wouldn't survive at all in the wild. By "using operant conditioning," all a falconer is saying is that they are being conscious of the way they are manipulating behavior-consequence patterns and are actively analyzing the cause and effect. It doesn't matter if the falconer isn't analyzing these things or not, because the hawk is going to modify its behavior based on the consequences in the environment regardless of the falconer's intentions.

"Aversion training" (or aversion therapy, as it is used clinically with humans) is classical conditioning. There are no consequence contingencies in classical conditioning, and the animal behaves reflexively (without "choice). There is no real need to get too deep into this, but I bring it up only because habituation training, flooding, and counterconditioning, which falconers do use to tame birds, are technically not Operant Conditioning because there are no consequences involved.

For example, tethering a passage prairie falcon to a screen perch in the house to expose it to people while going about your day is NOT operant conditioning-- it is habituation. However, the subsequent bating away from the falconer as he approaches too closely DOES have an operant component to it. The antecedent is the falconer's approach, the behavior is bating away, and the consequence is being restrained by the jesses. If bating away from the falconer decreases, it can be generally speculated that bating is a positive punisher (it decreased bating frequency). However, the reduction in bating is likely also do to habituation. Once the falconer starts introducing tidbits when approaching the falconer, we can say that this conditioning paradigm is quite likely a combination of habituation, punishment, negative reinforcement, counterconditioning, and positive reinforcement. This is where falconers usually check out, because every little aspect of one's interaction must be evaluated over the course of observational data, and it seems overcomplicated and unnecessary for most of us.

One thing I've brought up before on this forum is that unfortunately, fear is generally accepted to be learned at the classical level, so the more a falconer causes a bird to bate (in general, broad terms) the more likely it is to become an ingrained habit, be negatively reinforced, or cause "sensitization" rather than habituation. Those few birds that are a bit high strung and "just aren't cut out for falconry" or are "bad birds" are products of this, in my opinion. This is one of the reasons that understanding operant conditioning can increase the number of birds that end up working out well for the falconer.

Anyway, I've probably gotten too deep already and am boring the masses, but I get private messages about this stuff all the time, so I figured I'd throw something out there for those who have the attention span for it.

Finally, the only thing I have to add to the screaming discussion is that in my opinion, intermittent schedules and boredom can have more to do with conditioned screaming than simply begging for food.

Dillon