Quote Originally Posted by goshawkr View Post
That depends, do you want him silent on cue, or always? If you just want him silent on cue, then wait for him to solicit a click.

Your real goal seems to be for him to always be quiet, and for that you want to CR when he is not actively soliciting for a CR. And this should be really as random as you can make it to prevent drawing links to some undesired accidentally being linked as a cue. For example, if he is always getting a CR while he is preening and silent, he may think that is the behavior you are after.

Another point here is to be careful about not rewarding the screaming to the extent that you can. As social as aplomados are, he may scream just to get your attention. My current goshawk, for example, will scream when she wants to get put away from the weathering yard. And she starts screaming when she wants to go hunting.
Thanks! Once again you make some really good points!!

I actually ran into an issue this past weekend where my bird started landing on the ground and running around by my feet in the field. Obviously I don't want to encourage this, as he's missing slips on the ground. But he kept leaving the glove. Normal weight wasn't low at all. After discussing with a friend it looks like since my training sessions at home were done on the floor, my bird picked up on that, and was trying to elicit food from me by doing the same thing in the field. So last night's hood training session I did on the glove. It took a while for the aplo to figure it out, he kept trying to fly to the ground, but he did finally sit on the glove and start putting his head in the hood. I'm curious to see when I fly him tomorrow if he will spend more time on the glove than the ground now that I've switched methods. I never would have thought about the bird picking up one something like that. Really interesting.