Quote Originally Posted by kitana View Post
So back to training a behavior. The first way to train a behavior is called capturing: you capture the whole, finished behavior as it is. You click/treat when everything is perfect. It can be used for very fast behaviors such as eye wink, tongue flick, etc. The conditions to use capturing is that the behavior needs to naturally happen very often. It's almost a waste of time to use capturing with complex behaviors that the hawk won't do spontaneously often enough for you to reinforce it.
For example, when my dog has a bug flying around his head, he smacks at it with his mouth. So we taught him to "blow kisses" by reinforcing that behavior one day. Just use your bridge(whatever your noise is to bridge that gap), with my dog it's "good boy!", and then give that reinforcment. At first they look like, "What was that for?" and then they start to catch on. Once it got the picture and started smacking away, just introduce the discriminative stimulus you plan to use, in this case it was "Blow kisses!" (with a kiss action blown to him), and then when he does it, bridge and reinforce.