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<\/a><\/a>He found this catbird on his car port and started talking to it. It walked toward him and let him pick it up. It squirmed a bit at first, but then it finally relaxed as he held it in his hands. For perhaps thirty minutes he talked to it in soothing tones until he finally opened his hand. Rather than fly away, it climbed up on his back.<\/p>\nI remember when I was young he found another cat bird in the house that had come in through the chimney. He caught it and held onto it a while. When he took it outside, it didn’t want to leave him. Finally it flew into a tree and kept talking to him for some time.<\/p>\n
The trick, he says, is to hold onto the bird, restrain it just enough to keep it from getting away, but use no more force than you have to. It’s about building trust and letting it know you mean it no harm. It’s still a mystery to me that he can talk to it and make it come to him and let him pick it up. <\/p>\n
I think there’s a lesson here about building trust with not only birds, but also with people. In my father’s career as a dentist this ability to engender trust and set people at ease came in very handy. In the last years before he retired, he only accepted patients by referral. People came from states away to be cared for by this gentle man with a way of calming others. <\/p>\n
My dad said he first learned to work with birds as a boy when he hypnotized chickens to stand on their heads with their feet in the air. This is the first I’d heard of this so he suggested I Google it. Sure enough, here’s a video someone posted on how to hypnotize chickens. The final method in the video is the one my dad used as a child…<\/p>\n
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