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 Post subject: A Little update
PostPosted: Sun Mar 13, 2016 11:41 am 
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Thought I'd bring you all up to speed on what's happening in my (bird)-life.

So my canaries are all coupled up and one couple already has 4 eggs.

The budgies have 4 nesting blocks (hollowed stump of birch). 3 are occupied, 2 of have 2 eggs already, 1 has 1 egg. Mothers are Lillte Lemon, Marina and Tropicana.

I have a friend that works with plywood and he's going to cut out my nestingboxes for the cockatiels I drew up. He doesn't have the time to do them all in one go. He told me if he gets one done now and again with 'leftover wood' from the company he can make them for free even! So for now I've used cardboard boxes as nests. We'll see how it goes. I have 13 cockatiels (6 possible couples) and I put up 8 boxes, half are already taken as homes, the other half seem te be used as chewtoys.
I'm expecting eggs soon as I've seen Iago and Waldorf at it! (They have picked the nestbox I can see from inside my house).

The zebra-finches got some nesting material and nestboxes, but they seemed to prefer making the nests outside of the boxes so I gave them some pottery nests. No succes there yet...

I've been thinking about recording some fotage with my Hero4Silver and session. Not sure if I would be able to upload it to youtube (about 1h30 worth) and if anyone would be interested to look at it. But it's to give me an idea what is going on while I'm off to work. - What do you guys think? Should I do it?

Greetings from Belgium!
C U around!



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 Post subject: Re: A Little update
PostPosted: Sun Mar 13, 2016 2:00 pm 
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Nice to hear some pleasent updates. Hope breeding goes well for you!


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 Post subject: Re: A Little update
PostPosted: Sun Mar 13, 2016 9:23 pm 
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good to hear from you!
what do you do with all the babies? do they all find new homes easily?



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 Post subject: Re: A Little update
PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2016 1:40 am 
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Chipper wrote:
good to hear from you!
what do you do with all the babies? do they all find new homes easily?


In general I keep my offspring till I know what I'm going to do with them. Keep them for breeding after selecting out the best matchups. (colour wise and not too much inbreeding going on) After that the rest go up on a website for sale. If there are still birds left before I want to start selecting couples again I bring them to a shop that takes them all. Not at a good price, but still reasonable.

Specific for the birds I have:

My Canary babies stay with me untill I'm able to sex them.
Males sell better because of their abillity to sing. So I sell a couple that I don't like the colours on for breeding. Then after selecting the couples I want to breed with next season (but not yet caging them together), I try to sell off pairs. If after all that there are still to many of them (I keep 20 canaries max!) I bring them to the shop. I have a hard time selecting sometimes and have found me pondering to keep more than 20 at times. But I have to take into account if I want to keep breeding without expanding my cages I have to keep the number down.

The Zebra - Finches I keep are solely for my pleasure, I like how they chirp and look and they breed like mice! At the moment I have 5, 4 hens and a cock. So he has plenty of choice... I will look at keeping 2 of the baby hens out of him (hopefully from different mothers) and sell all the rest including the two mothers I'm keeping the babies from. I'll use that money to buy a new cock (black-cheek) to bring in new blood. I don't go about it like this every year. But it is my plan. Ever since my last cock died I have been thinking about keeping 2, but I would have to keep one away from the hens to make sure I know who the father is of my babies. And if I do that I wouldn't want him to be 'alone', so, in order to keep the number of birds down, I only have one.

This year I've paired up one european goldfinch (I got form my grandfather) with one of the canary hens, The male offspring is in high demand in my country (one male is worth 4 times the price of a normal canary male) The sad thing is they are all sterile, so I can't breed with the offspring further. I will not keep any of these babies, all will go up for sale.

The budgies I'm breeding will probably all have to go this year. I'm planning on only keeping the darkeyed clear ones like Little Lemon and her father Banana If I get any. The Idea is to gradually have all darkeyed clear budgies in my flight, specializing in that colour variant. I'm counting on you guys to help me with sexing again, since I still don't have the hang of it, I think.

As for the cockatiels (I have 13) I'm going to keep some unrelated White-faced babies, if any up to a maximum of 16 birds. I know it will be hard to gradually move towards a White-Face only flight with the normal greys and pearls in my flight now, but I'm willing to give it a go.

If you have any advice for me, go ahead and post! It is my first year trying to breed cockatiels so I can use all the help that is offered!



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 Post subject: Re: A Little update
PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2016 3:00 am 
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Busy busy times ahead for you....
Fingers crossed everything goes well
Yes its good to have such a lovely update....
Keep us all informed..



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 Post subject: Re: A Little update
PostPosted: Mon Mar 14, 2016 10:22 am 
Cockatiel
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no I have no advice
we had two clutches and I kept them all. Now I have 8 children and 2 parents (all kids grew up). Children made 3 pairs, and 2 remaining kids are girls bonded to each other. Children mate occasionally but lay no eggs. Parents also want to breed.
I don't like this situation coz they get bonded to each others more and more... Not much trouble for me, but unfair to the birds coz they won't be able to have babies never ever



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 Post subject: Re: A Little update
PostPosted: Tue Mar 15, 2016 8:26 am 
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Name: Bob
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Jan wrote:
Busy busy times ahead for you....

Busy times indeed. Specially since I'm also having a vegetable garden. Prepping is done, and my first plants of letuce are in the soil.

While I was working in the garden I made some footage of the birds. I'm putting them on my pc for editing so expect something on youtube soon.



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 Post subject: Re: A Little update
PostPosted: Wed Mar 16, 2016 9:45 am 
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Name: Melissa
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Wow you must have a big house.



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 Post subject: Re: A Little update
PostPosted: Wed Mar 16, 2016 11:29 pm 
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Mel wrote:
Wow you must have a big house.


Not the biggest, but reasonably big yes. We own 847m², 200m² (or there abouts) is taken up by the house. In front of the house we had to stay 5m away from the middle of the street, but we backed up even 3m further giving us a nice front garden with Pennisetum Image

In winter the grass dries and I've got loads of hay. I've been wondering if I can do anything usefull with it, cause now it goes on a heap of compost, but it needs 2+ years to be 'digested' by nature... I could probably store some for use in the chicken nests instead of the wood shavings I now buy, where the hay would be a freebee ;) I just don't have any idea where to store it, so in that regard my place is too small even! :clap:



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 Post subject: Re: A Little update
PostPosted: Thu Mar 17, 2016 8:24 am 
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Aaaaaugh, that's fountain grass! I don't know whether it's troublesome where you are, but here in Arizona it's an invasive species and I volunteer with groups who go around digging it up. The internet reports that it's poor forage for grazing animals because they don't like the taste. So it's not useful as a food source, but it's nontoxic so it should be OK to use it as hay. Here are a couple of links:

http://www.plantright.org/species/pennisetum-setaceum

http://www.hear.org/pier/wra/pacific/pe ... tmlwra.htm



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