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!