She's been looking for a place to nest for a couple of months, and I've been trying to get her to hold off until early July. I thought I was successfully keeping her under control, but tonight she went ahead and laid an egg on the cage floor. I'm going to ramp up the hormone control techniques and hope that she'll stop laying. But if she won't stop I'll have to give her a nestbox.

I wanted her to wait until later so hopefully she would only have one clutch this year. If she starts having babies now there's no way I'll be able to stop her from having a second clutch - I know this from previous experience. I'm planning to let some of my other birds breed and I don't want too many babies. She starts losing interest in breeding in the fall, so if I can get her to hold off until mid-summer she might be willing to stop at one clutch.

I had already ordered a nice big breeding cage and it was delivered today. Tomorrow I'm going to give a separate cage and a nestbox to Pip and Ladybug (who are pretty much guaranteed to breed). I'll give another nestbox in the big new cage to the foursome of Vlad, Mims, Snowy, and Azazel who I hope will breed but there are no guarantees (that's a long soap-opera style story). I took the egg that Shodu laid tonight and saved it, and I'll give it to Mims and Snowy to raise if neither of the males mates with them. They incubated two of Shodu's eggs and raised the babies two years ago, and they're wonderful mothers.

Shodu laid another egg yesterday, and while I was cleaning the big cage I found the remnants of another egg that she probably laid from a perch at night, two days before the May 1 egg. I know from past experience that there'll be no stopping her now, so I need to give up and give her a nestbox.

But first I'm going to wait for her to lay one more egg. I need some fertile eggs to foster out to Mims, since so far it doesn't like any of the males are going to mate with her. The May 1 egg turned out to have fine cracks in it and also a lot of bubbles from the air cell rupturing, so it's no good. But the May 3 egg is fine, and I expect that the one due tomorrow will be fine too. Shodu always lays 5 eggs once I give her a real nestbox, so she'll still have a full clutch to raise after I've finished stealing a couple of eggs for Mims.

Pip and Ladybug should start producing eggs soon. I don't know much about their nesting habits, but I might steal an egg from them too and give it to Mims.

Has Shodu mated with anybirdy? I hope ladybug and pip can finally give you some whiteface babies! Do you keep the babies?

This is an old thread from several months ago. Shodu mated with Buster and all eggs were fertile as usual. One was DIS but the other four hatched.

Pip and Ladybug gave me four pied babies, two of them cinnamon. But there were zero whiteface. If they don't give me any WF in 2014 I'm going to assume that Ladybug isn't split. She has the signs of a split, but I don't have a huge amount of confidence in the signs.

I sold all the babies. I've learned the hazards of keeping related birds of opposite sex together lol.

LOL yep a lesson for us all!

Cockatiels seem to actually PREFER incest. It's a constant hormone-management problem.

A dumb question, if the babies mate and lay eggs, why can't we just boil the eggs so they won't hatch?

We can absolutely do that, in fact I think we have a moral obligation to prevent incest eggs from hatching. But it's better if we can prevent incest eggs from being laid in the first place, and the easiest way to do that is to keep closely related birds apart from each other. I'm not saying that people shouldn't keep related birds together, I do it myself and make sure they don't have babies. But you are creating a certain amount of trouble for yourself if you go that route.

I don't have that problem since all of my babies that I have are female

Tielfan and Baruch, how do you keep track of the breeding? Especially when you give the eggs to foster to another hen it must be impossible to keep it all in your brain!
I am really interested to know how breeders, either professional and not, keep track of their clutches.
Do you have something like a genealogic tree for them as well? I don't mean like a human family, even though I would like the idea, but just some way to keep track of parents, siblings etc.