This true story began on the 20th March 2015.
Just after 9 a.m. on the 20th March I received a 'phone call from my son. He said he had just taken my granddaughter up to her Primary School and he was having a chat with the Janitor whom I knew well and the Janitor wanted to know how I was and what I was doing now.
When my son told him I now had an aviary and had lots of birds and was even incubating eggs-- I'm sure that's when the two of them put their heads together and did some plotting .
The title may give a clue to this 'blog'
I have no idea why this has been happening this year but my birds have decided to share nests and some have even turned into little 'Lucifers''
The first incident took place a while ago when one of my diamond doves decided it wanted to share one of the zebra finch's nest. The zebra finches had eggs in the nest and were incubating them and whenever one of the finches left the nest to feed in hopped the diamond dove and it cuddled up to the finch that
I'm beginning to believe that the two adult Heck Finches I have must be related to the Gremlins
They seem to have this delight in tossing their newly hatched chicks out from their nest.
This time they had 6 eggs in their nest - 4 chicks had hatched out and when I checked the birds this morning I discovered 3 of the chicks had been tossed from the nest and were dead. (I do have a photograph of this but it's just for my own records and I'm not posting it here - not a nice thing to find)
First Photo: this is Patch taken today 13th April 2015.
This is a little information about Patch's Siblings.
This is Storm and Snowflake on March 14th 2015
This is them today 13th April 2015
I had just finished hand rearing Snowflake and Storm a few days ago (they are Patch's siblings from the parents' previous brood) and was relieved they had survived after mum and dad had stopped feeding them.
They had hatched out on the 24th February and on the 2nd March it beca
I know I have already posted about this on the forum but I want to keep a record and thought the best way to do this using a 'blog' entry.
I've had this pair of Hecks since last year but they were not last years birds.
The hen was always laying eggs but she never incubated them.
Then surprise, the last lot she laid (6eggs) they decided to incubate them. The only difference this time was Instead of the usual nesting material I use I gave them coconut fibre. I was surprised just how quickly
Some of the information here has already been posted in a previous 'Blog' but I decided to start at the beginning from the day Billie hatched and this photograph was taken approx. 5 minutes after Billie had hatched out from the egg.
(As I don't know the sex of the chick yet to make things simpler I'll refer to Billie as - he. )
For the first 9 hours I left him in the incubator along with the nine Chinese Painted Quail eggs that hadn't yet hatched out.
At 9pm that evening I transferred B
This is the last photo taken of the cockatiel 'chick' inside the egg taken last night (Jan. 16th) at 11pm on the 17th day of incubation.
This morning (Jan.17th ) I checked the incubator as usual at 7.30 am and everything was normal-- no changes --egg was in the same position as last night.
About 9a.m. I got out my camera to take the first photo of the day to candle the egg on the 18th day of incubation. - That's when I got a shock!! the egg was broken!!
No! not smashed but in two halve
As the title says 'What an end to 2014! Not only have I crashed my car (black ice on road) but my cockatiels have decided to follow my example and as the photo above shows, crash some eggs!!
This is the 2nd egg they have broken they still have two eggs left in the nest that, so far, are OK. (edited to say she has laid another egg- so that's 3 eggs in nest now)
This blog is about what I've decide to try to do with the broken egg but I will be very surprised if it works.
I really don't k
This top photograph of the nest was taken this morning (29thNovember 2014)
This nest of my Pied BC contained 5 eggs -three of the eggs have hatched, only one more egg is fertile.
After I downloaded the photograph into my picture folder I candled the photo using the two methods I use.
Photos:
1. The above photo cropped to show position of one of the chicks
2. photo 1. candled using the first sequence I used to candle the eggs
3. photo 2. cropped to enlarge image.
4. photo 3.
Last year I had an article published in Cage and Aviary explaining how I came to candle eggs taking a photograph of the eggs in the nest (no flash used) then using a programme on the computer I was able to see which egg were fertile.
There is a post already on the forum explaining how I did this. This is a link to it Cage&aviarybirds 24Th July Issue
I have now tried out a different sequence in the candling and this produced new images which has made me want to search for further infor
Well tonight its another Misadventure story!
(Yes Andy you were correct when you suggested that Title(lol))
My intentions were to clean out the inside flight after I had rearranged things in the shed.
First I emptied the new large bags of seed into the proper tubs - then I moved things around and got the shed into such a mess you would have thought a bomb had gone off -(couldn't put things outside the shed because it was raining 'cats and dogs')
Then I noticed my owl finches had two eg
Guess we have all read about the bother we have when fireworks go off -- not only the birds but with our other pets too.
Well lucky for me my birds were OK (I left a radio on) but my wee Chihuahua- Rabelou was terrified and instead of hiding he had started running about the living room barking every time he heard a firework go off.
Last night about 10pm - it had all quietened down . Rabelou was in his bed and seemed settled so I decided I'd have an early night too.
I was no sooner in m
In the previous post, I mentioned the 'vets' I am registered with but sadly because they are not Avian vets they couldn't do anything to help Bimbo. They did recommend an avian vet but it was too far away for me to get there
.
The pervious photo I posted of Bimbo was taken on the 26th July this year and you can see quite clearly then that the Bimbo's beak needed to be sorted. Now its beak was much, much worse.
I kept on trying to find an avian vet and was told by friends of a few other vets (
6th October 2014
As I am just starting this 'BLOG' and haven't done anything like this before please excuse all the mistakes I will be making.
To begin with I'm going to use some of the posts I have already posted on the main forum (to practise )
I think you may already have read this earlier post about Bimbo my hand reared cockatiel with the overshot beak. (already having problems tried to download a picture of Bimbo but Bimbo seems to have 'flown away' )
Well I had spoken to my