Complete Psittacine - Psittacine Breeding Tips Volume VI

Eb Cravens continues his series of articles on breeding tips, which is something hopefully most hobby aviculturists can fi le away and use at their facility.

- EB Cravens

Now that the shortest day of the year has passed and the daylight hours are expanding north of the equator, many of our psittacines will soon begin thinking about the forthcoming nesting season. Especially if this change accompanies rainy weather, the earliest breeders, Rose Breasted Cockatoos and Australian Parakeets, for example, will begin showing interest in their dark boxes.

This is the period for keepers to step back and take a clear look at the whole picture of what is going on in their aviaries and begin to formulate a concrete plan for how they are going to help create a successful breeding season. But, don’t the parrots take care of that? Well, ideally, yes provided an owner’s management scheme is correct. I, as the breeder, am in charge of setting up the perfect sequence of events in the order that my birds will reproduce.

For example, you have a new young pair of Red-lored Amazons, four-year-olds, formerly hand-fed and now ready to breed. The weather this year in January is unusually warm and rainy in your vicinity. Seeing the young hen hot to trot, you give them a nest box even though the male has not yet begun to display, feed her, or attempt to strut his stuff and copulate. For an inexperienced pair, this is a mistake.

Two weeks later the domestic hen is in the box laying eggs with her mate several weeks behind in sync. The result is infertile eggs, a lessening of peak condition for the hen, and not unlikely a bungled breeding season. If you intervene and throw out the infertile eggs before the hen has set them to term, you may further exacerbate the problems by forcing her to lay again in a two-week cycle.