My Bird Aviary

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Baccus

We are not born just so we can die
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Well I finally :rolleyes: got around to getting some pic's of my bird avairy, most people who see it say it's huge but sometimes I look at it and think, gee really could have gone another 2m in depth and another 1m in height. Orginailly my husband had suggested we put a huge tall pole in the middle of the yard and just net the entire lot making one huge walk in aviary (our entire yard size is 897square metres, so not a tiny yard), I kid you not! :hyper: And he wonders :blink: why I keep getting more pets, with suggestions like that. :lol: Hope you enjoy :good:

The dogs in the front are Leah (the mostly white one) and Thor the Staffy.

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I'll be even happier with the aviary when the orchids on the old clothesline beside it are all in the bush house currently being constructed down the side of our house.

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The cockatiels that do a fair impression of being rabbits and even nest on the ground, as I wont give them nest boxes as I don't need or want any more and they are getting hard to sell locally. On the far left are my Rosa Bourkes, Burke the male at the top and Rose the female on the lower branch.

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Two female Ruddies (mother and daughter don't ask me which is which), 1 male cordon bleu, 1 male red faced gouldian and a black faced hen with hre back to me.

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Male and female Ruddies love seeing the boy in the sun, so red and vibrant!

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Not very good I know but on the right is a male black faced gouldian, in the middle a male strawberry finch, female black faced gouldian and on the wire the female jaracini, I couldn't get the male to stay still in the sun, he is STUNNING :hyper: :wub: . And just in the bottom right hand corner a part of a female red cheeked cordon bleu

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Male Cuban, who was chattering at me the entire time I was in the aviary.


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Male and female cuban finches
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A male strawberry finch, such a pretty little boy.
 
Thanks, my husband will be pleased to hear that as he/ we made most of it while he was still more or less convelessing over his brain anurysm bleed. So it really took ages to get it completed with him being on the mend, cost of materials and me having to do a lot of the heavy lifting. I can tell you first hand 600mm deep concrete rat walls (mostly dug by hand until we hired a DINGO - a small type of ride on excuvator) all poured from buckets by yours truly is NO fun! The inside of the aviary has a dirt/sand floor so I am able to have heaps of plants growing- when the birds don't eat them down to nothing that is.
 
The Gouldians are very nice. I always wanted a pair, but never got around to it. Must admit i was looking at some the other week though, but i am too busy for them unfortunately. :(
 
Just a quick up date on my bird population, sadly it looks as though my beautiful little jaracini's got a scare in the night and some how killed themselves :sad: . But on the up side my King quail have yet more chicks, the Red stars have just had 2 more chicks fledge and the cubans have a fledgling chick. Somewhere In the mass of various nesting material I have heard some more chicks peeping, but because I have no idea who's they are or where excatly they are in the clump of grass etc that the nest is in I haven't dared explore incase I cause the parents to desert the chicks. I doubt it is any gouldian chicks as they nest in logs or boxes, with the jaracini's gone that leaves them out, so I am HOPING that its the red cheeked cordon bleus. Hubby will be pleased if his (that's how I got them by letting him choose a finch species for the aviary) Red cheeked Cordon Bleus have raised a little family, then he shouldn't moan so much when I tell him we need to go on another termite nest hunt. Oh forgot it could be the St Helena's with chicks, :hyper: great as they were only new in March.
And just for any other bird keepers out there I have dicovered that Red Stars love eating live foods just as much as the Cordies, St Helena's Ruddies, strawberries and Cubans, but the gouldians wont have a bar of any live food.
 
OMG that's fantastic I LOVE it. Really well done, I love all your birds. I bet they make some noise lol
 
The finches are pretty quiet it's only the Cuban that's a bit loud but no where near the decibels of the cockatiels. Usually the cockatiels are a quiet as mice, it is only when something is harrassing the cage that they get loud. And the king quail do make a crowing noise but no where near as loud as a rooster or Jap Quail, but mostly until you see the avairy you would never even guess it was full of birds.
 
Lovely birds you have :)
I especially like the gouldians as well but was always put off getting a few pairs when I had finches as I heard they prove to be terrible parents on the whole and that many keep bengalese just to foster.

Ausralia is a kind of bird mecca for me lol you have so many native species I would love to own still although I did work my way through a few :D

Can I ask I know that Aus has a ban on the export of its birds but I have always wondered do they let people in the country they come from to obtain wild stock ? I ask as I know some species like galahs cause massive crop damage etc and have to be controlled btw they cost a fortune here over a £1000

At the moment I am still breeding a few birds a few pairs of different species of lovebird now if you wanna talk about noise haha............

regards scot :D
 
Sadly our laws in Aust are all #16#####-about-face :grr: If a farmer calls a cockatoo (any type red- tailed black, sulpher crested, galah, long or short billed corella) then they can get a permit to shoot them sometimes by the hundreds, but let somebody who is going to give the bird a wonderful (although no longer free/wild) life and they will come down on you like a tonne of bricks :shout: . In QLd even a native bird or animal that can not be released back into the wild for any reason must be killed, unless you can obtain special permits to keep it for life. Other states in Aust aren't quite a backward and will allow you to keep all sorts of native animals, provided you have a permit/ licence. Qld only just removed some of our native finches off the must have a licence to keep list, so I will probably get a few more types down the track I just can't be bothered going through all the licensing garbage again to just keep and sell the odd offspring.


I too have kept peacfaces in the past, noisy,aggro little creatures that happily chew the legs off other birds :grr: . I even had a couple of peace faces in with my pair of Red Winged Parrots and the little horrors even bullied the male Red wing - now that's an acheivement as he could be a real bully to any other birds. I do like our parrots and I am currently working on Hubby to let me get another, but he really isn't keen on yet another pet. Once the cockatiel flock dies out (some of them are over 15yrs old now) I plan to get a pair of scarlet breated parrots and maybe a pair of Golden shouldered parrots as both are just stunning. I really do like my finches and I find our native finches easier to keep simply because most of them are seed eaters first and foremost and don't need or even really want live food all the time.

As for Glouldians being bad parents, not over here they aren't. In some collections Gouldians are getting as bad as zebra finches for population explosions. One bloke I know had an aviary full of gouldians that he couldn't sell so he let them all go... a HUGE no no as they are not endemic to our region and he could have released all sorts of illnesses into our local native finches. The biggest hassel with Gouldians is making sure they don't get egg bound so plenty of calcium and keep them out of drafts as they have a different feather pattern to most birds and can not handle a chill. If you really did want gouldians (have to glaot a bit here, normals are selling in Aust for as little as $10ea :p ) I would go for a pair of normals (either red faced, black faced or yellow/ orange faced) and try to get them from a breeder that has allowed the parents to raise their own chicks. They will not make their own nest so you need to provide them with a nest box or log and they will fill that up with grass. A little tip I got told to ensure that Gouldians would nest was to make sure their nest opening faced due east for the rising sun, don't know why but it works. And then give the Gouldians a good selection of finch seed, as well as plenty of ripe seed heads along with thistles (sow or milk not scotch or mexican), egg and bisuit is a popular with them as well.

If I didn't have a resident perguine falcon in my area I would have some more tumbling pigeons in a shot, but then the harrier that keeps having a go at my aviary would probably clean them up as well. And then last night just to prove my birds aren't safe under the cover of darkness a Boobook owl decide to hunt geckos, frogs and goodness knows what else around my aviary. I know it wasn't really after my birds and had no hope of getting them any way but it flying around snatching things off the front of my avairy freaked the birds out big time.

Hope this answers your questions.
 
Hi thanx for the info :)
In the UK I think most of the breeding problems with gouldians is getting them to incubate tightly, If you want me to find you some articles on this let me know if they would be of interest to you. As for lovebirds I know exactly what you mean for such small birds they have alot of punch lets say haha there name is very very deceiving as when I colony bred them there wasnt much loving going round the shed lol.
I like your Quail I had to google them, I used to keep japs but them moved on to bob white and chinese painted.

Heres a quick pic of my fischers in the nest one thing I must say for lovebird sp is that they sure know how to put a nest together :D

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regards Scot :)
 
Fisher Lovebirds are pretty, I used to have a blue and a normal, the normal chewed the leg off the blue....but even after that they always stayed friends..go figure. I used to give my peachfaces banana leaves to strip up and make their nests out of and they really had a field day, I am betting that they would also love to get their beaks into palm fronds as well.

When I had Gouldians in another Central Queensland town I used to put clear perspex over the front of the avairy during winter. It let the light in and kept the birds toasty warm all winter. My gouldains used to breed right through winter and my chicks would be nearly coloured up before anyone else in my area was even close to having fledglings. I might have to do the same trick with my current avairy, not so much to make them breed, but just because I think we are going to have a rather chilly winter over here after quite a few years of mild ones.

I really do still suspect that if a bird is mucked around with and put out under foster parents the young are always going to be a bit dubious in the future parents stakes. I have had people come around and see my king quail and inform me point blank "that you have too put quail eggs into incubators as the hens wont sit and the fathers kill the chicks" I point out my happy little breeding trio and simply say "well that's my incubator (meaning a quail hen) and I have more chicks than I know what to do with". My hens are great sitters, and are almost as bad as bantam hens in relation to guarding their eggs and chicks from any interferance. It's really funny but also off putting to have one of these tiny birds puffed up and actually launching itself at you. The father is a wonderful dad, he always has a group of chicks under him or he's feeding them. When he has chicks to take care of he eats very little of the live foods he finds and gives nearly all of it to the chicks. I also usually leave some part grown chicks in with the parents and they in turn end up helping raise the next lot of chicks. All in all I think this makes the chicks better parents themselves in the long run.


It would be interseting to hear why some people suspect that their gouldians are not sitting tight over your way.
 

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