AUSTRALIAN POULTRY FORUM™

I don't have a cage. The females are find it's just one of the males. He think he owns the cage and chases the other pair away.

G'day Maybeamac.

It's always a good idea and important when you have colony birds and Indian Ringnecks are, is that you either have one pair in an aviary or three pair or more. Never two pair. Two pair will always chase or fight with each other whereas having three or pair, the dominat pair will have more than one pair to worry about (if that makes any sense). It also depends on the size of your aviary. The bigger the aviary the more pairs you can have. Although if you a decent sized aviary, you can get away with it.

With nestboxes, I would reccommend having at least two nest boxes/logs per/pair a decent area apart. That way they have more than one to choose from. We have a combination of both logs and woodedn boxes.

At work we always have either one pair or three or more pair of one species, but we have got away with having two pair in an aviary such as Sun Conures and Musk Lorikeets, our aviaries are pretty big though. We also have bachelor and bachelorette groups.

Jax.

Yeah maybe I Should do that. One pair always stay's at the top as that is their territory I think the nesting box is in the middle and my little cute friendly pair are at the bottom with the food and water. When the top pair comes down for food they always fly to the spot where the other pair is and they run away.

the poor fellas

Where do you buy hand rearing spoons an syringaes and food formulas?

G'day maybeamac

You can buy hand-raising spoons and crop needles from any good bird shops/suppliers and you can get syringes from chemists.

Here's our contact that we use if you want to enquire about getting any products.

Aviculture Accessories 02 9838 1256

Jax

What's a crop needle and isn't that company in NSW?

Yes it is a company in NSW. AA supplies a large variety of products, from feeds, to nesting boxes, supplements, accessories etc etc etc. But I don't know if he supplies interstate. A crop needle is a needle like implement that gets placed straight into a birds crop, it's a quicker way to feed birds or to medicate. But I wouldn't reccomend it for beginners as it can by quite tedious and dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.

Jax

So what would you recommend a begginener?

Like what to buy and when to pull them out of the nest.

Me personally, I would let the parents raise the birds and only hand-raise it if it's neccessary, if the parents abandon the chicks for example. Especially if it's there first time, that way you can suss things out and decide what you want to do when they have clutches later on.

When we breed birds at work, we usually let the parents raise the chicks for the first time. If they're are good parents we just leave them, unless we want to pull the chicks for one reason or another, such as raising chicks if someone wants to hand-raise for a show or if another park wants chicks for the same reason. But the parents are useless, we can decide to either let the parents sit on them and pull the chicks when they hatch or pull the eggs about 7-10 days before the eggs are due to hatch. We do have cases after where birds will raise chicks for only a certain amount of time, then they abandon them. So we what we do then is to figure out at what stage they start to abandon them, then the next time we can let them raise them until that point and then pull the chicks.

If anything, I would recommend, for a beginner, to let the parents raise the chicks and then pull the chick/s about 2-3 weeks (when the chicks start to develop pin feathers) and spoon feed. Spoon feeding is very easy and can be pretty messy, hehe

Cheers jax