**KAZ**

Give Grandpa a go. I have new chicks right now out of two six year old cocks

QUOTE(ghazzigh @ Aug 8 2009, 11:51) *this time im going to differ in opioion because for the last couple of days we have had a bird just sitting there wasting away while questions have been asked and offers put out but not being able to be taken up on we have a young person that probably hasnt got a crop tube well obiousbly hasnt done it anyway even if they did whereas on the other end everyone has a spoon and its not beyond her age and experience to try and bird is dieing anyway i know how hard it is for a adult to crop feed a very sick bird and the spoon for a young person in that situation in far better than keeping looking in the cage doing nothing but questioning you have nothing to lose in that situation at all just a thought I agree with Libby.

White pepper is way better than cornflour and less messy

The fact there are nestboxes makes them want to breed earlier. They shouldnt be in there with nestboxes. They may even be stopping the hen from returning to her nestbox.

Lovely birds You'd have to be really happy with them. Your next breeding season is going to be real exciting

While all this is going on and we may well be distracted about this one sick bird...........it would be a very good time to check the actual health of your other aviary birds.............. 1. check to see if water is getting into the aviary and if the ground is wet. 2. check to see if others are looking fluffed up. 3. Check to see if any others look thin or have poopy bottoms. 4. If the ground is wet and you have other birds not looking well, you need COCCIVET in their water. 5. and other sick birds need to be brought in and put into warm conditions...........warm cage with lamp or similar. PS I can visit you tomorrow if you like to help you out.

I would just like to add, for the record, that I would be willing to go visit cute spangled bub at her home anytime in the future to help her with advice about her aviary birds and how she may be able to make some changes that will help them all stay healthy. It would be good too if she was taught to crop feed....I can teach that.....and also she needs to have some emergency meds on hand and a hospital box. There is support available if she needs it and her parents will allow it. PM me for phone contact details.

I agree with Maesies advice. There should never be a time where underaged hens are anywhere near nestboxes. This will be your primary cause of a problem. Eggs that were fertile and have gone off will show discolouration on the shell .........check for that. if they feel cold to the touch then they will be no good too. The fact that she is mating means she is going to try and start again. If she does she may choose the nestbox where the other hen is and then you will have bloodshed. No bird should be breeding when moulting.

Thank's Kaz, We have 2 nest box's on shelf, opaline and one other pair, mum sitting on 6 eggs, no problem's there and two hens, (underage) loose in aviary.Other cages are inside aviary but birds are caged. Opaline and mate seem o.k she just leaves box for a fair while and only goes back for a few minutes and she's back out. It has been warm here last week or so, don't know if that has any bearing on it. She looked like she had a bit of bloody head, but it looks like pin feathers coming so thought moult? Cere is brown but she's still mating so, maybe it's just me. So you have two underaged hens in the aviary on the loose where two pairs are breeding with nestboxes ?

GB has given some great advioce as always. The thing about putting a nestbox in an aviary to see if birds are ready is one a lot of breeders do...........generally though the nestbox is a mock up nestbox and may not even have a proper door or bottom in it. Sometimes it may be a length of wood with nestbox sized holes and perches in it. Its just to see which birds are keen enough to investigate and get excited about it.

I am glad you will be taking the bird to Libby. You will like Lib a lot. She is great with birds. Be very careful about giving water by spoon. Its the easiest thing to aspirate into the lungs.

20 minutes is the general amount of time a hen can be off eggs and them not go cold. Are there other birds in the aviary ? As often in colony breeding others can stop a hen returning to her nestbox. Moulting can mean she is unwell and can cause her to lose interest. What colour is her cere ? and has there been any changes in seed or food that can have forced her to moult ?

A bird in the condition this one obviously is will not take a feed off a spoon without aspirating. Libby has offered to take the bird and do what needs to be done.........they dont live that far apart that the bird cannot be got to Libby. Its up to CUTE.SPANGLED.BUB to recognise that the need to accept help is URGENT and get the bird to Libby. If no vet, then Libby is next best option. I would trust Libby with any sick bird.

Preparing her now would be great. Advice about the nestbox whether you got it here or not is not a good idea. Not everyone who answers on this forum has expereince. Sometimes you have to check what experience a member has when issuing advice for you to judge whether or not the advice is good and sound. Good luck with your breeding plans.

Breeding diet ?? It should be the same as that all the time...............all the best of food and fresh vegies etc. Too late wont come into it. There wont be a time thats too late. Mostly this is about our excitement and anxiety to breed. I feel your excitement, but waiting would be best right now. Do NOT put a nestbox in a mixed cage not even for a few minutes. Bad move. You have waited this long and its admirable that you have....another month or so isnt much longer to wait.

Omelette Junior...............just like her Mum

From one of Daz's hens GB...............He has worked hard on getting the spangle markings right in his birds I have no idea.

So "angelic" ...............wonderful shot. Congratulations Neville

Kindie cage babies NASTY

By the look of that bird it will no longer eat or drink and needs emergency feeding by crop needle. I would bet it is thin and lightweight and on its last legs.

If a baby budgie is in an aviary with nestboxes and 3 months old they will mate and they will get eggbound. While this may not be happeneing in this case, it CAN happen........so never put it at the bottom of a list if they are in a breeding aviary.

Take up Libbys offer and get the bird to her ASAP.....its thin and dehydrated. It needs a crop feed by an EXPERIENCED person. Libby is in the PARKWOOD area. Please get the bird to her tonight or early tomorrow. She can do for this bird what you cannot. The bird is very thin and that hunched look is what they do when they have little reserves left to fight........she hasnt been eating.

Woo Hoo !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GREAT Photos Shannon

E-X-P-A-N-S-I-O-N

Rice and Birds.........the urban myth Against the Grain Claim: Rice thrown to wish newly-wedded couples well can kill their fine feathered friends. Status: False. Origins: We're cautioned not to throw rice at the bride and groom, because the grain will prove harmful to the birds who swoop down to eat it. The rice expands in those little birdy stomachs, causing our avian companions to explode, we're warned. Let's quit worrying about the birds. They'll be fine. Seagulls don't explode when they eat Alka-Seltzer; pigeons don't explode when they eat rice. This response to a 1996 Ann Landers column in which she "informed" readers about the danger rice poses to birds just about says it all: The USA Rice Federation in Houston has a message for advice columnist Ann Landers - straighten up Cartoon of the legendand fly right when you talk about birds. In a recent column, Landers warned readers that throwing rice at weddings is unhealthy for our feathered friends: "Please encourage the guests to throw rose petals instead of rice. Rice is not good for the birds." "This silly myth pops up periodically, and it is absolutely unfounded," responded rice expert Mary Jo Cheesman at the USA Rice Federation. Many migrating ducks and geese depend on winter-flooded rice fields each year to fatten up and build strength for their return trek to northern nesting grounds. Uncooked, milled rice is no more harmful to birds than rice in the field, Cheesman said. The Curator of Ornithology at the University of California at Berkeley agrees. "It's a myth. There is no reason why birds, including small songbirds, can't eat rice," said Ned Johnson, a professor of biology at Berkeley who lectures frequently on the food and feeding of birds. Many churchs and reception halls have rules prohibiting the throwing of confetti or rice. These rules work to keep the property clean so that the next happy couple doesn't get its send-off amid the leavings of the previous pair. Confetti is notoriously hard to clean up; not even vacuuming a lawn will return the grass to its pristine condition. Rice poses a unique danger. Not to birds, though; to people. Scattered on a hard surface (such as the steps of a church or a dance floor) it puts anyone who walks across that surface at risk of taking a nasty spill. Far better to prohibit rice throwing at a wedding than to end up with an injured guest. Don't do it for the birds, do it for the inlaws. MORE An urban legend that I've heard (most recently by a teacher during a discussion in a high school English class) is that you shouldn't throw rice at weddings, because after the party is over, birds will come and eat it. White rice, being as dehydrated as it is, will immediately begin absorbing water upon entering the moist environment of the bird's body. It will then swell up, and if there is enough of it in there, the bird's body (specifically the crop, where the food first goes to be stored) will burst, killing the poor little critter. Is there any truth to it? Dear Reader: No truth to it at all. In fact, wild rice is a dietary staple for many birds, as are other grains that expand in moisture such as wheat and barley. One thing purveyors of this myth fail to take into account is that the rate at which dried grains absorb liquids is pretty darned slow unless it takes place at cooking temperature. Also, there's a biological process you may be familiar with called digestion. Long before any uncooked rice consumed by a bird could expand enough to cause harm, it would have already been ground up in its crop and in the process of being broken down into nutrients and waste by the acids and enzymes in the bird's digestive tract. It's unclear exactly how and when this misconception originated, though it was most famously promulgated by advice columnist Ann Landers when she published a letter warning prospective brides and grooms against the practice of throwing rice at weddings on May 21, 1988: MORE Should you not throw rice at weddings because birds swallow it and explode? May 2, 1997 Dear Cecil: On a recent NBC Today Show segment, some Martha Stewart wannabe said you shouldn't throw rice at weddings because it kills birds. Supposedly birds eat the rice, it swells in their stomachs, and they explode over playgrounds. Having cooked a lot of rice, I know it takes boiling heat and a good 20 minutes to get it to swell (aside from so-called Minute rice). It seems to me if any bird has an intestinal temperature near boiling, eating a few grains of rice is the least of its worries. Also, despite zillions of weddings, I don't recall seeing piles of blown-up pigeons near churches, nor do I remember seeing inordinate numbers of bird carcasses near rice paddies in southeast Asia. Is there any basis in fact to the rice = bird killer story, or is this yet another urban myth? — David Thomas, via the Internet Dear David: Cecil humbly concedes that the final word cannot yet be written on this urgent subject. Instead, as is his custom, he merely recites the facts as ascertained to date: (1) Personally I think the whole thing is BS, but if I just said that I'd be 500 words shy of a column. (2) Having momentarily tired of the Internet, I had little Ed go on the Mara Tapp show on WBEZ radio in Chicago to see if any of the Teeming Millions had seen birds exploding over playgrounds. Number of calls from kibitzers who wanted to hear what their voices sounded like on the radio: zillions. Number of sightings of detonated birds: zero. Tolja. (3) One guy's idea of a major scientific contribution was to tell us he'd been in a cooking class in Minnesota ten years before, and they'd experimentally determined that dried rice doubles in volume when soaked. Like I didn't know this, you goof. (4) Though maybe the guy's point was that you didn't need to have boiling or even hot water to do this. Little Ed isn't sure. You look at his notes, you think, wow, nice shorthand. Unfortunately he was writing in longhand. (5) My brother-in-law told me that dried barley expands to three and a half times its original volume when soaked, so if you're looking for things to throw at weddings instead of rice I guess barley shouldn't be high on the list. Then again, my brother-in-law also told me he read in a World War II memoir about how they would parachute in bags of rice to the troops in Burma or someplace, and occasionally when a bag went astray people on the ground would later find an empty bag and an exploded cow nearby. But when I spent three hours in the library reading the memoir in question I found zip to support this tale, and it wouldn't surprise me if my brother-in-law hallucinated the bit about barley too. (6) Getting back to WBEZ, another guy claimed he had a friend who was a physical anthropologist, and she told him that when she wants to separate the bones in a skull, she fills it with rice and lets it sit in water overnight, whereupon the rice expands and forces the bones apart. The guy said in his opinion this didn't qualify as exploding. Maybe not, but it's not like having some bird swell up until its skull cracks open is a big improvement visualizationwise. (7) Some people think that, from the point of view of bird endangerment, a distinction should be drawn between regular rice and Minute rice. These people are losers. (8) When we queried the experts at Cornell University--you remember what a big help they were in exposing the grim truth about green potato chips--the director of education and information services wrote back as follows: "I do not have a prepared response [and why not?], but the simplest answer is, 'ricebirds' (bobolinks) have been eating rice throughout recorded history! It's really no different than the birds eating any grain, including millet or wheat, which they do all the time." Testify, sister. (9) My assistant Jane--I tell you, nobody's going to say I didn't throw enough resources into this--says that, judging from her review of pertinent Web sites, the cool thing to do instead of throwing rice is to release clouds of butterflies. I'm not quite picturing this, but I guess you go to the bridal supply house and buy a box full of butterflies and hope most of them survive till the wedding. This is an improvement? (10) A Presbyterian minister called WBEZ to say that the reason they didn't want you to throw rice at weddings was that it was like spreading little roller bearings all over the floor, and insurance companies didn't want the bride and groom to fall and break their necks. Though now that I think about it, using birdseed instead of rice is basically replacing roller bearings with ball bearings. Maybe we should rethink butterflies. (11) I've said this before, I'll say it again. Ain't science great?