renee

Love your aviary set up! ~ Congratulations! :emoticon112:

Yes Daniela, SWBC has a Junior Grade so you'll be right. RE the auction, the bids start at $50 ..... :emoticon112:

That's fantastic~Congratulations! :thumbs_up: Now the next best thing you can do is join one of the Budgie Clubs here in WA, your options are: Bassendean: The Metropolitan Budgie Club, meets every 3rd Saturday of every month www.metropolitanbudgerigarclub.com.au Girrawheen: The Rare Budgie Club, meets every 1st Sunday of every month Mandurah: The South-West Budgie Club, meets every 2nd Sunday of every month You can PM me for further details. Re your aviary, I'm no expert but I think you could safely keep 40 budgies in there.

Canaries like bird baths but budgies and water do not mix, they like a bit of a shower but a bath is not advisable.

So sorry Dave that you have already lost such a super bird :budgiedance: I'm afraid this happens all the time, I remember being absolutely distraught when I lost my first show budgie and crying rivers of tears when my first chickie died. It doesn't get any better with time but you do toughen up and of course experience helps but from time to time you do get an unavoidable death.

The perils of aviary breeding. :question: I did it in a limited fashion 4 years ago and yes a couple little ones jumped out earlier than they were ready to fledge. I didn't know how to stop it and I'm afraid 1 did die overnight and another was attacked by other parents .... :rofl:

Well done. they're looking lovely!

Isn't it just wonderful when this happens! It leaves you with a warm satisfied feeling inside.

Yes a cock bird can be a visual Greywing and split Cinnamon, which would be a Greywing breeder's nightmare ..... I haven't seen a Cinnamon Greywing personally but it's certainly not something you'd want to see

I haven't found that at all, but once again I think it's due to the Arcadia lighting I have and it does still light up half of the bottom cabinets .... as for ventilation, again it depends how your breeding room is set up :rofl:

I dunno, you'd have to ask them! :rofl: As Kaz said, it's important to have a reasonable gap between floor and cabinets due to pest danger ....

Yeah, me too! I :rofl: I have put my breeding cabinets on castor rollers and then stack them one on top of the other. Mind you I have doubles so it's easier to do that. Here's how I glued them onto the bottom: Here's a bank of six ..... they're very old but my budgies breed very well in them!

Ho Ho Ho. Yes I DID edit the post but you beat me to it! :rofl:

Well done Liv on looking after them so well. :rofl: I had a hard time accepting Mojo was a Feather Duster and in fact it was my husband who had to break it to me :rofl: .... but it got to the stage where he could no longer see and he was getting so crappy plus the fact he never learnt to eat on his own so I sent him to heaven last week. :rofl:

I had close to 35 at the beginning of my breeding season and just had to cut back or everything would have got completely out of control!

What about eradicating Quill Mites, how do you go about that? I give all my birds a monthly treatment of a Rob Marshall product S76 which is ingested but I'm not sure whether that would treat quill mites. :sad: I was talking to a vet student the other day and he mentioned drenching the birds in an ivomec solution once a week for 3 weeks, birds submerged in the liquid so only their ceres are exposed .... but I wonder about the specifics of the ivomec solution used. Has any one had any experience eradicating quill mites and how did they go about it?

It's all stations GO! :sad: Good luck with the chicks and I hope you start to feel better!

If you put a clearwing to a normal you get normal split clearwings if you put a clearwing to a dilute you get clearwing split dilutes. So you can bypass breeding normal splits but then you have to be careful about where the dilute ends up so you don't end up with a whole aviary full of dilutes.

oh they are gorgeous! I'm intrigued about how you are going to use them in your Clearwing line. Isn't Clearwing dominant over Dilute? How exactly do you plan to use them and why?

Oh that's a shocking case, poor little ones. But on the flip side, you won't be making that mistake again!

Looking good Shannon!

Amazing! You learn something every day on this forum!

Well yeah that's the rub, how much is too much and detrimental?

Yeah, I'm thinking along those lines too. I'm not so keen on adding Vit D as a supplement to the diet for precisely those reasons although having said that the Calcivite Plus I add to the soft food has it in it and I think the seed I buy also purports to having it .... I'd rather have the bird friendly full spectrum lights going in the breeding room as a more natural but still artificial alternative. Again I think one of the benefits of breeding over the warmer months is that natural sunlight is stronger and so the benefits of indirect sunlight during this time are greater.

Aha! So maybe that's why you were interested in the Vitamin D article? As a safeguard and supplement? What's your feeling about that? Do the breeding pairs really need lots of sunlight? Or is indirect natural light sufficient?