11 is a lot of eggs for one hen.

 

You have 3 hens with 6, 4 and 1 respectively. That is not that many. I am not sure the egg laying has stopped there. You should expect more.

 

I only have show birds and one has layed 7 eggs so far, so expect more from the pet types.

 

 

Well, I hope Finnie and Phoebe have more, but I don't want Colleen to overdo it. It would be nice if she stops soon

Do you have any picture's of the young from this discussion, i would love to see what you ended up with.

Lib

Finnie and Patrick's offspring:

 

 

Finnie had 9 eggs, but only 6 hatched. There's a mauve greywing, maybe dilute in the lower right, you can barely see. Here's a better picture of that one:

 

Now she's on the left. She looks like she's grey, but since there's no grey in this breeding, she must be mauve. So this clutch had 3 greywings and 3 normals. All dom pied except for the mauve normal on the right. And I actually think they are all hens. There are 2 or 3 that looked iffy, buy now they are showing a little white on their ceres.

 

I put Colleen and Sean's babies in a cage with Phoebe and Bailey's, except for the three I'm keeping and two that I have sold. (Colleen had 7 eggs and 7 babies, and Phoebe had 5 eggs and 4 babies.) So they are mixed together in the following photos.

 

 

 

 

 

There are actually 6 in that cage, some got into multiple photos. 4 boys and 2 girls. It's interesting to note, that where you see two birds on one perch, they are siblings from the same clutch.

 

What a great mixed bag of babies in such nice colours and varieties!

 

It's so exciting when unexpecteds pop out of the breeding! Did you know or suspect that you had so much greywing in your birds?

 

 

No, I had no idea! I had two of the pairs set up to get greywing splits, but never thought that the normal parents were split already, and even the pair that were both normals produced greywings, so I guess I have splits all around!

Gotta love that as a pet type breeder... I'm not certain all Show breeders like the surprises they get Genetics is fascinating...

Time for an update. There must have been two clear eggs in a row, because there was a 6 day gap between chicks #2 and 3. Then I had two hatch on consecutive days, March 14th and March 15th. So the two oldest are huge and the two youngest are tiny.

 

 

 

 

There are still two more eggs that might hatch, or might not. We should know in a few days. In the mean time, it looks like the one above that's got his wings stretched out might be a dommie pied, and the oldest one looks normal to me, but it's another grey wing!

 

 

 

 

Awwwwww.

Well, I think you guys are all gonna want to lynch me- all four of these babies are sold now, and I never took any more pictures of them! In fact, other than the ones I'm keeping for future breeding purposes, I've sold every one of the babies that hatched this year. I had 21 babies hatch, and I've kept 3. For a while there, I thought I was never going to be able to sell any of them. I took a dozen or so to a bird fair back in March, and only sold 1 bird the whole day. Then I had a few sales trickle in from various ads I had around, but I thought that at this rate, I was going to have to get out of budgie breeding completely. No point making baby birds I can't sell.

 

Then yesterday a lady followed up on a contact from a while back, and she bought 4 birds, and then today I went to another bird fair, and sold all the rest of the babies, plus a couple of others I decided to "cull". That makes 10 birds sold this weekend! ( As a reward, I bought myself a couple of new hens for my cinnamon line.) I've decided that if I try to pace the rate at which I allow the birds to breed, I should be able to continue to enjoy this fun and interesting hobby.

 

As for the three babies I have left, they are showing signs of moulting, so I will put up some current pictures in a day or two, once they get those cute pinny heads.

Some updated photos of the 3 babies I've kept.

 

Nelly, on the left, and Riley. 4 months old and moulting!

 

 

And Kelpie. (The name Kelpie means 'the color of seaweed')

 

 

All three of them are from Colleen and Sean's clutch. Riley is my first hatchling ever, so I'm glad I kept him.

LYNCH time! Why did you not take photos?! I sold one of my babies and another is being kept in my cage for the time being. Happy it went okay anyway.

LYNCH time! Why did you not take photos?! I sold one of my babies and another is being kept in my cage for the time being. Happy it went okay anyway.

 

 

I don't know what happened, I guess I thought I had plenty of time, and then all of a sudden, they were all sold. And while they were still in the nest, I was spending all my time with them trying to tame them, so I thought I would take pictures later... I never even realized I had no pictures of this lot until I went to post about selling them, and I didn't have any pictures to put in! :kiss: :star:

 

It was pretty overwhelming having so many birds, though, and I was worried about being stuck with all of them, so pictures was the last thing on my mind, and I honestly didn't think they'd be gone before I took pictures.

 

So, Ratzy, you sold one of yours, and you're keeping one. What about the other two? Did you ever have a second round?

I started to have a second round but dad addled the eggs and Marigold didn't want to sit on them after that. I'm keeping two now, but one is being kept in my cage for the moment. My budgies are thin at the moment, I can just feel their keel bones, so I am fattining them up a bit with more seeds. I thought about incubating the eggs, but I don't think any would've hatched and if theydid I wouldn't be able to feed them. I'm babling now.... how did your second round go?

It went pretty well, actually. There were only the four babies, so I was able to handle them a lot more, and get them used to me. Once they were out of the nest, though, I couldn't pick them up anymore- they would fly away. So I would hold millet in the cage, and they were pretty good about standing on my arm and hand to eat it.

 

Two of them were braver than the others, and they would come close to the wire to see me, and even climb along my arm towards my shoulder. The lady who bought one of those was very pleased, she told me that he was friendly and would come to the side of the cage to be near her. So at least they had a bit of a head start in their taming.

 

But that is why I need GB to tell me her secrets for hand-taming, so I can make better progress once they leave the nest and are no longer grabbable. (The first round of 17 babies didn't get nearly as much attention, and I felt bad selling them to people and telling them "No, they're not tame, you will have to work on it.")

 

I even had a lady call me when I had an ad in the paper and give me a lecture on how I can't compete with the pet stores if my babies are wild, but if I hand tamed them, then I would be able to sell them very quickly, and for more money! :star: She even wanted to come over every day and play with her baby so it would know her when it went home. I had to quickly put an end to that idea!

Mine tamed fine but I only had four and they played with me everyday.