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Breeding Cockatiels Part 1
Getting Started
By Judy McElveen
All Rights Reserved
If you are thinking of becoming
a cockatiel breeder, whether it’s your male and female pets in a cage in the
den or several pairs that you plan to
buy and set up for breeding, there are some things that are important
to know. Although these birds are so
prolific and have such a strong urge to breed that you’d probably be able to
produce some young even if you were totally ignorant of the needs of breeding
cockatiels, the experience will be
much happier and the birds much more productive if you learn some elementary
facts about how to select and care for your breeding stock.
First of all, do some thinking
about your goals. Do you want to
breed your pet pair and have your family share the experience, then give away
or sell the babies to family members and friends? If so, your approach will be totally different from that of
someone who wants to breed several pairs of cockatiels to sell as handfed pets. The person who wants to raise some birds
for showing and sell excess babies as pets will have still a different
approach. Whether you identify with
one of the descriptions above or your situation is totally different,
learning some simple facts before starting will help you to avoid or
manage some typical problems that could result in the loss of babies or, even
worse, your beloved pets or prized breeding stock.
If your goal goes
beyond breeding your pet pair, buy the best breeding stock you can afford and
buy young birds that have their whole reproductive life ahead of them. While a “proven” or “producing” pair is a
good investment if breeding birds that take many years to mature (such as
macaws, African greys, amazons, etc.), it just plain doesn’t make sense with
cockatiels, for several reasons. The
first reason is that these birds mature at an early age and, if they are
healthy and at least six months old when you buy them, you can expect to have
babies within a year of setting them up for breeding. Although it is better to wait until a hen
is 18 months old to breed her, cock birds are able (and eager!) to fertilize eggs before the age of one year.
( Like many young fathers, though, they don’t always settle down to their
parenting duties at this early age.)
As many breeders will hold their young stock until about the age of
one year (so that they can be accurately sexed by behavior or appearance),
this is probably about the age you’d be able to purchase your young breeding
pairs. Since they will need to become
accustomed to your facility, the diet you provide, the caging you provide and
each other, as well as overcoming the stress of the move, you would normally not hang a nestbox for
about 3 months after you receive the birds, so that means you could have
chicks from your breeders approximately six months after buying them and can
expect them to continue to breed for 8 to 10 years or even longer. Another reason for buying young, untried,
birds is that established breeders who are continuing to breed cockatiels
will very seldom sell producing stock unless there are problems with the
pairs. An honest breeder will tell
you what the problems are and, if you are prepared to deal with the problems,
then go ahead and buy, taking into consideration how many breeding years they
might have left to them. Otherwise,
or if neither you nor anyone in your bird circle can vouch for the honesty of
the seller, BUY YOUNG BIRDS!
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Please, don’t make the mistake
I did and start with less than top-quality birds. Do not gather your future breeding stock from this yard sale,
that flea market or yonder pet store!
You will become attached to the birds you initially buy and their
offspring and it will take you years to produce good quality
birds. Look for, and buy, your nine
to twelve month old breeding stock from a breeder who shows cockatiels. While there are plenty of people who
produce good quality birds, the cockatiel exhibitors are the ones, for the
most part, who are actively working to maintain high standards and improve
the breed. It is they who first pay
outlandish prices for new color mutations so that, eventually, you are able
to buy a whiteface, for example, at a reasonable price. People who exhibit their cockatiels do so
at considerable expense and are, therefore, more likely to monitor and
protect the health of their flock.
After all, the competition at shows is fierce and any bird must be in
tip-top condition and health to have any chance of doing well.
If you are buying good quality
birds from an exhibitor, plan to pay at least $200 for a pair, more if the
birds are rares or good quality pieds.
The price will go up if you specify show quality birds. If you want to get a “jumpstart” as a
cockatiel exhibitor and hope to place a bird on the top bench within three
years, tell the exhibitor/breeder whose birds you want to buy. Expect to pay substantially more for birds
of this caliber. Exhibitors who own only a few Champions or Grand Champions,
or who have just started placing birds on the top bench, will sometimes be
willing to sell you the offspring of very good parents for somewhere in the
neighborhood of $200 to $400.
Exhibitors whose names you see over and over on the top bench winners
and whose birds are consistently producing Champion and Grand Champion
offspring will, quite logically, charge more–to MUCH more – for the
birds they sell.
Let’s do a little math together
and I’ll prove to you that buying good birds is the best way to go. (We’ll ignore, for the moment, the real cost
of the $75.00 pair you saw at the bird fair.) Let’s assume good quality birds, a pair costing you $500. You buy them and put them in a cage
together and feed them an excellent diet for about three months. Suddenly, you notice that the cuttlebone
that was whole day before yesterday has been reduced to dust and skin. This means your female is ready to lay
eggs - put the nestbox up quickly! At
this point, you can usually expect eggs within a matter of days. Your hen lays a clutch of four eggs
(often, the first clutch is smaller than the following ones will be). Within a year of buying them, your pair
has produced three clutches of 3, 4 and 5 chicks - a total of twelve
babies. If you retail the handfed
babies at an average (very reasonable) price of $75.00 each, your return on
investment is $900, a gross profit of over 100%. If you deduct for cage, nestbox, food, etc., your profit is
still around 100%, within the first year of acquiring the birds. Do
you know anywhere else you can make this sort of return and still have your
original assets, ready to go again next year?
Now, let’s consider the real
cost of the $75.00 pair from the bird fair or flea market. Let me say first that it’s entirely possible,
at times, to receive a real bargain on high quality birds; that is, fairly
young birds of good size and conformation that have been fed a good diet and
are not diseased. If you can buy such
birds from a breeder you know you can trust, you can’t go wrong. Most often, though, the cheap birds come
from breeders who start with mediocre stock, keep their birds under
substandard conditions and feed a marginal to inadequate diet. Such birds have no reserves to help them
withstand stress and just the stress of being sold and moved to a new home
can cause them to get sick from bacteria, viruses and fungi present in the
air everywhere. Of course, the birds
could be diseased already, but let’s be optimistic. Still, the cock bird develops a runny nose within a week or so
of your bringing him home with you.
You don’t know if this is just a passing thing or what but, if you’ve
done your reading and research, you know this could also be a symptom of that
dreaded disease “psittacosis”, also known as “parrot fever” (people can catch
this one and the correct name for it at this time is chlamydia). Since you
have no way to tell, the bird has to go to the vet. With the test for chlamydia, the total cost will be at least $100.00. Although the cost of the pair is now up to
$175, you’re lucky. The bird did not
have chlamydia and it recovers. A
couple of months goes by, the nest box is being investigated and suddenly
your hen acts like she’s in distress.
Her feathers are fluffed, she’s sitting in the nestbox or on the
bottom of the cage but no eggs are produced - or, she lays a soft shelled
egg. She’s in trouble. Egg binding (being unable to successfully
expel an egg) can be fatal and soft shelled eggs are very hard to expel. You do first aid (which I’ll explain in
detail later) but wind up taking the bird to the vet who first injects
calcium (to assist in muscular contractions) and a hormone to help the bird
pass the egg. If this doesn’t work,
the egg must either be broken inside the bird’s body so she can pass it or
the contents removed with a hypodermic needle and the shell broken. Either way, infection can result, so the
bird must receive antibiotics for ten days.
Egg binding can sometimes cause a “prolapsed” uterus, in which case
you will be advised not to breed this bird again. Let’s again be optimistic and assume you recognized the
symptoms and got the bird to the vet on time and she recovers. Your cost for the pair is now $275.00 or
more, depending on whether the female had to be hospitalized. You now have to prevent the hen from
laying again for at least a month while supplementing her diet heavily with
calcium to prevent this happening again.
After a month, you hang the nestbox and, this time, you get four fertile
eggs. Hooray, we’re on our way (aren’t
we?)! Sadly, the embryos die in the
shell a few days before hatching.
Dead-in-shell eggs this late in the development period are usually
from nutritional deficiencies. In
this case, I’d suspect that this hen’s calcium reserves were still inadequate
and the calcium layer on the shell not dense enough. The growing embryos draw calcium from
the shell of the egg as they develop and I’d suspect these died after
exhausting their calcium supply. You
have now lost four chicks at $50.00 each, so your real cost for the pair, four to five months into the
process is now just $25.00 less than that of the good quality pair - but you
don’t have any babies at all and now you have to wait at least two months
before letting the hen lay again!
Okay, okay!! I am revealing my own bias here, I admit
it. You’ve been presented with the
best case scenario for the birds purchased from an exhibitor and the worst
case for the inexpensive pair. It is
also possible that you could incur veterinary bills and/or lose the good
quality birds and have no problems whatsoever with the cheap pair (in my
opinion, this is unlikely - I’m being generous here). When the babies are sold, however, you
will easily get your asking price of $75.00 for the chicks from the good
quality pair and will sell those ahead of the people asking $50.00 for the
handfed offspring from their bargain birds.
Yes, even the uneducated public can tell the difference!
Next
Edition - Providing the best caging, environment and diet for your breeding
cockatiels, as well as solutions to some common “start up” problems.