Ask Lafeber

Breeding cockatiels

I have 4 cockatiel breeding pairs in a big avairy all sitting on eggs but notice today one male from breeding pairs having sex with another female from different breeding pair what’s going on there thx

Hi Bradley,

It’s really not a good idea to try to colony breed cockatiels. When you do this, you have no control over which birds breed with each other. Colony breeding is generally only done by for-profit breeders who are only interested in volume rather than good genetics. Cockatiels are very territorial and when you colony breed, even in a large aviary, there are many risks such as fighting, nest raiding, eggs being destroyed or chicks being killed by another pair. If a parent bird gets too stressed or too caught up in defending its territory, it can end up abandoning its own nest, eggs or chicks. As chicks start to emerge from the nest boxes, they are at a high risk of being attacked and possibly killed by other adult birds. Breeding in captivity means that you must control how often they breed and raise chicks. If you do not control them, they will breed year round and eventually the chicks will be weaker and unhealthy and your adults will start dying due to over-breeding. In the wild, they would only hatch one clutch per year because the weather would change and food sources would be limited, so the adults move on until the nest breeding season. In captivity, a pair should not be allowed to have more than 2 clutches per year, which again is one more than they are truly intended to have. After each clutch, you have to take down the nest box as soon as the young leave the nest, and force the parents to rest from breeding for several months. Otherwise the parents will immediately breed again and lay more eggs, and in some cases they will fail to wean the older chicks and let them die. They do this because we provide a perfect breeding environment for them, so they do not have the natural triggers from nature to stop breeding. In a colony situation, it is much harder to control the breeding because unless chicks from every pair leave their nest boxes at the same time, if you remove one nest box, that pair is likely to fight with another pair in order to steal their nest box. You also need to remove all chicks once they are weaned, unless you handfeed them, because you can’t allow the chicks to breed with any of the birds they are related to. You should never allow related birds to breed because this will result in diluted genetics, weak and sickly chicks, deformed chicks or eggs that fail to hatch. Because you have no way of knowing which birds have bred together, you have to assume that each and every offspring are related, so you can never keep any of them as breeders unless you buy unrelated birds from another breeder. So you will need to decide if you want to breed responsibly, and if so, this means each pair must have their own cage for breeding. You can keep the colony together as a wild non-breeding group and not give them nest boxes, and discard any eggs that are laid. Birds do not need nests unless they are breeding, so it’s fine for them to live together in the aviary and not have nest boxes. As to the current pending chicks, all you can do is monitor the situation and be ready to remove chicks and handfeed them if needed. And definitely take down the nest boxes to rest the pairs after all of the chicks are out.

Thank you for asking Lafeber,

Brenda