Hi,
Cockatiels should be at least 2 years old before they are put together, whether you plan to breed them or not. A young female should never be around an older male and especially not a hormonal male who is trying to mate with it. Even at 10 months, she is technically capable of breeding and laying fertile eggs. However a young female is at a very high risk of becoming egg bound, which is often fatal. If the egg does eventually pass, it can cause damage, preventing the bird from being a breeder. Young males and females are typically more interested in mating than settling down and caring for eggs. They tend to develop bad breeding habits like breaking or eating the eggs, or not incubating the eggs. These habits often cannot be broken and the birds are ruined for being good breeders. You should keep these birds apart until the female is at least 2 years old. But one problem is that a female cockatiel can have her hormones triggered just by hearing her mate call to her. I would keep as much distance as possible between these birds for her own safety.
As for breeding, when she is old enough, you would introduce the birds. There is no guarantee they will bond as a pair. But if they do, you have to understand that you will be giving up both birds as pets. Breeder birds can’t be pet birds. They need to focus on each other and bonding as mate. If you try to continue handling them, this causes confusion and can cause the birds to not bond, or to fight badly. Tame males are bad about turning on their mate when they can’t adjust from being a pet to being a breeder. So with former pets, you have to give them a private area where the only contact you have is to feed them or check on them. If they bond as a pair, they will spend most of their time together grooming and feeding each other and eventually start mating. This is when you provide them with a nest box that is made for cockatiels. It will be a very large wooden box that should be attached to the outside of the cage as high as possible. You do not build them a nest. You can put some natural aspen shavings in the box – no other kind. But most of the time they kick all of it out and use nothing or use some of their own feathers. There is no guarantee these birds will bond as mates. They choose their own mate in the wild do not always like the mate we choose. Even if they bond and she lays eggs, the eggs might not be fertile, or the pair might not incubate them, or fail to feed the chicks. There is a lot that tends to go wrong before you end up with any chicks, and often you do everything right but the pair is never successful. So you now have two wild birds and no pets. It’s a lot to think about. If both birds are tame by the time the female is old enough to breed, you should consider if it is worth giving up your pets to breed them, when you may never get any chicks.
One more thing I need to address is whether this new bird is actually a female. I don’t think it is since the bird mated on your hand. This is something the males tend to do but usually not the females. At 2 months old, it is impossible to know the sex of a cockatiel. Even a DNA test isn’t reliable on a very young cockatiel and is most likely to come back as female even if it is a male. All cockatiels have the appearance of females until they go through their first adult molt between 8-12 months old. Depending on the color mutation, the bird’s feathers will change if it is a male. But with some color mutations, you can’t easily tell the males and females apart. So you may have a male, which would also explain why the bird is so interested in being tame, since the females are not as outgoing. Whether male or female, if the bird continues to exhibit hormonal behavior, you need to discourage this by distracting it with a toy or putting it back in the cage. And if the breeder really claimed they knew the gender of a 2 month old cockatiel without a doubt, this is not a trustworthy source for birds or information. You can send me pictures to [email protected] and put it to my attention and I’ll let you know if the bird can be visually sexed. Just based on the behavior, I think this bird is also a male, but of course there can always be exceptions.
Thank you for asking Lafeber,
Brenda
