Thank you for contacting Ask Lafeber. Breeding is a complicated topic. Zebra finches do best when a pair is alone in an appropriate cage with a nest box and all other needed items. An experienced avian vet can provide the best advice. Also, if the beak twitching is excessive, consider taking her to an avian vet for examination in case there is a health issue.
Meanwhile, below are excerpts from previous Q&As that discuss Zebra finch breeding that might have helpful info for you.
“You can’t breed with more than one pair in the cage. Moving them should probably help. Just give them plenty of privacy and they will breed when they are ready. You can start feeding an egg food — either egg with the shell washed, crushed and cooked with them or buy a commercial dried egg food made for finches.”
“Ideally the birds should be about a year old before you try to breed them. They also need to be on a nutritionally balanced diet like pellets or granules, and not a loose seed mix. Zebra finches can turn into breeding machines, so make sure this is something you want to deal with. You can’t leave any offspring with the adults after they are weaned. And you can’t keep male and female chicks together or they will try to start breeding as young as 4-6 months old in captivity. You have to remove the nest as soon as the chicks have left it, or the parents will start another clutch and often leave the older chicks to die without weaning them. Once the chicks are weaned and moved out of the cage, you still have to wait at least 4 months before returning the nest. And you should limit them to no more than 2 clutches per year. Sometimes you have to discard eggs when you take out the nest, so if this bothers you, breeding is not a good idea. In the wild, the seasons would change and trigger the pairs to stop breeding, but in captivity, they do not get the environmental signals so we have to intervene and keep them from breeding too often.”
“I would leave the nest alone. They may have taken longer to get the nest ready and laid eggs later than the other pair. When you check a nest, it can be very disruptive to the pair and they are likely to abandon the nest and any eggs or chicks. It’s actually more important to control how often they nest. So with the other pair, you need to take their nest away as soon as the chicks leave it, or they will try to nest again immediately and sometimes that means they don’t wean the chicks and they die. In the wild there are environmental changes that signal the birds that breeding season is over. Since we provide an ideal environment year round, you need to make the pair rest in between clutches. It’s best to limit them to two clutches per year, which is one more than they would have in the wild. So the adults do not need a nest except for when they are breeding. Also, be sure to remove the chicks once they are weaned, to prevent the parents from picking on them. They should be separated by gender so that they do not breed — you should never allow related birds to breed.”
