Hi Breeann,
I understand your frustration and desire to have success with breeding. Breeding birds is not easy by any means. It takes a lot of patience, and sometimes even if you do everything exactly right, you still get no results. Unfortunately there are some things you do not have right, and you have possibly received some bad advice. I’m really not sure what you are referring to about taking the birds in the bathroom and running hot water? This sounds like a strange myth and there is certainly no basis to it. It could be based on a home remedy for an egg bound bird where providing a hot, steamy room may help the bird pass the egg, however, Vet care is the best chance for any egg bound bird as the home remedies rarely work.
Nutrition is the foundation for successful breeding. Without a nutritionally balanced diet, the birds will not be healthy enough to breed. You must convert your birds to a pelleted diet or our Nutri-Berries, Avi-Cakes or Pellet-Berries before you even think of letting them breed. I’ve never known a bird that wouldn’t convert to a better diet, but I’ve known many owners who give up too soon. If you can’t commit to improving their diet, you will never be able to deal with the ups and downs of breeding birds. One thing is almost certain when breeding birds – you will have a lot of failure before you get any healthy chicks. I can understand them not accepting pellets, but they should easily convert to our foraging diets. Nutri-Berries, Avi-Cakes and Pellet-Berries are formulated the same as a pellet, but they are not ground up. They contain the whole seeds that your birds already love, along with other ingredients to provide a balanced diet. You can’t get this with a seed mix because even if vitamins are added, they are lost when the bird removes the hulls. The seeds in our diets are hulled so that they absorb the added nutrients. To convert your birds, you can start by crumbling our diets over their seeds. You will gradually reduce the amount of seeds each day until they are only eating the new food. In most cases, it takes no more than a week or two. But you have to be consistent and dedicated to converting them. Even if you decide not to breed them, they need a better diet or they won’t be as healthy and their life span will be much shorter. In addition to the balanced daily diet, you should offer dark leaf greens, chopped veggies, multi grain bread and cooked eggs, with the shells cleaned, crushed and cooked with them. The eggs and shell are vital for the extra protein and calcium that the female needs when laying eggs. If they ever hatch chicks, they will eat a lot of food each day and you will need to replenish it throughout the day.
Of course you need males and females. You mentioned the ceres, which is a good indicator of gender with some parakeet color mutations, but not with all. In some color mutations, the cere never changes. This is especially true for the pale colors and the solid colors like white or yellow. Unless you have had DNA blood testing run, you very well may have all males.
Next is the proper caging for breeding. You need to have a separate cage for each pair. If you have more than one pair in a cage, it doesn’t work out. Some for-profit breeders will breed their parakeets in a large walk-in aviary, but they are breeding for quantity rather than strong healthy birds with good genes. So if you really want to have success at breeding, you need to remove one of the pairs and get them a separate flight. When you have more than one pair in a cage for breeding, they will get very territorial and start fighting. In some cases, one male will become dominant and breed with all of the females. The females will compete with each other over the nests, and this can result in raiding each other’s nests, destroying or eating the eggs or killing each other’s chicks.
You also need the right type of nest. A coconut shell is not going to work. I’ve seen these and many other completely inappropriate items that are sold as nests. You need a wooden nest box that has been made for parakeets. The chicks will be nearly as large as the adults before they leave the nest, so the nest box has to be large enough to hold 6-8 grown parakeets! As you can imagine, a coconut shell is nowhere near large enough and it isn’t the shape they want. The nest box will have a concave floor which keeps the eggs from rolling around. It will also have a hinged top that can be opened to check on the eggs or chicks.The nest box should be attached to the outside of the cage, as high as possible.
Breeding birds also need a lot of privacy. You should have them in a quiet area and only check on them a couple of times a day when you feed them. If people are around them all day, they aren’t going to feel like their cage is a safe place for breeding. You need to be very careful about cleaning the cage, and not be too disruptive. Once they do lay eggs, you can’t clean the nest box until the chicks are out. At that time you would take the nest box down and rest the parents for several months. You should not let them have more than two clutches per year. You also have to find homes for the chicks because you can’t let them breed with the parents or each other – you should never breed related birds.
To me, having several parakeets in a large cage with a lot of fun toys is a lot more entertaining and rewarding than breeding them. Parakeets are very social and it can be a lot of fun to watch them interact and play with their toys. You might want to just take away the coconut, give them some fun toys and enjoy having them and keeping them all together. When you breed birds, you can’t do this and because of the privacy they need, you hardly ever get to see them. Regardless of what you decide, you do need to improve their diet. One of our vets has been writing a series of articles on diet, so I’ll provide those links below.
Bird Seeds Versus Pellets: What’s The Difference?
Why Are Pellets Better Than Seeds For Pet Birds?
Thank you for asking Lafeber,
Brenda
