Hi Clarissa,
You have a couple of issues here. Your hen is too young to be with a male or be allowed to breed and lay eggs. She is a typical young hen – her eggs weren’t viable and the chicks not robust. The other problem is the poor diet – seeds provide almost no nutrition, so neither she nor the chick is getting the nutrition they need. The chick may not survive, but it would be more due to the diet. Parents do stuff their chicks, and on a good diet, the food moves through the crop naturally. With seeds, there is a high risk of the crop getting impacted and the chick will sadly die. It’s too late to change things now, but you can offer other foods. You should be feeding the parents a nutritionally balanced diet like pellets or our foraging diets. Loose seeds have little nutrition, and added vitamins are lost when the birds hull the seeds. Vitamins in the water can help some, but they do not drink enough to get enough vitamins just that way. Pellets are all the nutrition they need in a pelleted form. And our foraging diets are the same as pellets, but the ingredients are left whole, and all of the seeds already have the hulled removed. You should also offer leafy greens, chopped veggies and some fruit. And of course the egg. The egg should be cooked with the shell washed, crushed and cooked with it.
If the chick survives, then you need to remove the nest box as soon as it leaves the box the first time. Otherwise the parents will try to nest again right away. Since your hen really needs to be older, I would not give the nest box back for 8 months to a year. Use this time to convert the parents to a nutritionally balanced diet before letting them breed again. Then return the box and next time, she will most likely have a better hatch rate, and chick survival rate. A lot of people do not realize you shouldn’t pair young birds together, because it does make them breed too early. And some breeders do start them at a year old. But the serious breeders with the healthiest cockatiels never pair their birds until they are between 2-3 years old. At that age, both parents are fully developed both physically and mentally.
Thank you for asking Lafeber,
Brenda
