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Avril and RobertAt the moment our household consists of myself and husband Robert, Bazo the cocker spaniel X who is 13 years old, Sasha the fluffy cat, Missy the grey pearl cockatiel who loves cuddles, 1 Black Moor and various other cockatiels in cages, some of whom talk.Our two elder children have long since flown the coop and now have chicks of their own but our younger daughter calls our place home at the moment, although she is planning to move in the near future and build her own nest. Our Aviaries consist mainly of Australian parrots including neophemas, a few budgies, finches and lovebirds. It all started about 5-6 years ago when the family asked "What can we get Dad for Xmas?" I thought about this for a while and remember him saying we should get some birds to compliment the garden and shade house so we made some enquiries and we surprised Rob with a 6'x6' aviary which was delivered a few days before Xmas. Early in the new year we went looking for birds, not really having any idea what to buy until I found two gorgeous yellow and grey cockatiels in the pet shop and just had to have them. (Later I learned that they were reverse pieds) We added a grey cock bird and a cinnamon hen (of course knowing nothing about breeding mutations) and a pair of budgies. The aviary was looking good until Rob came home with 6 lovebirds a friend had given him and a small shed was instantly turned into another aviary, to house the cockatiels.
I became interested in hand-rearing birds when I rescued 5 neglected young lovebird chicks and spoonfed them successfully. They went back into the aviary but I went from there to hand-rearing cockatiels as pets. They breed most of the year, have 3-4 chicks eatch clutch and I feel them soaked seed and greenfeed during the breeding season. I find the cockatiels are not very keen on fruit but do like sweet corn when I can get it. Rob and I really enjoy breeding the birds but I can honestly say that we have learnt so much since originally joining the ASSA Lovebird Branch and now the Adelaide Bird Club where other memebers are always keen to pass on their knowledge.
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Soon 4 out of the 6 lovebirds went into the nest and laid eggs. I didnt expect them all to hatch, as naturally I felt some of them would be infertile, but no such thing. They all hatched out, although the 2 cock birds only fed one hen each, this left one hen to feed her own chicks and the other was fed by the budgie cock birds which was so cute. However it soon became apparent that we could not house budgies with lovebirds so another aviary was purchased. As time went by we aquired a few more birds and of course the aviaries grew. Soon we had 5 small aviaries and Robert decided it was time to build some larger and more permanant breeding aviaries. Now we have 11 and he has recently installed automatic watering which is great.