General pondering about cages and zebra finches.

[Ameza]

Hi guys.

I have a few questions that would be awesome if you could give me some answers on.

I have only had one pair of zebras and I know many people keep many pairs together in one cage, of course in a big enough cage. So my question is, do pairs generally get well along with each other and do zebras pair for life? As an example would a male start flirting with the female of the other pair or just leave her alone?

And on that topic, would parents tolerate having a pair when one of the pair would be one of their own chicks?

And then about keeping the same sex of birds, does it matter if they are an odd number or even? I have heard they get better along in threes than in twos, any thruth in that?

If you can shed any light on my pondering please do

[Sally]

I don't have Zebras, but many of your questions apply to most species. Most finch species are not monogamous. Even if they have a mate, the males will flirt and breed with other females. They may grieve for a time when losing a mate, but they get over it pretty quickly when a new mate is introduced. With many species, the males see their male offspring as competition, and they will begin to squabble with them when the offspring reach sexual maturity. Two pairs still have a lot of competition. Three or more pairs (in a large enough cage) seem to get along better.

With same sex birds, or any combination actually, three is usually a bad number. What happens is that two will buddy up and often pick on the odd man out. I have kept same sex birds in both odd and even numbers (4 or 5) and had no problem then.

These are also generalizations. You always can have the odd individual that doesn't follow any of the rules!

[ac12]

I keep my adults in separate male and female cages. This is to prevent uncontrolled population growth. And so when I do mate them, I am mating the ones that I want to mate.

Once the chicks have weaned I remove the parents to the adult cages, and let the juvs color out until I can figure out male from female. And as soon as I identify a male, I separate him from his siblings/sisters. Same cage, just on the other side of a wire divider. Before I separated the boys from the girls, I saw one of the male juvs try to mate with his sister.

The last time I waited until they finished their molt to move them into the respective adult cages. The problem was, they had established their own pecking order and tried to keep that order in the adult cage. This created chaos with the top adult and the top juv fighting. The next time I will move them individually during the molt to try to prevent the juv pecking order from carrying over into the adult cage.

In same sex cages. The birds will pair up. If there is an odd bird out, it could then be picked on. One odd behavior that I have noticed is that the dominate bird if the pair will sometimes pluck his/her partner.

And the bigger the cage the better, to remove crowding as one cause of aggressive behavior. Or do like me and sell/give away some of the birds.

I also get rid of the aggressive birds, as I do not have the extra cages to separate and keep them. I noticed that an aggressive parent, seem to produce aggressive kids. At least in the few clutches that I had with aggressive hens. I do NOT want to have aggression being passed on from parent to kid.

[Ameza]

Thank you guys sheding some light on this! I don't really have a big enough room for a large cage and many pairs but I was just wondering you know, just in case haha.

I will be keeping two chicks of the same sex I am sure and that's why I was wondering. Good to clear up the two and threes through.

If I would actually go into breeding I think that keepign sexes in seperate cages is clever and then you can test different colours and birds that way.

[ac12]

If you have a mating pair w other birds, they could get aggressive to the other birds. I had a pair where the hen was VERY aggressive to her own fledglings. She had already laid another clutch of eggs, and wanted them OUT of the cage, so she could raise her next clutch.

[Ria]

Just be aware that it all depends on the individual birds. When I kept three pairs together, there was chaos, as the pairs I thought were established suddenly fell apart and there was a lot of fighting. Removing the most aggressive male seemed to work until the extra female then turned nasty. She got removed and placed with that male; they get along ok now. The remaining two pairs in my cage do all right with each other. Occaisional bickering and chasing, but mostly calm. Most people will tell you this is unusual (2 pairs getting along) but it works with these particular birds. And yes, parents will not hesitate to either fight with or mate with their own offspring.