who else to add?

[Nagdabit]

And I disagree with zebras being very pushy, all of mine are pretty passive. I think given the right circumstances zebra can go with just about anyone.

Gotta agree with that and say that I do grow tired of the Zebra bashing sometimes. Like any other finch, they do fine IF you work with their temperament rather than try to mold them into something they are not. Certainly no mater what you do you are going to have some problem birds, but I would think that would be the case with any species of finch. Out of all the Zebras we have right now (Around 50) we only have problems with 2. And both of those are getting better as we work at lessing their aggression.

We have one decent sized cage that has three breeding couples in it. Yes, I realize that goes against all recommendations, but they do just fine. The one hen (Ash) is relatively new to the cage, since we had to swap out our white hen (Lyric) that was constantly being plucked, but Miss Ash got acclimated to the mayhem with hardly any problems. Even though she has yet to raise a clutch of her own, she's helped feed babies from both of the other couples. And what I find really interesting is that when we had her in the all girl cage she was on the aggressive side, chasing the other hens around. She may have tried that when we first put her in this cage, but the other birds would have none of that behavior and quickly put her in her place. So in a sense she took on the established personality of the "new" cage.

Obviously since all we have are Zebras I can't speak for the behavior of other finches, but we really enjoy our guys and I wouldn't trade their colorful little personalities for anyone else. Hardly a day goes goes by that they don't give me a good chuckle. For instance, just last night I laughed my butt off as I watched them do a finch version of the limbo. Two adults had a hold of either end of a skeletonized millet spray, and as they were tugging back and forth, a juvie that was caught in between kept ducking underneath the moving stick. Come on, who else but Zebras are going to give you a show like that?

[James]

I have an HQ Double Flight that has a sliding wall in the middle. With this kind of cage if you are going to add birds you can put the wall in with all the older birds in one side then put the new birds in the other side. After afew weeks just pull the wall out and let them mix as they wish. This way the new birds establish their area and the Zebras theirs, while getting use to each other. With the Zebra pair, I wouldn't add more than 3 pairs of birds. The more birds, in an area, the more aggresive the zebras get.

James