FINCHforum

Hi guys.

I am not going to let my pair bring up another clutch anytime soon but I want them to stay together. They have been together most of their life and go crazy if I seperate them. They keep on breeding and laying eggs and at the moment are trying to make one of their food boxes into a nest.

I remember reading often about using fake eggs or old eggs to let the pair lie on. How has that worked out for you guys?
Do you just give them a nest to build and then put old eggs in the nest? But won't they just lay more eggs into the nest? And don't the birds get upset if you in the end remove the old/fake eggs all of a sudden?

Please share your thoughts

I would clean out the nest, give them a new nest and nesting materials, and then as she lays eggs, one a day, you take out the real egg and replace with a fake. When she is happy with the number of eggs in the clutch, she will then incubate the fake eggs. Eventually she will give up on the fake clutch and start with real eggs again, but at least it stops the egglaying cycle for a bit.

I've found that they sometimes don't get fooled if you switch out an entire clutch of eggs at one time. To tell the truth, my fake eggs look so fake, I'm surprised the birds are fooled at all!

Ha ha

Thank you for the reply, I guess I can do the same thing with some old eggs? Because I don't think that there is a store here that sells fake eggs.

Just to be warned, I had a pair that the hen would not stop laying eggs...no mater what I did. I finally had to separate them to stop her from laying.

I have another pair where they laid a clutch, which did not hatch, and then she laid a 2nd clutch. So you might stop them for a little while, but when they decide the clutch isn't going to hatch, they might just start up again.

Remove anything that might trigger a mating behavior.
Nests, anything that looks like a nest, nesting material, etc.

Thank you for the warning.
They don't have anything normal stuff that would trigger them but are just very determinded right now, ripping up newspaper in the bottom, sitting in food boxes and so on.
I wish I had a cage with a seperater right now. If the other stuff won't slow them down I might put them in smaller cages and keep them side by side, maybe they won't get so crazy if they are still close.