Completed aviary

[dfcauley]

Thanks for the info Kenny. Much appreciated. At the moment I too have a colony set up. I'm running into a glitch though that if I keep some of my best bred hens, in a colony they will soon start favouring their fathers! I don't fancy a breeding setup full of cages as I prefer to let them have full run of an aviary.

I'll prob just have to make sure I keep either unrelated or sell off the parents each year.... but I do get too attached to good breeders.
Nice to see others set-ups though. It can give others ideas.

ahhh... I have the same problem.
I usually try to rehome all the hens and if I do keep on I watch it very closely that it doesn't hook up with a brother or father. Problem with that is...... they can pull a fast one on you. That is the down side of colony breeding.

[kenny66]

I get attached to all the birds, like you. I am not sure how this works in nature though as goulds also hang in colonies up north where I am. Their numbers are now very low-supposed to be less than 2000 in an area the size of France!!! Yet they still maintain genetic diversity. Now I know the chicks must disperse somehow when they are mature but they do tend to stay in the area they were bred before they go on the big migration following the seeding grasses across the top of Australia. This concentrates the breeding flocks even more and when you take into account the hen having definite preference for head colors, the available breeding stock must be really low. How then do they not interbreed with relatives.I dont know the answers but I do know that hens go for mature cocks and cocks go for mature hens in addition to favoring last years partners . So maybe it gets worked out by a combination of these factors. Any way all my chicks go into a medium sized holding aviary away from the parents. I then introduce some of these chicks back into the colony after the beginning of the next breeding season when everyone has paired up. I also introduce new bloodlines by swapping new season birds with my finchy mates. I do this by introducing the same number of new birds as I traded out.