FINCHforum

On how to be a parent.



This hen is driving me to madness - she is clueless, absolutely clueless, on how to build a nest.

Nevermind that her aviary home has ten different types of baskets both open and covered, out in the open and hidden in foliage, at every level from ground to ceiling. No, Kari knows better. She knows that the top of the ceiling fan's blades is a much safer place to start a family, even as every single strip of paper she sets there blows away, and the eggs laid as she crouches there at night roll to the floor in an instant.

Oh! Well then surely the top of the Java's nestbox works! Just as smooth, flat, no support! And the same thing happens.

Another week passes. She moves to a hanging flower basket, but builds no nest at all now. She lays three eggs, and over three days, loses each one over the side. She lays a fourth the next day and, without enough eggs to interest her now, eats it and moves on.

She suddenly has an epiphany! The water dish! It's 16 inches wide and over an inch deep, perfect for a nest! She piles papers into it to form a mount almost taller than the water level and sits in it, in the water!!! When the big human who knows nothing on a good nest removes this soggy heap of gross papers, she frantically runs about the ground, stuffing paper in corners on the floor, in the windowsill, in her smaller water dishes.

Seriously, this season Kari has lost at least 12 eggs because she absolutely will not accept a proper nest - the most she'll do is take soft things from them to stick around the room in places where a nest can never be made. What the heck is wrong with this bird? She literally nested in a pool of water and laid in it. :/

LOL - I have a lovebird like this! ...but then her eggs are not fertile and I do not want babies...sorry, because this sounds like a breeding bird. But it does make a cute story.

Sheather - Sorry to hear about Kari's poor nest making. I have had canaries for many years & this is the first year I have a pair to breed so I am no expert. Hopefully more "canary folks" will have ideas.

Is she a young bird? Has she bred before? Just wondering if this is all new to her.

Mary

She's two-to-three years old, she's never been bred that I know of.

She doesn't have to breed, but the fact that she is trying so hard and failing so miserably constantly is kind of irking...

Sheather

Oh Dylan, don't you get it, she's there for comic relief. Either that, or did you drop her on her head on the way home (?)

Who knows what goes on through their heads? I have one, who sits in an empty vine ball nest. At one point she laid eggs, then they disappeared. Still she sits in the nest. I have given her nesting material, even put stuff in the nest for her. It disappears , don't know what she does with it. I have seen Luciano and her mating, and still nothing, yet still she sits...

~Elana~

Sheather
Dylan, I can understand your frustration. When I bought my canaries (2 pairs), the breeder told me canaries are easy to breed. Unfortunately, that hasn't been my experience. My first pair (Ra & Isis) couldn't stand each other and fought all the time when I put them together. I eventually had to separate them, keeping Ra separately in his own cage and Isis in the mixed aviary. Ra seems happier on his own, always singing. Isis is content in the aviary and has no interest in breeding.

My second pair loves to mate, but are pretty lousy parents. The red-factor female laid 4 eggs in her first clutch. After the eggs hatched, they abandoned their babies and the poor chicks didn't survive. She then laid another clutch of 4 eggs, then ate them, even though I placed plenty of egg food and crushed egg shell in the aviary. She laid 2 eggs in her third clutch and promptly ate those too.

Now, she's been sitting in her favorite nest like she's incubating eggs, but there's no egg under her. Her behavior is very confusing. I have no idea what to make of her.

I've found canary breeding to be baffling and not at all easy as other breeders claimed.

My crested green hen Steve was SUCH a good mother, she knew right what to do from the start and gave us a lovely descendant before she passed.

But this girl, she is just ridiculous.

I too am sorry she is so frustrating. She is such a cutie. But goodness I got a good chuckle picturing her sitting in her water dish!

Canaries are usually easy to breed. My father breeds them, about 4 to 10 pairs a season, and he rarely gets trouble. Occasionally one won't feed well, but in general they are easy. Canaries are also very sensitive to light and they do much better with " seasons". I can tell how many hours of light they are getting by their behavior. At 11 hours they were carrying paper, at 11.5 hrs they were building a nest and now at 11.75 hrs they are laying eggs.

Mine are very picky with the nests and will put nesting material in food dishes and water dishes if I don't give them the right shaped nest, they won't accept it. I always end up putting the nest close to where they are building.

I've decided to take away her freedom for the moment in a large flight with only a plastic commercial canary nest available to her; she took to it within a few days, after she accepted that the cage door wasn't opening any time soon.

I've started supplementing her calcium intake with a powdered supplement (+D3) in her daily eggfood in addition to cuttlebone and eggshell, for her last clutch had weak shells since she hasn't stopped laying every 14 days since just after Christmas. I simply don't have a suitable place in the house to move her where day length can be artificially shortened, so she is going to keep laying no matter what until summer, so the best I can do is supplement the heck out of her and try to get her to sit on a clutch; if she ends up losing her next one I have picked up some plastic eggs and will put her on those so she can try to recuperate some energy for a while - though these false eggs did not arrive as pictured and, while blue and relatively round, neither feel nor look like actual canary eggs (more like society eggs)... so I don't know if she'll like them...

She's very very picky about when the male can come around. She only lets him mate one time before she lays each clutch, and after that she gets very snippity with him. She does let him feed her once she's sitting, though - the few times she's gotten that far at least.

Sheather

Hi Dylan.

If you want to make the day shorter for her, throw a sheet over the cage, preferably a dark sheet at a certain time every evening. That just might get her out of this crazy cycle that she'd got herself into and back into a more normal schedule.

Regarding the fake eggs. It's apparently difficult to find good fake Canary eggs. My Canary breeder, used to get his Mother in Italy to send him some, because couldn't find good ones here in Canada.

Good luck with your little girl.

~Elana~

These are the kind I use, the canaries don't seem to notice even though they are really blue
http://glamgouldians.com/product-finch-canary-eggs.php
(I don't buy them from here, I get them from bird fairs)

Aw, poor Kari.

In the photos in your most recent post, I love the second one with the orange guy peering at her inside the cage! So cute! (I don't know that guy! Who is he???)

I can definitely relate.
I went through SO MANY chicks before my parentally-challenged zebras got the hang of parenting. I don't even want to fathom how many chicks they let die because they didn't understand that you need to feed them. Too many.

One pair eventually figured it out.
I gave up on the other pair.

But if there's a bright side, it's that she's messing it up *before* the babies hatch.
Less suffering involved that way at least.

I hope she figures it out.
The nest in the water bowl is definitely a testament to her cluelessness!
Hopefully the confinement will help her figure it out, with only a nest available! (That's the good thing about confining her; she won't have any choice but to notice the proper nest!)
I wonder if the freedom is just too much for her? Perhaps too much disturbance and too many options for nesting? Maybe the limited options are just what she needs!

Poor Kari.
She'll get it!
I believe in you, Kari!!!

MiaCarter that's Sierra, the orange canary hen I bought last month. I also bought Mysty, a pure white one. Both seem to be too young to come into breeding condition this year.