Peculiar (or not) social order (pecking) :)

[thenootz]

Well,the long story short :
I have housed together 8 birds into an indoor aviary with following dimensions 4d x 5w x 6h ft.
Because I intend this to be a breeding space, I think I should stick to 4 pairs only (hope this is not too much already), 2 owls, 2 fires, 2 gold breasts and 2 BCCBs.
Few days ago I remind I've read that the fires are best to be kept together with CBs and OBs due to their quiet and soft nature and that should not be any problem even in a breeding enclosure big enough.
So, as I've say, I've putted the birds togheter with 10 different types of nests in the enclosure and waited for few days for them to settle down and see what happens.
What actually is going on is that they seems to have established a strange (at least for me) pecking order, meaning that the male fire finch immediately seemed to be the bully one trying to chase everyone, especially CB pair inside the hole aviary !
Male fire has prepared already 2 maybe 3 nests stuffing all kind of nesting material in them ( hay ,feathers, coconut fibers...) but the female doesn't seem interested yet.
Only owls seems don't care about bully and already layed some eggs and started to sit on them doing shifts.
So the pecking order seems like this: Fires chase CB and OB, CB chase owls and owls chase fires wich I find to be peculiar and I wanna know if someone else has experienced something like this...
I hope only that I've been able to explain and that is not too complicated for you to get the picture Sorry for my english

[Sally]

All these birds are on the passive list, so you would think they would get along, but there can always be exceptions. I've had Fires with CBs, and Fires with GBs, all without problem. A friend put Fires and GBs together, and the Fires killed one of his GBs. So you can have a bully passive finch, and then you can have a sweetheart that is on the aggressive list--they are individuals.

I'd keep a close eye on things, but keep in mind that any time you set up a new community of finches, they have to work out their pecking order, even if they are all passive species. This is a new setup for them, so they will have to work it out, and there are bound to be some squabbles. Just make sure the squabbles don't escalate to serious fighting.

[Zebrafincher]

Even if you have a look at the lists, and match up birds according to 'passiveness' and 'aggressiveness', you can have exceptions! My most aggressive little finch has been a flightless, little star finch Fruit, who attacked all birds in his cage, even my large canary!