Some great points, Colt. When I first started working with the Strawberries, and I had such a hard time finding any other breeders, I only swapped with a few breeders, plus I had extra males, so I sold males to those who had lonely females, in hopes of getting babies out of those hens before they aged out. Unfortunately, most of them were already too old.Colt wrote: And then you have great breeders like Scott Golden who work with a species and sell birds and within a year is unable to track down any of the birds he sold because the buyers didn't breed them...
But I was criticized for not selling to everyone. Some felt I was being selfish, keeping them all to myself. I learned the hard way with BCCBs that you never sell your F1 or even F2 babies if you really want to improve the numbers. I sold those BCCB babies, and then the imports stopped, my pairs aged out, and I didn't have anything but old birds for a while.
There has been a lot of talk with NFSS about breeders needing to work with certain species to keep them from disappearing from U.S. aviculture. I sympathize with their feelings, yet they have to realize that it is impractical to think we can save every species. In order to work seriously to bring up numbers, you have to have an absolute minimum of 3 pairs of birds, but realistically, you need 10 to 12 pairs of birds. Start working with just 3 species, and you have 30-36 pairs of birds to house and care for. Hopefully, you have lots of babies too, but that also means more cages, food, work and time, not to mention the money.
How many of us have the space, the time, the money to maintain such breeding programs? If you could get 4 different breeders to work with 3 pairs each, you could spread out the work and the expense. The reality is that most of us are hobby breeders, working with multiple species, and we really don't accomplish enough. Someone could specialize only in Fire finches and need a whole bird building just for those. Then you have multiple twinspots, multiple CBs, multiple pytillias--the list goes on.
Europe is far ahead of us, but then finch keeping has always been more popular there than here--look some time at the size of their bird shows! Proximity makes a difference too, they are able to drive to other breeders, check out stock, do lots of swapping. We tend to be spread all over the country, dependent on shipping to swap bloodlines.
People begged and begged for Strawberries, yet when those big shipments came in, some of the brokers couldn't even sell all of them. People felt they were too expensive, but I doubt seriously they will ever get back to being the cheap birds they once were. It also depends on the part of the country. Waxbills simply don't sell well in our area. Ahmed has lovely domestic BCCBs and RB Fires, yet he has trouble selling them at the marts--people expect them to be priced like Societies, I guess. Though most of us realize that we don't make money in this hobby, we still don't want to give away these more expensive birds.
OK, I need to get off my soapbox!
Some of these species are doomed to disappear for no other reason than they are no longer being imported, or they are so difficult to breed that only zoos have any success with them, or they are so expensive that the average person simply can't afford them. There are still plenty of beautiful species that are within reason for the average hobbyist.
