Letter 3: Countless eggs!
Hello, my name is Vanessa.
About 4 months ago I recieved a male and a female finch. They are so adorable ... even though they wake me up at 6 in the morning. About a month and a half after I got them I found four eggs in the nest. I was so happy when one hatched and then another. It was a shame that both died as well as the other two eggs. I figured it was just a fluke and it really would happen that all of the eggs would die the next time. Little did I know, the next time was around 3 to 4 weeks later. This time two hatched out of the four laid and one lived. The one is now around a month old and is doing well. I looked in the nest yesterday as I do to check on the baby and I found another batch of eggs. It is ok for my birds to keep laying eggs? If not what do I do? I feel like it is a birdy sex factory ....!
Thanks for your help! Thanks again,
Vanessa
Hello Vanessa ...?,
I don't think it was a fluke, I think it was just nature. If you have read my book or the pages of my website (e.g. "Rescue the new born") you know two things:
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| 5 plastic eggs: artificial Zebra Finch clutch |
- Overly young pairs often have problems producing the usual number of eggs and raising their young properly, i. e. their inborn natural behaviour has not yet matured fully – they simply do not know what to do with what suddenly crawls out of the eggs. The second attempt at producing offspring only a few weeks later usually proves successful.
- A cage or aviary can indeed look like a sex factory because there Zebra Finches find those ideal conditions for breeding the whole year round which they only find two, three or four times a year in the arid and harsh Australian outback – which doesn't mean they wouldn't swap their cage for a large bird room or outdoor aviary or total freedom in Australia if they had the choice; birds like to fly, you know, that's their natural way of moving.
Laying eggs too often can indeed harm a female Zebra Finch's health. To prevent too many eggs, do not take away the eggs or nest or nesting material; just replace the birds' eggs by a set of artificial (ceramic or plastic) eggs of the same size and colour (white) from a good pet shop as soon as the clutch is complete (= 5 eggs). Sitting on these eggs and brooding is less energy-consuming than producing eggs and building new nests.
Yours,
Hans-Jürgen Martin
