New start - breeding season begins!

As weather is finally turning cooler - as in low 90s F instead of over 100 F, I have started to set up gouldian pairs, and the scarlet chested grasskeets are also demanding nest boxes.  They show their desire by displacing all the seeds from their cups, looking for appropriate nesting sites.  The shaft tails looks to be ready as well, but as I do not have enough breeding cages for everyone, they will have to wait their turn as I am concentrating on gouldians first.  My gouldian pet projects for this season will include trying to breed more redline individuals as well as my continuing effort to successfully breed yellow, blue, and silver mutations.  My pink bourkes are too young to worry about nesting yet.  Since my poor yellow turquoisine hen died, my 2 new yellow turq hens are both too young to breed yet.  Their older mates will have to be patient for one more year, I'm afraid.  

There was a surprising hen in my society cage - I thought I had removed all the hens in an attempt to decrease the amount of society breeding since I keep them mainly for fostering purposes.  She has produced 3 babies recently - unfortuantely, I still don't know who she is :)  It can be really difficult to tell gender in societies especially when there is a small troupe of them.  The zebras are behaving as they are reputed to be - crazy good breeders.  I was a bit late in taking away their nest box since the latest babies are still being weaned, and now there are 5 more eggs in the box.  I really will have to be more vigilant next time around.

One pair of linnies laid 2 eggs which they did not sit on, so these 2 are in the incubator I mentioned buying previously.  There should be about 2 more weeks of incubation before we'll have to see if the babies will hatch out successfully.  If the incubator does it's work, then the real work will begin in 2 weeks - handfeeding from the start can be very rewarding, but very tiring as well since new chicks will need food at least every 1-2 hours.  I would have preferred chicks to be at least 1-2 weeks old before having to handfeed, both for ability to space out feedings more, but more importantly, it is also much easier in terms of the babies survival if they get some immunity from their parents.  I do have a new handfeeding formula that has a lot of probiotics to be mixed with my old formula; hopefully this will help.

As for the waxbills, I'll be waiting a bit longer.  Some of them are still molting and no one seems particularly eager to breed yet, which is good, since I will have to rotate the usage of the breeding cages somewhat this year.