After a fair bit of prompting I’ve decided to share a bit about my history with and interest in birds particularly finches. I grew up and lived all my life in Australia until I moved here in 2004 as my wife was seconded to a position in Laguna and I went on leave without pay. The avicultural world here was largely invisible to me until mid 2007 when my wife signed another 3 year contract and I had to resign from my job in Australia. Now free of my belief that I was only here temporarily I began what I started to do just before I moved here – to build an aviary and recapture the interest of my youth. As a kid in Tamworth I was always the one catching snakes, frogs, insects and growing plants and so keeping native birds came naturally. My father built my first aviary when I was 8 and on my insistence it had three sections one for finches one for parrots and one for pigeons. Finches proved to be of much more interest and were a little more affordable than the parrots and my brother took over the pigeons. Back in the 1970s the conservation ethic wasn’t so big and I used to even catch the more common ones locally on the nest (zebra, double bar [owl outside of Australia], red browed and diamond firetail). I was a naughty boy but as these birds were not rare or endangered it really wasn’t a problem and nor was my technique particularly productive. Of the finches I kept at that time I managed to breed zebras, double bars, stars and canaries but I kept others, chestnut-breasted and Pictorella manikins, printed firetails (my favourite), masked, orange breasted and St Helena waxbills and Melba finches. My main problem breeding in that aviary was that it was too crowded and that I couldn’t afford the critical mass needed for some species to be stimulated to breed or in the case of manikins they aren’t sexually dimorphic.
 

I had a lot expertise to guide me in my avicultural interests. In Sydney I had a Dutch uncle who had a bird-room full of canaries and a couple of small aviaries where he kept zebras, Gouldians and budgies. He proved to be an inspiration to another uncle who built a beautiful aviary in his back yard but neither of them could compare to another of my mothers brothers who lived in Wagga Wagga. This uncle was a serious aviculturist with a large collection of breeding aviaries dedicated to each species or mutation. His rule was if a bird didn’t pay for itself then get rid of it. I thought it was a little harsh for something that is so beautiful as a bird to be reduced to an economic unit but the philosophy allowed him to keep more species than I’ve ever had so perhaps he was right. If I needed to know what food, what nesting material, what breed stimulus or housing requirements were needed he was the one to ask. Going away to university, establishing a career, moving to Melbourne for a post graduate degree, meeting my wife and moving to Leeton near Wagga Wagga brought me back in contact with my avicultural uncle and I was just starting to build an aviary when the family moved here and we sold our house and my avicultural dream was lost again until this year. So now I’ve started to build and this time I’m going to try my uncle Neville’s model even if I don’t make it as profitable as he did. As a foreigner I’m not sure that I’m entitled to do that anyway. As you may have seen from my first posting I did my research first on the legalities of bird ownership. In coming posts I hope to tell of my aviary construction, buying birds and hopefully breeding success. Just talking to the few breeders here there are differences in husbandry between Australian and Philippine so I’m hoping for a fruitful exchange.