Feeding green seeding grass heads to finches should be considered a must by serious finch breeders.  Dried, mature heads of millet sold at the pet store as a treat have no additional food value and are costly but do offer a form of environmental enrichment that is often lacking for cage and cabinet housed birds.  [...]

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Well Finchme has been off the air again for a while.  I hope some you guys made it to the BIRDS show at Tiendasita’s on March 8.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get there and since then I’ve had some my recent aviculturals successes brought to a halt.  On March 10, I checked in on my two [...]

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Fostering is the deliberate introduction of chicks or eggs into another birds nest.  There are many reasons for fostering and as was related in part one of this post, aviary birds occasionally and probably mistakenly do it to  when they attempt to take over an existing nest. Fostering is most commonly done to as a way to increase [...]

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It seems that in spite of my dislike of interspecific fostering that my birds have been doing it without without consulting me! Last year I purchased a pair of star finches which produced four consecutive clutches; they faithfully incubated and then let the babies starve to death within 1-2 days of hatching. I suspect that they [...]

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In my previous post I said that I didn’t have an aesthetic appreciation of bird-song but it’s not that I don’t appreciate what song does for our birds it’s just that I prefer the quieter ones. In this post I’ve pulled some recent news releases together which highlight some of the more interesting aspects of [...]

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I was very privileged to visit Northern Australia during this past July. This beautiful and vast region, particularly the Kimberley of Western Australia is home to 11 species of finch commonly held in aviaries in Australia and overseas.  Here in the Philippines the most commonly held finches: zebras, Gouldians, owls, shaft-tailed, mask and stars all [...]

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Finchme looks like it could do with a new article so I’m posting a quick one.  I’ve just come back from 7 weeks in Australia, during which I visited the Kimberly region of Western Australia.   This region is the home of most of the Philippines favourite finches.  I’ve got some nice shots of wild owls, gouldians, [...]

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 My interest in this subject is fairly new as I thought I was doing the right thing with my birds - they were breeding and I’d overcome the air-sac mite problem that that plagued the female.  The juveniles, who shared the aviary with the adults, had almost completed colouring up but it was the parents [...]

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Now here’s a better video with both parents feeding their fledglings outside of the nest. The babies are now three-four weeks old, and you can still see the markings on their mouth.

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The next time I go headhunting(I mean, birdhunting) for my next zebra finch pair, I’ll make sure to bring a sound recorder.  I have yet to see a large zebra finch aviary in the country, but that’s where I want to end up. A recorder and a nice big aviary.  Why? See my explanation in this article.

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