Chapter 8 – Breeding Basics
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Before you decide to put your pair of budgies together, carefully consider why you want to breed them. If you want to make money, you will surely be disappointed. The large pet store chains and even many local pet stores buy their birds from a well-organized network of breeders, wholesalers, and distributors who all closely control their overhead. They can sell a bird to a pet store for less than you spend to feed the parents during the nesting and weaning periods. You can't compete unless you have a stunning color variety, and even the most beautiful varieties sell for only a small premium over normal colors.
You must also consider the business aspects of selling your budgies. Businesses involving animals are subject to all types of legal requirements, from city and state business permits to inspection by state agricultural officials and health authorities. You will have to pay taxes and may have to pay some business-ownership fees. In some areas, you may not be allowed to breed birds for sale at all, so you will need to check zoning ordinances before you begin.
You may decide that you just want to breed a pair or two as a hobby, but have you thought about what you will do with perhaps eight to twelve young budgies after two breedings?
Do you have the space to set up three or four very large cages to keep them as pets? Do you have enough friends and relatives interested in birds to adopt them? It's important that you don't bring new budgies into the world unless you are sure you can successfully place them in loving homes.
Before you decide to breed your budgies, think carefully about the commitment involved, and make sure you have homes for all of the off spring the breeding will produce.
It's easy to tell the sex of a mature pair of normal green budgies. Both have solid yellow heads, but the female has a pale cere, whereas the larger male has a telltale blue cere.
Sex Differentiation
If you have decided to breed a pair of budgies, the first step is to be sure you know the ages and sexes of the birds you plan to breed. Female budgies mature when only sixteen weeks out of the nest, and males mature at eighteen weeks (about five to six months old); they could breed at this point. You may have better success, however, if you give the young birds a chance to develop some muscle, store some fat, and strengthen their bones before breeding them. The first breeding should begin when the pair is roughly ten to twelve months old, no younger.
Visually determining the sex of a budgie is not as big a mystery as it is in so many other parrots. By the time they are five months old and have molted into their adult plumage, male budgies are easily recognized by their blue ceres. The blue can be pale or dark, depending to some extent on the individual and his hormonal levels, but it is always blue. Adult females have duller ceres that vary from tan (similar to that of an immature budgie) to bright pinkish. In older birds of both sexes, the ceres usually become wrinkled and rough in appearance, whereas they are smooth and shiny in younger adults.
Because budgies mature at such a young age and have such obvious differences in coloration, few people will pay for DNA sexing of immature budgies; instead, they wait until the birds molt into maturity. However, note that some color varieties don't display age differences in head coloration and may display only minor differences in cere color in adults. If you must be sure about the sex, ask your veterinarian to take a blood or feather sample, which can then be sent to a lab for DNA testing.
Selecting Parents
Responsible breeders won't breed related budgies, so purchase your birds from two breeders or pet stores that obtain their birds from different sources. Breeding closely related parents can concentrate defects (poor feathering, deformities, and poor personalities) in a line and reduce the reproductive success of the parents.
The adults should be healthy and should be free of parasite infestations, which means a visit to the veterinarian for checkups and fecal samples. The female should be eating well and taking a calcium supplement to ensure that she has sufficient fat and calcium reserves for laying. Select two birds who have good personalities. If either bird is trained to talk, expect that ability to be lost during and after breeding (especially for the female), and the bird may have to be retrained. The birds should be compatible, although they may have to be housed in adjacent cages for a week or two to get used to each other before putting them together. Almost as soon as they are placed in the same cage, the male will start courting the female, and eggs could follow in a few days.
Courtship and Mating
When introduced to each other, the female initially often ignores the male, who tries to court her. He sits next to her on the perch and whistles. He grooms her repeatedly and accepts grooming in return. As things become serious, he offers the hen presents of bits of regurgitated food and tries to feed her. Most budgie couples hit it off fairly well at the onset, and there seldom is any fighting, so the pair often begins to mate in a matter of just one or two days.
Most pairs mate repeatedly. Young budgies often are rather clumsy when mating, and males may actually lose their footing and fall off the perch. Fortunately, it takes the two only a few attempts to learn the best ways to hold their bodies.
A mated pair of budgies will remain faithful for life if allowed to stay together. If the two birds are separated after several clutches to allow the hen to regain her strength, the two will recognize each other as soon as they again share a cage. The bond is easily broken, however, and breeders have few problems removing one bird of a pair and replacing the bird with a new male or female.
Egg Binding
Egg binding can be a serious and even deadly problem for the hen. Egg laying is very stressful to females, and it is quite common for the hen to produce defective eggs that don't have shells or have thin shells that are crushed while waiting in the oviduct to be laid. In such cases, the broken or poorly formed egg remains in the bird, who becomes obviously distressed, huddling in a corner with ruffled feathers and often not drinking. Breeders sometimes try to solve this egg-binding problem by adding a few drops of mineral oil into the vent, but this seldom works. Take an egg-bound female to the veterinarian immediately, or you may lose her. The veterinarian probably will give her an injection of calcium compounds and hormones to help the egg pass. And if the egg breaks inside her, the veterinarian may have to perform minor surgery to remove bits of egg before they infect the oviduct.
The female will lay her eggs in the nest box attached to the side of the cage. There she will stay for a few weeks while she incubates the clutch, and the male will feed her through an opening in the cage.
Nesting
A hen may lay her first egg within a day or two of mating, followed by other eggs a day or two apart. Typical clutches are three to five white eggs. She usually starts to incubate the first egg before she lays the second, so there may be more than a week's difference in the hatching times of the young in a nest. The first egg hatches after eighteen days of incubation, whereas the fifth egg may hatch ten days later, assuming the eggs are laid at two-day intervals. This means that the first young to hatch are well developed before the last eggs even hatch. Fortunately, nature takes care of this problem by changing the feeding behavior of the older young; they need less food at night as they get older, and so more food goes to the younger birds. Typically, budgies will raise all the hatchlings in a nest if given sufficient food.
As is typical of parrots, only the hen incubates the eggs (cockatiels are the exception: both parents brood and feed the chicks). She spends most of the day and night in the box, where she is fed by the male perched outside the opening. When she leaves the nest a few times a day to defecate, she passes large, soft blobs of feces compared with the usual small droppings. She also rolls the eggs several times a day. Incubating hens do not appreciate being disturbed on the nest, so just leave her alone. As the eggs begin to hatch after eighteen days, you may seldom see the hen while she keeps the nest warm and feeds the young.
After sixteen to seventeen days of incubation, the embryo in the egg is fully developed and begins to move about in the egg, placing his beak into the air pocket at one end of the egg. His lungs begin to function as his yolk sac is emptied and dries out, and he learns to breathe air that enters the egg through the porous shell. He makes circular motions with his head to help a tiny, sharp projection on the beak (the egg tooth) score a hole through the shell; that hole eventually allows the chick to first stick out his head and then completely break free of the egg. The mother budgie may help a chick leave the egg by chipping at the scored spot and rotating the egg to help the chick position himself. Hens hear the faint calls of the chicks while they are still in the eggs, so they know when the young are about to hatch.
Nest Box
Buy the largest cage you can afford for a breeding budgie pair, preferably more than twenty-four inches in length. On one side of this cage, add a nest box purchased from a pet store--there is no reason to make your own, as commercial nest boxes, regardless of material, are inexpensive and reliable. Because the box will probably be thrown away after one breeding (they become extremely dirty, as you might expect), don't worry about investing in a durable box. Nest boxes for budgies generally are about ten inches long and six to eight inches high and have a perch under the opening.
The Nestlings
Baby budgies would certainly never win a beauty contest. They are hatched completely naked, with closed eyes and disproportionately large, blunt beaks. When fed by the mother, their crops become gigantic inflated food reserves, almost equal to the rest of their bodies in size. The chicks grow quickly, however, and by the time they are eleven days old, they are covered with down, and the first large feathers of their wings and tails are in place. The mother feeds them every one to two hours, day and night, for the first eight days; after that, she feeds them only during the day.
By the time the nestlings are four to five weeks old, they have full coats of feathers, and their muscles are developed enough to allow them to walk around the nest and even fly a bit. At this time, they leave the nest box but remain near it, and they are still fed by the parents for another week. During this period, they are usually called fledglings (emphasizing that they are learning to fly) or weanlings (indicating that their parents are weaning them to whole, unregurgitated seeds and a pelleted diet).
Hand-Raising Budgies
Budgie parents are usually allowed to raise their own young. The incubation period is short enough and the parents are diligent enough that there are seldom any problems, and so breeders just let the birds do the work. However, it is possible to remove the eggs from a nest and raise them yourself, although this is a complicated and time-consuming process.
ARTIFICIAL INCUBATION
You will need an incubator that maintains a constant temperature of approximately one hundred degrees Fahrenheit for the entire eighteen days of incubation. It should also be able to maintain a relative humidity of about 25 percent, rising to 50 percent just before the eggs start to hatch. Unless you can afford one of the most expensive types of incubators, you will have to turn the eggs at least six and as much as twelve times a day (ask an experienced breeder for advice) to prevent the developing embryo from sticking to the shell and becoming deformed or dying.
To hand-raise young from the beginning, you will need an incubator to maintain the eggs at a constant, very warm temperature.
Candling
Before wasting your efforts incubating infertile eggs, you can examine them with a simple device known as a candler. A candler is a pinpoint source of strong light that illuminates the inside of the egg from the back while you look at the front. In a fertile egg, blood vessels develop within three days after incubation starts, and they cover more and more of the inside of the shell over time. These blood vessels become visible when the light passes through the egg. Infertile eggs remain clear (nothing develops) and never display the growing tissue.
Candling devices can be made at home, but the light can be too hot and could damage the embryo--even with just a few seconds of use each day. Commercial devices are relatively inexpensive, and the best commercial candlers have bright but cool lights.
As a rule, breeders date the top of each egg with a soft wax pencil to indicate when it was placed in the incubator. This not only tells you how long the egg has been incubating but also gives you a reference point for turning it regularly. If necessary, you can remove eggs from the nest as they are laid and keep them in a moderately warm (sixty degrees Fahrenheit) cupboard for a few days until you are ready to place several in an incubator at the same time. The eggs will not develop at the lower temperature, but they will remain alive. Then you will have a brooder with several hatchlings of the same age, regardless of when the eggs were actually laid.
When the chicks emerge from their eggs, place them in a brooder that holds a temperature of about one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Next, you have to feed the chicks, which is truly the most difficult part of hand-raising birds.
HAND-FEEDING BASICS
Because there are too many details regarding hand-feeding to cover in a book this size, consider the information that follows to be a starting point. You will want to learn more from an experienced budgie breeder, your veterinarian, and a few good books on the subject. You'll find that there are many different opinions out there, so look for a breeder or veterinarian mentor you can trust and can count on if problems arise.
Unlike baby cockatiels, who have to be fed only during the day, baby budgies need food every two hours all through the day and night at first. This won't leave you much time for sleep. Special hand-feeding foods for nestlings are available at pet stores that cater to birds and through Internet and mail-order suppliers. There are many homemade formulations that work (often based on boiled egg mashes with supplements), but they can be complicated. It is best to use commercial mixes.
Many hand-fed babies are killed by improper feeding. The food must be fed at a consistently warm temperature, or the baby will not prosper. Commercial hand-feeding formulas may recommend temperature ranges specific to their brand and to the budgie's age. (Check the packaging for detailed instructions.) Food that is colder than recommended will not be digested and will be regurgitated. Warmer food will burn the delicate lining of the baby's crop, resulting in a painful death. This means that you must use an accurate thermometer to measure food temperature.
Budgies Mature Quickly
Baby budgies have their first full molt when they are about four months out of the nest (five to six months after hatching). This is when they assume the adult coloration and have the ability to breed. This is extremely rapid development for a parrot--an adaptation to raise as many broods as possible in an environment where food and water are unpredictable.
Because you have become the main provider of his food and he is used to your handling, the baby will bond strongly with you as a parent, and he will make a wonderful pet.
Once your pair has finished raising the young, interact with the parents individually again. They will quickly remember their previous training and will once again be bonded to you.
When the baby is about eight days old, you can start reducing (and then cutting out) the nightly feedings and start spacing the daytime feedings a bit more widely apart. By the time the baby budgie is eleven days old, he can maintain his own body temperature better, and you can gradually start reducing the heat in the brooder; it should be roughly ninety degrees Fahrenheit by the time the bird is fully feathered.
If you try to raise your own baby budgies, expect many sleepless nights and many losses as well; it is probably best to just let the parents do it. You can cheat a bit, however, by removing a baby from the nest when he is three to four weeks old and almost fully developed, feeding him just during the day on a mix of fine pulp and some adult food. (For a full program, consult your veterinarian or a breeder experienced in hand-feeding.)
After Breeding
Your pet budgies should not be allowed to breed more than once or twice, or you risk losing part of their friendly pet personalities to more natural budgie mentalities. Place the birds into their own cages, and begin to play with them on a regular basis again. Offer the usual treats and perhaps either try to teach them to speak or reinforce old tricks they may have forgotten. If you leave the pair together, the hen will continue laying clutch after clutch and could eventually die from low calcium levels, and simple exhaustion.
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