upatsix.com - Your Source For Pet Bird Information

I personally would not give them any nestboxes. Asking for trouble, females fighting etc. Its hard to colony breed.

http://home.earthlink.net/~judyjudd/budfaq.html

This website was set up by someone who posted on the oldUpat6. Hope it helps some.

ndunn

How many generations do you have in your flight pen? How many of those are inbred? How many more generations are you going to inbreed? What is your expectation of the health of continued in breeding of your colony? You don’t have even pairs, this one REALLY good way to start bloody wars within your colony.


Below is a copy of a post I made on another chat board.

I always advise anyone who wants to be a breeder to read as much as they can on the subject. There is so much more than providing a nest box for the birds. One owns it to their birds to be a prepared for everything as possible since the depend 100% on their owners for proper care. The birds need to be old enough, they need to be healthy, the NEED to be well established on a healthy diet. 100% seed is NOT a healthy diet. If your birds are seed junkies, this is the perfect opportunity to be reading while training your birds what other food items might be. Remember chicks learn from their parents. If you have 1st generation seed junkies - when you teach them to eat other foods they will teach their chicks what other food are and break the "must have seed only" need.

I am disappointed in most books when it comes to breeding birds because they tend to be one sided. They seem to make it seem easy and one will always get chicks from every egg produced. They rarely ever mention the ugly side to breeding. Sometimes they do mention about egg
binding in hens. This is a life and death problem that a breeder must know what to look for and do if he/she wishes to save the hen. Make sure you have a good avian vet that you can take a hen in trouble in immediately for help in this area. An dog and cat vet will NOT be able to help you with avian medicine. This is a specialty area not taught in routine vet school studies.

Hens are quite aggressive and can kill. Hens choose which cock they will breed with or decide if they like the cock you provide if you are individually cage breeding. Just because a hen's cere changes colors, her ovaries swell up (the pudginess near her vent), the dilation of the cloaca and her siting in a nest box does not mean she will lay eggs. This occurs more in the English than the Americans - to the frustration of exhibition breeders. Budgies are opportunistic breeder regardless of what a few books on the market say. A fertile cock is more than obliging to any hen that is ready for a quick tryst.

Individual cage breeding results in the highest chick production because it is the most relaxed setting. You also know what each pair produces if you are wishing to breed for a certain color or mutation. If you are keeping pedigrees this is the ONLY way to know for sure who the parents are of the offspring. If you run into trouble with a hen or cock it is contained to just that one cage. This would be problems like chick pluckers, or egg eaters. Egg eaters can never be broken from this habit. Chick plucking is an abuse learned in the nest from the adults. Depending upon how heavy the plucking is it can damage the follicles to the point that the feathers don't regrow.

Colony breeding should not be undertaken by the fait of heart. Even though a breeder provides 4 or 5 MORE nest boxes than there are pairs this does not stop an aggressive hen in a hostel nest box take over. These take over can result in broken eggs, killed chick and even the death of the lesser hen(s). There will always be some kind of bickering and one should not be surprised in that some birds might loose toes. Because of the stress of this environment chick production is not always very high.

As I said earlier budgies don't pair bond like most parrots. If you are individually cage breeding you can change up partners each year. I have even had 1 cock that serviced 3 hens. I kept moving him to a different cage each day. He was a pretty tired boy after that breeding season.

When I break down a pair from breeding I put the hens in a hen flight and the cocks in a separate flight until everyone cycles out of breeding condition. I start to mix the flights - cocks and hens in
September to get the birds ready to start the new breeding season in October.

Hope this helps.

Kerry

Kerry and other post-ers have very good advice.Breeding boxes or potential areas that may encourage breeding can set up budgie wars. unfortunately this situation happened to me when I was away on vacation and under my Mother's watch. the females decided the newspaper (on bottom of cage) was nesting material. One female killed another one. it was terrible. I had put all the budgies on cage when I left for vacation to make things "easier' for my mother to attend to which unfortunately set up this rivalry. I now have lots of cages (no more nest box) so the birds have their own 'space' to avoid conflicts.
Yes, make sure the budgies have a varied diet. greens. Mine love cwashed collard greens. Cuttle bones.
I had 6 budgies not 17!