Baby Bourke

[patdbunny]

A few minutes old.

hatch day 2 compressed.jpg (8.57 KiB) Viewed 4263 times

hatch day compressed.jpg (15.11 KiB) Viewed 4263 times

[kaylayuh]

This is probably really dumb, but what is the white stuff on it?

[zazanomore]

So ugly! I want one

[patdbunny]

They are NOT ugly!! They're super cute as far as ugly aliens go.

The white stuff's the down. The baby hasn't dried off yet. It'll get poofy when it's all dry.

[GlassOnion]

Sorry Pat, I don't mean to be mean or rude to you in any way... I just remember reading from one of EB Cravens' articles that it is psychologically detrimental to the baby to expose it to bright light until it becomes of age to come out of the nest box by itself, because in the wild chicks are never under bright light during their early days. But then he deals with a lot of controversial breeding topics.

Do you find that there is no difference in birds whether they're kept in darkness or not?

[patdbunny]

No rudeness taken. I usually keep my babies in the dark until at least when they open their eyes. There's light for all of 5 minutes while I took today's pics. My thinking is it's like premie babies - keep their eyes covered for the most part, but 5-10 minutes every so often to look them over's not going to hurt them and it's necessary in order to catch any problems early on. I'm feeding this baby from hatch so I have to have light during feeding in order to see what I'm doing.

I don't prefer to incubate my eggs either and only do it as a last resort. Like this little bourke - mom hasn't figured out she needs to incubate them the entire 18 days. She abandons the eggs about 5-10 days into incubation and the eggs die. So, it was either let all the eggs die again or incubate and hope something lived. This was a clutch of 5 eggs. 4 died before I popped them into the incubator, this one lived.

I understand (or at least try to understand) the controversies involved. It takes a lot of thinking, learning, weighing the pros and cons and coming to a decision that "feels" right to me. Incubating abandoned eggs and feeding from day one if necessary "feels" right to me, rather than to let them die. Some people disagree and will let the eggs die.

These tiny bourkes are a hard call. If something goes wrong within the first 3-5 days handfeeding, they're so small that they probably won't live through any corrective procedures. Again, it just "feels" right to me to try though.

Psychologically, again this is controversial, I'm raising pets so I want to raise my babies knowing how to behave in a household of humans so they're less likely to lose their homes and get bounced around. That's not necessarily natural for them as birds. So, the psychological damage issue I have to inquire as to what is the desired end result? A pet in a household of humans, a future breeder, a pretty aviary bird, a bird for future release into the wild, or what?

[Vicki5280]

OK, it's my turn to be dumb A Bourke is a little parakeet, similar to a Budgie size, right? And I have no frame of reference for the size of the baby in the picture... I'm looking at the egg and picturing a chicken's egg, but I know that Budgie's eggs are super teeny compared to a chicken's, so is the baby (roughly) the size of a dime? A quarter? Or am I completely on the wrong track?!! (Entirely possible!) I love pictures like this! Thanks for sharing the pictures, and your knowledge!!

[patdbunny]

You're not dumb. I should have put something next to it for reference. I was just too excited, grabbed the camera and started snapping.

It's about dime size, bumble bee size. It's crop currently holds about half of one of those small baby frozen peas.

I just figured I'd post these pics for you guys. I thought y'all might like to see what some of your babies look like when they're still aliens.

[kaylayuh]

I didn't know they were born with down! I thought they were all born naked and got their feathers later. You learn something new every day.

I'm naturally blonde, so I'll chalk this up to one of those dumb blonde moments.

[GlassOnion]

Half a pea in their crop?!?!! My goodness those aliens are so puny...