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My Birds Won't Come Out of Their Cage

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Re: My Birds Won't Come Out of Their Cage

Postby Trick or 'Tiel » Sun May 07, 2017 11:52 am

How do you give them a mate without allowing them to breed?
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Re: My Birds Won't Come Out of Their Cage

Postby ParrotsForLife » Sun May 07, 2017 12:02 pm

Trick or 'Tiel wrote:How do you give them a mate without allowing them to breed?

So your assuming they would wanna breed without having enough food supply to feed chicks and of course they would have to be on a poor sleeping schedule making them hormonal and lastly some wont breed without a nesting spot.
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Re: My Birds Won't Come Out of Their Cage

Postby stevesjk » Sun May 07, 2017 2:11 pm

With the birds being allowed to go through the motions which nature intended but with chicks never actually materialising would you not conclude that that may result in frustrations of another kind? Possibly just as frustrating as the single bird with just humans for company? Captive birds are frustrated and the only thing we can do is try to limit that frustration.
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Re: My Birds Won't Come Out of Their Cage

Postby ParrotsForLife » Sun May 07, 2017 3:54 pm

stevesjk wrote:With the birds being allowed to go through the motions which nature intended but with chicks never actually materialising would you not conclude that that may result in frustrations of another kind? Possibly just as frustrating as the single bird with just humans for company? Captive birds are frustrated and the only thing we can do is try to limit that frustration.

Not being able to mate can cause frustration in Parrots as I'm going through it now with Mango who is a single Plum headed parakeet but I'm getting a Female.Its terrible listening to him calling out all the time and no he doesn't want my company at all he needs another bird I guess he's a lot different than other species who would want human attention to some extent.
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Re: My Birds Won't Come Out of Their Cage

Postby liz » Mon May 08, 2017 6:15 am

Trick or 'Tiel wrote:How do you give them a mate without allowing them to breed?



They go through all the motions as they would when breeding season comes. If the eggs are fertile you can swop out fake eggs. Of course they will not hatch but you have allowed your bird the pleasure of going through the steps. I have some sitting on infertile eggs. Instead of being disappointed they seem to just give up on the ones that don't hatch and go back to being your babies.
Lolla (rip) laid a few eggs the year before she past. She knew they were not any good and just left them on the floor of the cage.
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Re: My Birds Won't Come Out of Their Cage

Postby ParrotsForLife » Mon May 08, 2017 7:47 am

I wouldn't be able to remove fertile eggs
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Re: My Birds Won't Come Out of Their Cage

Postby Pajarita » Mon May 08, 2017 9:42 am

Trick or 'Tiel wrote:How do you give them a mate without allowing them to breed?


Like Liz said, it's just matter of switching the good eggs for fake or infertile ones. When a bird is kept to a strict solar schedule and seasonal diet (meaning less protein during the resting season -aka winter), they are only hormonal for a period of time so it's not as if they would be laying all the time which would be terribly unhealthy for the bird and lots of work for us. They just go through the normal 'motions' for the same period of time they are supposed to, just like the wild birds would. Once the daylight hours reach a certain number (this is determined through evolution which fine-tunes their reproductive cycles so they only breed when it's the ideal time of the year - the point when the body recognizes the 'change' in season and reacts by starting or stopping the production of sexual hormones is called 'the point of photorefractoriness'), they start producing sexual hormones and this is when they start their 'courtship' - depending on the species, there are different behaviors. there could be a dance (like senegals do), there could be vocalizations (like budgies do), there could start making a nest (like cockatoos do), etc. When the level of hormonal production reaches a certain amount and their gonads (sexual organs) are now active and large enough to allow reproduction, they go into 'nesting' - the females approve and accept (or not) the nest and start working on it (with parrots, this is not a complicated affair as it is with passerines -like canaries, for example, which make incredible engineering masterpieces). Then the hen starts laying eggs (the size of the clutch -number of eggs- is genetically predetermined in all parrot species except for the budgies that are 'indeterminate layers' while all others are 'determinate' which means that, given the right conditions, the hen will always produce the same number of eggs in every clutch). In parrots and as far as I know, they don't lay every day (canaries do) but they all usually lay early in the morning so, if you check the nest in the am, when you are cleaning the cage, and you find a new egg, all you have to do is either render that same egg infertile (boiling it or freezing it will do it but, in my personal experience, addling doesn't always do the trick) OR switch it for a fake egg. And there you have it! The birds are happy and feel fulfilled because they are able to do what nature ordained they should, and we are happy because the birds are happy but we still don't get any babies!
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Re: My Birds Won't Come Out of Their Cage

Postby Pajarita » Mon May 08, 2017 10:03 am

stevesjk wrote:With the birds being allowed to go through the motions which nature intended but with chicks never actually materialising would you not conclude that that may result in frustrations of another kind? Possibly just as frustrating as the single bird with just humans for company? Captive birds are frustrated and the only thing we can do is try to limit that frustration.


Well, not all captive birds are sexually frustrated. For one thing, sexual frustration only sets in when birds are not kept at a strict solar schedule because a human light schedule will make them produce sexual hormones all the time which makes their sexual organs unnaturally large - and this is what creates the 'frustration' (they are terribly horny all the time and have no way of finding relief). Birds that are kept at a solar schedule will get hormonal but they stop producing sexual hormones before frustration would begin to set in. For another, if you give them a potential mate, they do have the choice to 'find relief'... But, if you mean that they would get frustrated when they sit on eggs but no babies come out, no, this would not frustrate them. Two reasons why. Birds (and all animals, actually) don't project desires into their physiological needs. Meaning, when they go through the motions of breeding, they are simply reacting to the stimulus of the hormones and not out of a specific desire/thought process. Reproduction for them is not a choice as it is for humans. We produce sexual hormones all the time and have sex because we like it, preventing or not reproduction. They don't 'choose', they have seasons that are governed by environmental triggers like light and diet and they either produce sexual hormones because of them or they don't (the argument that 'I bred my bird because he/she wanted to have babies' is not a valid one because the situation is created by faulty husbandry on the human's part). It's not as if they say to themselves: "Oh, I think I am going to get a husband and make a nest because I woulk really like to have babies" and then get disappointed (or frustrated) when their eggs don't hatch. Besides, eggs not hatching happens all the time in nature same as babies dying because the nest fell down or predators got to them. Animals don't dwell on failures, they are eminently pragmatic, if the clutch was not successful, they will start another one and just keep on trying until they are no longer in breeding condition.
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Re: My Birds Won't Come Out of Their Cage

Postby Pajarita » Mon May 08, 2017 10:07 am

ParrotsForLife wrote:I wouldn't be able to remove fertile eggs


But that's the whole thing! If you switch an egg that was laid that same morning, there is no way to tell if the egg is going to be fertile or not because there is nothing that will indicate it! There is no embryo in a just-laid egg. It takes a certain number of hours of incubation for the embryo to start forming so you can candle it and confirm the egg is fertile. So it's not as if you are killing babies or embryos or anything - it's just an egg like the ones you could buy in a supermarket.
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Re: My Birds Won't Come Out of Their Cage

Postby stevesjk » Mon May 08, 2017 10:14 am

Why is keeping them on 10 hour days ineffective in keeping the production of sexual hormones down? For example a routine of 10am to 8pm every day. All seems very complex. With the solar schedule and birds being very vocal in the morning im starting to think there is no such thing as an 'apartment bird'.
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