by Wolf » Sun Aug 09, 2015 7:29 am
Just about the first day or two of this month, August, I took a white birch log and cut of a piece of it and hollowed it out about 2 or 2 1/2 inches and about 5 inches in diameter and I put it in the budgies cage for a nest box for Marley. I purposely made certain that it was not large enough around or deep enough. I was thinking that as excitable as Marley was that perhaps giving her a nest that was not suitable would give her something to do and keep her occupied and perhaps help prevent her from plucking as much. She was the happiest little budgie that you could have imagined and worked all of her waking time on this nest. She was happy and not plucking, so I was happy as well.
Yesterday she started trying the nest on for size and would scratch around in it for a while and settle down in the nest only to stand up and scratch around even more and chew at the wood inside of the nest and then try it on for size again. Last night she did not go to her normal sleeping perch with Harley, instead she fit herself very carefully into the nest and went to sleep. At around 3 am she woke me up as she was chattering away and then this morning when it got light enough to see, I fixed their breakfast and when I gave it to them Marley was sitting on one nice little egg. I will wait for her to lay another egg and freeze this one and then do the same with all of them that she lays as I have no intention of raising budgies, but I don't want her to lay any more than she must to satisfy her egg count, which I hope that she will keep to no more than four eggs.
I thought that this was a good time to update this. My next thing is to find where I can order some dummies eggs for to replace any other eggs that she may decide to lay in the future.