Abstract
There have been so many articles written about breeding the Black Masked Love Bird that I invariably shudder each time I see one. I dit1itifully read them, however, because you never know, they might contain one more answer to the many questions.
The one thing these writings all have in common seems to be how they give the reader the euphoric notion that these intrigueing little birds are easy to breed. They casually toss around phrases like "free breeders", or "breed well in captivity", or "easily maintained", etc. If you haven't seen those things in print, perhaps you remember the one about Love Birds being "the next step up from Budgies". Maybe so, but not the eye ring series of love birds.
After my first disastrous attempts, I felt that everything I had been reading was a dirty lie. I've modified that opinion, however, and have decided that the problem is that most writings on the subject don't lie, they just don't tell you the whole story. The leave you with a "blind spot". That blind spot increases ten fold if you live in an area where you don't keep your birds outdoors for fear of losing the feed dishes in a snow drift.
This article, therefore, is intended to fill in that blind spot and is respectfully dedicated to my fellow breeders who, like myself, are faced with the nasty proposition of keeping their birds indoors.
I will not burden you with basic like diet, housing, genetics, sanitation, lighting, nestboxes, etc. I will assume that you have all that. I'll also assume you've joined the African Love Bird Society, and that you've even raised a few Masked or Fischers. I think it's important, however, at this point to define "success" with the eye ring love birds. Certainly there are many people in the North, Midwest, and on the East Coast who have raised them. But when I talk about being "successful" I am not talking about producing two or three birds per pair per season. That is success with Amazons or Cockatoos, but not with Love Birds. I am talking about five or six chicks per pair per clutch for two or three clutches each season and over a number of seasons. That is the "success" I expect with my birds and there is no reason why it should not be so.
This definitely was not the case when I first started raising Masked and Fischers. I housed five pairs to an eight foot by four foot by six foot high flight. All seemed to be going well but somehow the number of chicks that fledgedwere very few. There were plenty of dead embryos, young dying in the first week, and even a number dying in the fifth week. After two clutches of Masked birds I had only 12 young ones to show for the effort. The Fischers were even worse. Three young Fischers on the perch! I checked nyself on all the basics and nothing was vrong (according to the books). My other birds were all doing splendidly so there was definitely something I was missing out on with the love birds. Other people I talked with had no suggestions. They, too, were generally disappointed with the results from their eye ring birds.
It was clear that the one major difference between the love birds and other birds was the nesting behavior. The nest builders were the only ones with poor breeding results. The finger pointed directly at nest building as the weak point in my breeding program.
Any observer will notice that the nest building is a very elaborate operation. The pairs will spend many of their waking hours working on the nest in some form or another. The drive to construct an elaborate nest is so strong that no matter how many boxes I hang, there will be a nest in every one of them even though only half of them are finally used. We all notice, too, that the birds will carry everything but the kitchen sink into the boxes, and, if they had access, they would probably carry in the sink as well.
Obviously there must be a reason for this. Nature is very clever and not so wasteful as to allow the birds to go through days and weeks of nest building just for the fun of it. I also noticed that, almost as if there was a big time clock running, all pairs in a flight will cease the heavy nest building activity about the same time and start laying within a few days of each other. Even though they are incubating and later raising a family, however, the hens continue to pay attention to that nest. Each day new material is added. As the chicks approach fledging age, the nest building picks up dramatically. If there is no new mateial available, they try to steal it from other nests or from the empty nests built originally. The Fischers even went so far as to soak all the material before putting it into the boxes. Ah ha! Humidity is the answer to all this one would think.· But why do chicks of all ages need wet nesting material tucked in around them?
Back to the books to check out nesting material. The nesting material itself, I decided, was crucial to the success of breeding the eye rings. Excitedly I read about nesting material. Palm Fronds! I looked out my window over the snow and not one palm frond did I see. The nearest palm tree was 1600 miles away somewhere in ' Southern Georgia! Whoopie. There had to be a substitute. So began the long search to find a perfect nesting material that didn't grow on palm trees.
Hay and straw obviously were not right. I had tried that and suspected that allergens in the pollen created itchy hens and dead chicks. Some people were using shredded paper. I couldn't believe this was suitable for eye rings, especially after they soaked it, so I never tried it. Green material seemed to be key, so I tried long grasses. The birds ate some, others they used for the nest, but it didn't seem to make much difference. Then there was the matter of whether the weeds I was....