Miami, FL

Hello new to the forum, I’ve been breeding birds for about a year as a hobby I share with my Dad. I love them. Glad to be apart of this community

Welcome to you and your flock! Hope you’ll share some pictures of your birds, it sounds like you have a few different species.

Always great to welcome another fellow Floridian!

Hello fellow Floridian and welcome! Would love to see pics of your flock.

Hi Pato, welcome to the Community!!! You've just found the most-awesome Parrot Forum/Community on the Net! We have dozens and dozens of long-time members here that have years and years of experience owning, caring-for, training, and loving all species of birds, from Parrots to Dove/Pigeons to Chickens and Duck to Quail and Chukkars and everything in-between! We also have a very large Community of very experienced bird/parrot Breeders, Hand-Feeders/Hand-Raisers...So do not EVER hisitate to make a new post and ask any and all questions you might have, ask for advice, or if you just need someone who understands what owning/raising Parrots can be like to talk to, or to vent to. We're that kind of Parrot-Community...And I use the word "Community" rather than "forum", because there is a definite difference between the two, and we are a Parrot-Community!!!

And also please do not ever hesitate to reply to a post with your own advice!!! We can always use all of the parrot knowledge, experience, and expertise that we can get when trying to help other parrot owners with their problems, so please don't ever be shy about sharing your own experiences and telling us the ideas and actions that have worked for you in the past! I think that a lot of the time people who are new to owning/raising birds, and just people who are new members of the Community, are often shy about responding to posts, and sometimes maybe even a bit scared because they're afraid that they are going to get other members jumping down their throats, scolding them or yelling at them because something they said was incorrect or the advice that they gave wasn't the best, or simply because they have been treated badly on a regular-basis in other Parrot forums or pet forums in-general (which all of us here are well aware of and know just how nasty some forums are)...Just know that this Parrot Community does not work that way at all, not in any way!!!! Not only do we not have any long-time members who are nasty, rude, etc., but we have a lot of really awesome Moderators who would NEVER allow anyone to be treated badly or allow anyone's ideas to be stomped-on...At worst you might get someone kindly and with the utmost-respect correcting something that you wrote that may have been incorrect information. That's it. And the only reason it's very important that we all check each other and make sure that we correct any incorrect information that is given here is because it could mean the difference between life and death for a bird. But you will never be disrespected here in our Community...In-fact, the only time that anyone has ever been spoken to in a harsh way here is when someone talks about abusing or neglecting their birds, or has described something violent or aggressive that they have done to their own birds as discipline or just because their birds were annoyiing them...It's rare, but people do sometimes come here and say such things, and I think the one thing that the members of this Community all agree upon is that OUR BIRDS ALWAYS COME FIRST! So I sincerely hope that you'll join-in the conversations here and become and active member of the Community!!! And you should also iinvite your Dad to come join us as well!

***I don't know how old you are, but I'm assuming you are under 18 years-old (if I'm wrong I apologize, I'm just guessing , but I think it's awesome that you and your Dad have started breeding and raising parrot-chicks together!!! So many people come here because they decided to allow their pet birds to breed, and something has gone wrong with the parents, the babies, or both, or more-often than not they decided that hand-feeding/hand-raising baby parrot chicks was a piece of cake and so easy that they could do it with absolutely no experience, knowledge, or any Mentor or other experienced person helping them at all, and suddenly their chicks are all sick and dying and they don't know what to do....And we are always more than happy to try to do anything and everything we can to help them and more-so to help their birds and baby chicks....Unfortunately, despite our best-efforts, more often than not the chicks in this situation die unless they can get them to an Avian Vet immediately, and it's just heartbreaking for everyone involved, as well as extremely frustrating for us...

***So when a new member comes to the Community and tells us that they have been learning how to breed and raise baby birds with their Dad over the last year or so, and is doing things the responsible way and with love and care, it just makes my day!!! Both my own Grandmother and my Mom were long-time bird/parrot owners and breeders/hand-raisers for most of their adult-lives, and my Mom bred and hand-raised my very first bird, actually he was my very first pet! He was a Cobalt-Blue/Violet Pied English Budgie that I named Keety and who my mom gave to me for my 6th Birthday...And I helped her and my Grandmother every single day with their breeders and chicks, learning everything I could and absorbing all the knowledge I could like a sponge, so that one day I could start breeding and raising my own baby parrots...And when I turned 16 my Mom finally gave me one of her Breeding-Pairs of American Budgies (I say she "gave" them to me, but we obviously lived in the same house and the pair were kept in the same place they had always been, in with the rest of my Mom's birds, lol)...This pair of Budgies was totally my responsibility, from feeding them to cleaning their cage to finally attaching a Nest-Box to their cage and breeding my first clutch of baby parrots...I had absolutely NO IDEA what in the world I was doing, and when it came time to pull the first chick from the Nest-Box when he turned 2 weeks-old and put him in the Brooder and start hand-feeding him once every 2-hours (including overnight), I was absolutely petrofied! I was sure I was going to kill them, even though I had already hand-fed many baby birds, I hadn't ever hand-fed one that was younger than 5-6 weeks-old with my Mom's complete supervison...But she helped me, taught me, educated me, and by the time that very first clutch of baby Budgies fully-weaned and were ready to go to our local, privately-owned pet-shop, I was confident in my ability to responsibly breed and raise baby Budgies (the pet-shop in my hometown was owned by a friend of the family who got ALL of the live animals she sold from local breeders ONLY, right down to the Hamsters, Guinea Pigs, Rabits, Birds, Puppies, Kittens, Reptiles, and yes, even the Aquarium-Fish)...

I think the best thing about doing what you're doing and the way that you're doing it is that you're doing it with your Dad, and that you're not just breeding birds in-order to be able to sell them and make some money, but rather because you enjoy it and have an interest in doing it, and it's something constructive and healthy that you can learn to responsibly do with your Dad...That's Awesome!!! I wish more young people who make the decsion to breed their birds would take a page from your book!

Again, welcome to the Community! We look forward to hearing from you, AND YES, POST SOME PHOTOS OF YOUR BIRDS!!! It's a requirment here!!! LOL...

Thank you everyone. My grandfather shared his love for birds with my father and my father shared it with me. I’m in my mid - 20s. I’m still figuring out how to upload pictures and videos. I am going to attempt to attach a YouTube link to our aviary. Thank you again

[ame="https://youtu.be/RP1dzCp0g4Q"]Pato and Father Aviary - YouTube[/ame]

Welcome to the forums! So glad you joined us! Pretty birds in the video. Thanks for sharing, please tell us more.

Welcome. I look forward to sharing your journey. I'm glad you found us!

Welcome to you and your menagerie, thanks for joining!!

See, I WAS WRONG, you're over 18!!! Sorry about that, I always do that...When you said you were breeding and raising birds "with your dad", I once again assumed that you had to be a kid...I have to stop doing that...

I really like your Aviary set-up! Very nice, clean housing for your breeders, and their cages aren't tiny little "breeding-boxes" like you so often see so many parrot-breeders keep their pairs in. You've also got a nice mix of parrot species, actually very similar to the species that I bred for the 20 years that I did it (except I never bred IRN's/Alex's). I am now 39 and stopped breeding and raising almost 7/8 years now, but I too bred Cockatiels, Green Cheeks, Suns, and Jendays...I never bred IRN's or Alex's (I couldn't tell in the video if the green Ringnecks you have were IRN's or Alex's), but instead I also bred both American and English Budgies, along with a really nice mix of the less-common Parakeet species, including Moustache/Mustache Parakeets, Canary-Wing/Bee-Bee Parakeets, Rosey Bourkes, Princess of Wales Parakeets, Lineolated Parakeets, etc. I miss it sometimes...and sometimes I'm glad I don't have to set an alarm to wake me up every 2-3 hours throughout the night to feed 2-3 week-old chicks, lol...

****The only bit of advice or suggestion that I would give you and your dad, and I say this with the utmost-respect to both of you and your Dad, and am only trying to help not only you guys, but actually more-so want to help your birds, is that you need to put a few more toys inside of your breeder's cages, as it looks like at the most I saw 1 single toy in each cage, and some of them didn't even have the 1 toy. A lot of people who breed parrots, for whatever reason I don't really know, but they commonly do not put anything inside of their breeder's cages except a food dish, a water bowl, a perch or perches, and then of course the Nest-Box during breeding-season, and that's it....I don't know if they think that their breeding-pairs don't need to have any toys or active-foraging activities inside of their cages because "they have each other" and don't need any other forms of entertainment or mental-stimulation, or if it's just because they figure that they are "breeder-birds" who don't need toys or foraging-activities because they aren't "pet" parrots, etc...I don't know why, but it's so extremely common, and it's also very, very, very sad...

Now I did see that most of your breeder's cages do at least have 1 toy hanging inside their cage, so that's better than a lot of parrot-breeders provide to their birds...However, your breeding-pairs of parrots (specifically parrots, obviously not your chickens, lol) should not be treated ANY DIFFERENTLY than you would treat a pet parrot who lives inside your home. They are all "Parrots", and as-such they ALL hae the intelligence of a 3-4 year-old human child, from the smallest Parrotlet and Budgie to the largest Macaw and Cockatoo, and every single species in-between. They all use logic and reasoning skills, and they ALL get extremely bored, mentally unstimulated, and they all can and eventually will develop Feather-Destructive Behaviors, can begin to start Self-Mutilating, and most-commonly they all can become extremely depressed. And having their bonded-mate in the cage with them does provide them with a source of entertainment/socialization that does help a bit, there is no doubt about that, but the problem is that then you have not 1, but 2 parrots who deal with bouts of boredom and a lack of mental-stimulation at times throughout each day, and over-time their boredom, depressionn, etc. does effect each-other....And we have to remember that these are "Breeders", which are typically not hand-tame, and aren't typically let out of their cages every day for exercise/flight-time or to play on a big play-stand or play-gym, because they aren't hand-tame and they aren't easily rounded back-up, they can't be handled, etc.

So because most breeding-pairs rarely or never get time out of their cages to fly around, get exercise, or to play on play-stands or play-gyms that have lots of different types of toys and activites on them, and because they spend most-all of their lives inside of their cages, this means that we as their owners, the people who are forcing them to live their lives in-captivity as being solely parrots meant to be bred and produce babies, WE are responsible for providing our Breeding-Birds with as high a quality-of-life as we possibly can, WHICH IS NO DIFFERENT THAN THE QUALITY OF LIFE THAT WE PROVIDE OUR TAME, PET PARROTS...Or it shouldn't be any different, anyway...

***So what I would suggest is that you think not so much about all the different "types" of toys that you can provide your Breeder's with, meaning toys that all have different purposes/uses, and then get at least 3-4 different TYPES of toys IN EACH of your Breeder's cages, along with providing them ALL with some different "Active-Foraging activities inside of their cages at least once week. So you want each cage that contains a Breeding-Pair or an Un-Paired Breeder-Bird to have 1 toy for chewing, 1 toys for shredding, 1 toy for active-foraging (like the bird-toys that you hide treats inside and they have to figure out how to get them out), etc. Even just buying a couple of boxes of "Shredders" at Petco each month and wrapping each of your bird's cages up in the "Shredders", winding it in-between the cage bars, around the bars, up and down and all around the cage, etc. so that you are "GIVING THEM A JOB TO DO EACH DAY" would be an awesome idea that they typically LOVE and spend hours at a time working on. (If you don't already know what "Shredders" are, they boxes of 30 feet of reinforced, braided, thick strips of fully-digestible paper that resembles the "Chinese Finger-Traps" that are paper, that you wrap your bird's cage in, all around the cage, in and out and around the bars, etc., and they are extremely strong and not at all easy to just rip-up, they have to work at them. So you're giving your parrots a "job" to do, and usually if you wrap their cage up in the Shredders in the morning, they will work on them for hours and hours at a time, and they keep their brains and their beaks busy; they are sold in boxes of 30ft. long rolls at Petco for around $5 each, so they're also inexpensive, so great for people who have lots of Breeding-Pairs)...

The point is that a Parrot is a Parrot, regardless of whether they were hand-raised, hand-fed babies who are inside pets that are a part of the family and who are spoiled-rotten and spend all-day, every-day with their people, eating their meals at the dinner-table, watching movies on the couch, or sleeping in a special sleep-cage next to their owner's bed in their bedroom, OR whether they were parent-raised, non-tame and non-pet birds who are kept specifically to be Breeder-Birds...They ALL have extreme intelligence that is much-greater than that of any Dog, and they ALL are very social Flock-Animals who typically fly around 10-miles a day in the wild, doing nothing but Foraging for enough food to meet their nutrtional-requirements each day...So when a Parrot is kept as a Breeder and is typically not tame, it's extremely important that we as Breeder's remember that a Parrot is a Parrot is a Parrot, and Breeder-Parrots have EXACTLY the same needs as Hand-Tame, Pet Parrots have, that they are just as susceptible to boredom, depression, Feather-Destructive and Self-Mutilation Behaviors, and it's our repsonsibility to make sure they have lots of different types of toys in their cages at all times, lots of Active-Foraging Activities to take-part in, and that we rotate-in new toys on a regular-basis so that we keep their brains stimulated and their bodies/beaks active and moving...They'll be much happier, healthier Parrots, and that means they will produce healthier, happier offspring as well...And if we're forcing them to live their lives as Breeder-Parrots, this is the least we can do...It's what we HAVE to do...

Thank you very much, I will be purchasing shredders later today. Any recommendations or advice is GREATLY APPRECIATED. Thank you.