rhaewynsmom
New member
- Jul 15, 2015
- 3
- 0
I have a mated pair of green cheek conures and another female (my mom could no longer take care of her bird so we got the male's sister). The male and his sister are fancies, the other is a cinnamon. The cinnamon is a little hen. She has been laying eggs since she was a year old. The parents had no idea how to feed the babies (neither did I at first). I used fake eggs last year and that seemed to work okay. This year I did not take them out in time and they did figure out how to feed one of the babies, they over fed it and it died. The first year she laid 5 eggs total. Last year she laid 6. This year she laid 6. It's always been the same timing the middle/end of May for laying, and until mid/end of June for the incubation period. This year her egg laying was further apart--took almost two weeks to lay the full clutch.
Now she has two more in their box as of today. It is not an official nest box, but a card board box with a huge hole... Plus the one she has torn into the side of it. They sit by the window and can come and go as they please. They do not like to sleep on perches. They tend to lay down and will be up all hours of the night if they don't have something to lay down on and seem to like the added darkness. I cover them with a big thick dark comforter at night and they are covered for 10-12 hours.The male says "Night! GOOD NIGHT!" around 8-8:30pm every night to tell me they want to sleep. They will all piled into the box for bed.
My fiance does watch tv pretty late although we don't always have the lights on at night because I like to make sure the birds get rest. I'm not sure if this is an issue. We've never had a problem with this previously--just this year. In our own lives, we have been dealing with death after death, family drama, and having to leave a lot (we were gone for one whole day and night and had someone check on them). I'm not sure if this disrupted their pattern at all or not. They get quite a bit of attention though. They eat harvest garden by zupreem. No dyes in the pellets. They have a seed mixture as well and always have veggies at dinner time and fruit earlier in the day as well as fresh water 2-3 times a day.
I've seen some posts on lighting and hormones and understand from breeders that green cheeks are can become prone to laying twice a year if they have an optimum food supply readily available. I added 4 fake eggs to see if that would stop her from laying, but the pair are still having sex. I am also unsure if the sister being with them is throwing off the hen and causing her to lay more? (The sister has been with them over a year now). The sister has not laid any eggs, but does sit on them with the hen and will feed the hen and helps.
The hen has also seemed kind of sad to me since the baby died. Where they didn't know how to feed the baby and figured it out, but overfed, I was thinking maybe she wants to try again? I have never seen the hen feed the male or the sister before, but ever since this last clutch, the hen has been feeding the other two birds. It almost seemed like she was practicing?
Any suggestions?
Now she has two more in their box as of today. It is not an official nest box, but a card board box with a huge hole... Plus the one she has torn into the side of it. They sit by the window and can come and go as they please. They do not like to sleep on perches. They tend to lay down and will be up all hours of the night if they don't have something to lay down on and seem to like the added darkness. I cover them with a big thick dark comforter at night and they are covered for 10-12 hours.The male says "Night! GOOD NIGHT!" around 8-8:30pm every night to tell me they want to sleep. They will all piled into the box for bed.
My fiance does watch tv pretty late although we don't always have the lights on at night because I like to make sure the birds get rest. I'm not sure if this is an issue. We've never had a problem with this previously--just this year. In our own lives, we have been dealing with death after death, family drama, and having to leave a lot (we were gone for one whole day and night and had someone check on them). I'm not sure if this disrupted their pattern at all or not. They get quite a bit of attention though. They eat harvest garden by zupreem. No dyes in the pellets. They have a seed mixture as well and always have veggies at dinner time and fruit earlier in the day as well as fresh water 2-3 times a day.
I've seen some posts on lighting and hormones and understand from breeders that green cheeks are can become prone to laying twice a year if they have an optimum food supply readily available. I added 4 fake eggs to see if that would stop her from laying, but the pair are still having sex. I am also unsure if the sister being with them is throwing off the hen and causing her to lay more? (The sister has been with them over a year now). The sister has not laid any eggs, but does sit on them with the hen and will feed the hen and helps.
The hen has also seemed kind of sad to me since the baby died. Where they didn't know how to feed the baby and figured it out, but overfed, I was thinking maybe she wants to try again? I have never seen the hen feed the male or the sister before, but ever since this last clutch, the hen has been feeding the other two birds. It almost seemed like she was practicing?
Any suggestions?