COUNTRY CAPITAL wrote:Gday matty, just wondering how the husbandry manual is going.
G'day CC,
mate, I'm pushing it uphill right now. It is due on Friday, and it is a long way from ready.
I've been unhealthily busy the last few months, and the optional stuff (like study) has had to make way for the important stuff (like family and work). This is why I've been so quiet on the forum for the last little while.
It is an extra subject for me, so though I would love to complete the husbandry manual anyway, I may have to drop the subject because I have just too much other stuff on. I'm still trying to figure it out.
I've done heaps of research and learnt an awful lot about birds in general and diamonds in particular; for example, the size and number of spots on the flanks signals breeding dominance in females, and they have a habit of building nests in the base of large stick nests of raptors.
Tiaris wrote:At least a couple of breeders have fostered Diamond mutations under bengalese regularly in recent years.
Thank you Tiaris. To date, I had found no reports of fostering and I would love to speak to those breeders if it were possible.
If you feel they wouldn't mind, I would be most grateful if you could PM details so I can record their experiences.
It seems odd to me how anti-aviculture the scientific ornithology mob are: they seem to have a real problem with some people keeping birds in cages. They have no problem strapping radio tracking back-packs to migrating ducks, flipper-banding penguins or wrapping whole trees in the amazon in plastic and fumigating every living thing inside the wrapper, but regard our hobby as retrograde and cruel. Further, they deride the idea that anything useful could be learnt from captive birds, even as we are given papers in our readings which deal with research on captive birds.
They say that the science is not reliable if done on captive birds, but they used data from their flipper-banded penguins. Until the happy accident of an oil spill, after which some of the banded penguins were 'rescued' and washed in detergents; when they were rinsing off it was noticed that they curved significantly off line and were less able to dive. Needless to say, this calls into question the usefulness of all data obtained related to population size/dynamics and behaviour, as the study was using a group of impaired penguins.
(With excuses to any aviculture-friendly ornithologists for the gross generalisations above).
All of this makes sense of the suspicion which old birdos seem to hold for the ornithologists, which is a shame because we have much to learn from each other. The same might be said of twitchers. When I look around, I see the aviculturalists, the ornithologists and the twitchers in their separate siloes, each decrying the practices of the others without criticising their own. It seems to me that everyone is trying to be the 'good guy', but no one in any of these fields is contributing significantly to the decline of our threatened birds. Each of these groups has a noisy but spurious claim to be doing some kind of conservation work. The zoos are the noisiest and most spurious of these claimants.
It seems to me that the "real" conservationists are shifting their focus to habitat restoration and preservation rather than captive-breeding.
****dismounts soapbax, reluctantly returns to composition of doomed husbandry manual...***
PS: One of the things I like about AFF is that we have representatives of the ornithologists and twitchers amongst us, but there is none of the disparagement or petty criticism which I have often been struck by when talking with other ornithologists and twitchers. Go AFF!
One of the scientific types asked me: What do you do with your birds?
I answered: I love them.
She didn't ask me anymore questions....
Res ipsa loquitur (These things speak for themselves...)
Avid amateur aviculturalist; I keep mostly australian and foreign finches.
The art is long, the life so short; the critical moment is fleeting and experience can be misleading, crisis is difficult....... (Hippocrates)
on your choice of bird though....a true little aussie battler, they never seem to be out of favour and still they can present a challenge for the serious breeder.
