Aussie Finch Forum

Finch_Breeder wrote:What about if I feed them home made eggfood (soft food), sprouted seeds, greens and finch mix instead of live food?
Mike

The above is what I feed mine plus Chick Starter

finches247 wrote:

Finch_Breeder wrote:What about if I feed them home made eggfood (soft food), sprouted seeds, greens and finch mix instead of live food?
Mike

The above is what I feed mine plus Chick Starter

Ok Thanks

Thats an impressive result with no insect food.
I attempted to substitute livefood with high protein softfood with a 4 pair colony of Cutties about 30 years ago & reared a few, very few, but experienced very high juvenile mortality with most chicks ejected from the nest at a few days old which at the time I put down to the lack of livefood. The following season the same colony were fed livefood daily & they then consistently produced many clutches with insignificant juvenile losses.
In hindsight this may have been due to the source birds being raised on livefood themselves. Non livefood-reared Cutthroats would be quite difficult to source in Australia.
In any case, I'd still back the breeding results of insect-fed over none all else being equal. Cutthroats definitely prefer relatively high volume of insect food when rearing young.
I would regard Cubans as a better non-livefood breeding prospect than are Cutthroats but about the worst colony candidate you could possibly get.

A friend of mine has a 5 pair colony and in the last 5 months have sucsessfully
fledged over 40 young with no live food.

Where does he/she live? Victoria, seeing your from there?
Mike

And also what species can be kept with cutthroats? i'm only planning to keep 2 pairs of cut throats in the aviary.
Cheers, Mike

Finch_Breeder wrote:And also what species can be kept with cutthroats? i'm only planning to keep 2 pairs of cut throats in the aviary.
Cheers, Mike

Depends on size of aviary...some can be a bit boisterous to other finches, I just give them multiple feed stations, that way they can't be everywhere at once..I would keep Diamond Sparrows, Javas, Parrot Finches in a reasonable size aviary with them..

I'll try breeding my own mealworms and see how it goes, is there any other finch that can go with 2 pairs of cut throats apart from Diamond sparrows, java finches and parrot finches in an aviary 2.5m wide and 2.80m high?
Cheers, Mike

How long is the aviary ?

2.5 m