Aussie Finch Forum

Hi Brad and welcome to aussie finch forum,there is alot to learn and ask enjoy.

Cheer from Mr Tino

Hi, and welcome. I'm a newbie too, to the forum at least, not to finches, although I'm probably the most inept finch keeper here. I really should be better at this. I've been keeping birds of one kind or another for more than 50 years.

Hello there and welcome! I am new too!

Hi Mantall, I bet your not inept as you say lol, 50 years of birds, I bet you could teach us all some things, we all have so many different experiences, like me being in birds 52 years, we all have had bad & good luck with all different things & we solve them all some how, like one experiences for me with a Newcastle vet, 20 odd years ago, I had airsac mite in some of the birds I had bought, after experienced the same problem with Canaries before, back then the only treatment was poison mixed in seed or fly spray the birds in a box, the vets in Cessnock back then had no idea how to treat, so I heard of this newcastle vet he was a bird vet, so after a consultation he gave me a concoction & a crop needle & taught me how to treat them, I got home & proceeded to treat all the birds, after a while when I had done about half, some were shaking there heads & dropping off the perches dead, lucky I didn't treat all my birds, but I lost half my birds, thousands of dollars worth gone & all my pairs destroyed, when I rang the vet back he said he dosnt know what went wrong, he said he used it on canaries before & had no problems, so you can imagine it took me a long time to recover, I couldn't afford to buy any new birds to replace all the mates I lost, the vet use ivermectime & glycerin or something like that, it must have been back in the trail days, also a friend of mine I went to his place & he was in his aviaries picking up dead read faced parrot finches, he picked up a bucket or more, I was so jealous of all his parroties as back then I couldn't afford any & he had dozens & dozens, as they were really expensive, his vet or friend told him to use a product to worm his birds & killed them all, so I learnt some valuable lessons don't fully trust vets or other peoples advice 100% & to only treat a couple birds first.
So i learnt to listen to all advice & evaluate it before acting on it.
So I bet your a lot more experienced than you let on & have a lot of knowledge.

Hi Graham, no I promise I'm not just being modest. Most of my experience over the years was with budgies and a few bigger parrots, pets not breeding, although I did breed budgies for a while. It's the finches that are still largely a mystery to me, I seem to have no luck at all with them. Mind you not all of that is strictly my fault. We had a problem with snakes at our previous place and not just pythons, eastern browns. I had a pretty close call there on a couple of occasions.

I've never been into breeding any kind of bird in any big way. I'd just like to start with a few and build up a reasonable little mixed community for myself, not necessarily for resale. I have trouble parting with them anyway and if I was too successful with a breeding programme we would be swamped with birdies. When the zebs started getting out of hand I just removed the nesting boxes to stop the breeding and let nature take it's course. I only ever sold a few to a petshop (took me hours to catch them, wasn't worth the trouble) and then I couldn't sleep thinking about them having had a nice big aviary and now being cooped up in a tiny little cage at a petshop - tragic isn't it?

And I won't even go into how much of the wild bird population I have helped to grow. Read about the great escape. That was just the latest. So no I promise I'm not just being modest.

Cheers ... Leonie

Hi Leonie
Well the main thing is you love birds & want to keep them, we all have ups & downs & make lots mistakes, I think, as long as you learn from your mistakes, thats the main thing.
We always get something new tossed at us, I wish I had the net back when I had a lot of my problems lol, just a few things tossed my way, mice plague, rats killing birds, dog broke in avairy & let all out, Snakes, Hawks, pack of dogs killing all my chooks & ducks, Marecks diseare & fowl pox in my chooks, mites & lice, feral wild Cat & foxes, wrong advice, bad neighbors, we get tossed so many things its a wonder we keep birds but its because we love them so much, lol