Aussie Finch Forum

Now this will be interesting, will this post go up before my still hidden earlier ones? Or will they remain in sequence? It is post number 6 and obviously the post controller is off reading the next chapter of Russel Kingston's fabulous book, which I am about half way through. It is a classic ignorance is bliss situation for me, I got by just fine before on what I didn't know, and now I have an understanding of so much stuff I was in happy ignorance having no idea of. Worming, what's that? Mate I just used to spray a bit of lice powder around every now and then and keep the water clean! Now I have a squirty dispenser of yellow stuff and have made a few birds bathe in it (well, their choice really, I just wanted them to drink the crap but they ain't called bird brained for nuffin!) Plus I can now spell Coccidiosis and know how to use it! (joke, you'll see).

Still trying to determine what my "level" is going to be, but like anything I guess you "start", then get sucked into all the bits 'n pieces of it with a passion. I won't go back to breeder cages again, whilst I did like particularly breeding canaries that way before it is not as personally rewarding as the natural free flight set-up. The aviary I have built is close to 50m3 and I will need to sort out a stocking policy in time, for now I'm just going to enjoy the birds.

Aviary construction started in the last Chrissy break. But the first question before starting became, "So where am I gunna get birds from?" The local pet shops don't seem to be much chop, although I have recently realised there are a couple of decent suppliers in the area I am yet to visit. In "the good 'ol days" you could certainly get the prolific breeders from petshops, but when a lad had a hankering for more decent birds he went to Featherdale Aviaries in west Sydney and they always had a couple of overfull cages they were happy to dispense a few pairs from for a good price.

Through Google I found the active finch support like here, and reference to the Gunnedah Bird Sale, grand daddy of them all. OK, so that was 30th March 2012. In early November 2011 I booked the 6th last motel room in Gunnedah the fri night before and we had us a timetable! Got a finch licence sorted (a whole story in itself) and bought the material. I did double wire on the roof, separated 100mm because I had a lot of issues in the Blue Mtns especially with Currawongs pecking and killing birds through the wire. I now realise that was unnecessary effort, and it was a lot of effort, as a $10 plastic owl bird scarer from Bunnings has shooed away the aggressive honey-eaters that wanted a bit more "on the side" than their usual beak dripping with nectar! And the magpies, Indian Mynahs, and couple of others that were really p'd off about the new intruders.

Obviously the trip to Gunnedah was successful, and I got the aviary done in time. What DIDN'T help that was we went for a 3 week holiday in Hong Kong and Malaysia and I saw how well the KL bird park is set up, and similar systems elsewhere. So when we got back I had to build a triple pond with water fall, side stream and fountain didn't I? And stuff up the pond sealing and redo it all again (Colodur 60% is the answer to every possible pond sealing question, only issue is it really needs to cure for a full 15 days in mild weather to get a proper potable water finish, kept fully covered and dry while curing - see http://www.totalwaterproofingsupplies.c ... ductID=415" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;).

What, did I hear tut-tutting about fancy water features from veteran finchies? Well you may twit twit, but this is an engineer you are tweeting to. So I have a 10 litre filter with UV light and a low watt high flow pump to keep it all circulating (quite rapidly) and clean. Oh not that? Well I also put a drain on the main reservoir (lower) pond and a plug in the two upper ones so I can dump the whole ~140litres and put my medication of choice in the two upper ponds. Ah, now you're smiling!

But I should mention the birds. These are my new feathered friends:
4 DoubleBar finches
4 Blue faced parrot finches
2 Red Cheeked Cordon Bleu
2 Seagreen parrot finch
4 ruddy finch
2 king quail
3 canary
2 painted finch
2 standard gouldian finch
2 orange headed gouldian finch
2 black headed gouldian finch
2 black headed white chest gouldian finch
2 yellow faced star finch
2 silver king quail

Yes and another problem with this newbie post moderation is I forget what I wrote in the waiting posts. This is NOT any kind of criticism, I know what its all about as I have a penchant for Ducatis when I'm not tooling around the yard and have a bit of a forum thing going there which I moderate.

So let me stop telling tails (not a misspelling!) and thank everybody for their kind twits, greetings and miscellaneous encouragement to change what I cannot change. I have already learnt a lot from this forum, in fact the detailed species listings that have been painstakingly collected were extremely helpful in finalising the species I wanted to purchase at Gunnedah. Now I am looking forward to the next sale which is at Cessnock and hoping to add the following to the collection:

yellow painted firetails
red stars
orange breasted waxbills
pictorellas
plumheads
masked grassfinch

Unfortunately I also need a female black headed white chested Gouldian as she died of Coccidiosis last Tuesday. This was despite me giving her Coccivet for the last 4 days. Sugarloaf vet did an autopsy and said the Coccidiosis was that advanced that the liver occupied 60% of the body cavity in lieu of the normal 10%. So now everybody has been enjoying a dose of Baycox for the last four days since this happened, 1 more day to go before they get their fresh mountain stream back (which they absolutely luuurrrrrve drinking from). I didn't mention before this pond has a beach, a spa sexction, a jacuzzi and plunge pool. I kid you not I have never seen birds enjoy bathing so much. It must be a bit intoxicating for the canaries as they even dive bomb it, skipping stone style, which I have never seen before.

However, apart from the sealing mishap, this pond has not been a bed of roses for a couple of quail. We went away at Easter and found a female quail drowned in the reservoir fountain section. I had a s/s mushroom ball fountain initially and this makes a ball of water. I did see a few birds try to land on this solid looking silver ball, they just flew off when it didn't hold up for them. Didn't occur to me it could be a problem but to a quail that falls in and suddenly finds itself surrounded by a noisy terrifying wall of water where the outside world is just a misty memory the wide escape ramp just a few cm away may as well be on Mars, and of course she can't burst out of something and fly away if she can't get something solid to push on, so it is the stop breathing, chicken leg thing for her. Darn it, lost my first one already. But I changed the fountain to an open multi-jet style so that wouldn't be an issue again.

And I got a new juvenile (3/4 grown) female king quail and a pair of juvenile silver king quail (do you believe that sewing needle sexing thing? not sure if I do but the lovely lass at the Belmont pet shop sure does!). This was the weekend before we had all that crap heavy rain about a fortnight ago. I figured this was a good time to hit the aviary with worming goop so did so. The night of the second day it rained really hard, this was the third day for the new birds and it takes about a fortnight I have figured to learn a complex aviary like this one. Unfortunately a bunch of things came together. It had rained in the arvo and diluted the worming goop so I figured I will dump it in the morning and have another go when there is less chance of rain, and anyway they had 2 days which is supposed to be enough. Did it on the 4pm - 9am "make 'em thirsty" abstinence plan to make sure the BFPF's got a dose rather than suck the drizzle off the wire when I wasn't looking!

Anyway, back to the twitch. For whatever reason I shut the main drain valve in the pond. It rained really heavily overnight and 3/4 filled the bottom pond and, for whatever reason unknown to me, one of the silver quail jumped in it. The dry sleeping area is 4m away, dunno what scared it out but there you have it. The escape ramp was not covered by water (obviously the auto filling system was off) and this quail found itself in a vertical sided section with no way out and swum off to a bad case of quail rigamortise. Now the deep pond has an aluminium mesh cover on it (from Supercheap Auto, who'd a thought?), so it is now not possible to drown in any part of it, let's see if the baby quails can manage not to prove me wrong when they arrive! The rest of the birds really like the snazzy new mesh. They have discovered it whilst Baycox is in the top ponds as the bottom one is of course empty, lets see if they experiment with walking on water when it returns, the mesh is 5mm under the water surface level.

oh dear, seem to have lost a couple of chapters in the saga. I will wait and see if the missing posts turn up.......

Welcome to the forum. Are you by any chance an Author, Journo or teacher? You write like one of the 3. Oh and do finish the snake story before we die of curiosity. Now everything is in sequence this is one interesting yarn.
LML

Yes ! What did your wife do ??? And Hello !

VinceS wrote:Installed a new wife since I musta missed one of those important "shut up now" moments and the old one exploded messily (as they do!).

I shouldn't laugh, but

That new aviary is very flash!

finchbreeder wrote:Welcome to the forum. Are you by any chance an Author, Journo or teacher? You write like one of the 3. Oh and do finish the snake story before we die of curiosity.
LML

Thanks, but a mechanical engineer is my chosen vocation. As you can see the post moderation does a time shift thing, so they magically appear later, and earlier - at the same time, spooky huh? At least it happened!

The funniest thing about the aviary is the feed box. 75mm concrete on the base, sloping and colodur 60% waterproofed, fully sealed, low front entry to keep out swirling rain and a tilt up side to make servicing easy, also the front is lift off for a super clean when needed. Typical "over the top" jobbie. But the funny thing is I covered it with clear UV polycarbonate sheeting. What's so funny about that? you might wonder, and if you were a bird that would be your question. You see they "get" aviary wire, but this poly sheeting is another matter, and boy they bounce off it good! It took about a fortnight for the regular thudding to stop as they all slowly figured out the only way to leave was via the way they came in!

I still see them fly up and hover a bit just before the bounce, then the correct two brain neurones fire and out the doorway they burst, it is very funny! I don't think it is a problem for them now as they really seem to love everything that they can do in and around the feed box. I installed a couple of those brilliant Bob Collier feeders which just keep on giving. They think it is fantastic when I tip the husk box out on the quail super-highway (to connect the lower section with the upper area in a baby quail friendly way), and they will spend much longer picking through the remains of what they were previously happy to flick into the tray, so this area is renamed smorgasbord straight.

I guess I should see what I can manage by way of pics, I took a few in the first week (as you do) but really should take some more. Just by observing what they do I realised they needed more perching in the sunshine so made a perch Jungle Jim down one side and it is really cool to watch when it is the right time of day and they all decide to go play on that for a while. I need to get some pics of this but so far haven't had a camera on me when its happening. As you would appreciate you can stand next to the wire and they will put on a show, but go get a camera and its all over rover!

Having a cuppa on the weekend and watching the blue faced parrot finches playing one of their flying show-off games. "Yeah mate, I've figured out the best run in this aviary is to go from the top right back perch, hoon around the left hander and splat onto the lower right perch. See, and boy I can do it fast". So two of them do about ten loops of this circuit. One of the male ruddies who has been watching this pipes up "yeah, think you're so big and strong, but you ain't so smart. Really, the best exercise run is to do what you said but chuck a 90 air brake turn on the bottom perch and hit the one in the other corner above the door instead, that's at least 434 feathers further! Twit twit." and promptly demonstrates with half a dozen runs of his own while the blue faces lose interest and suddenly remember this was actually to warm them up for a bit of BFPF chick chasing, gotta get those gals into fine form so they can look after the chillun! Obviously micro games like this go on all day, really could write a book about it. But you know that don't you, there's no news here to a fellow finchie!

Pics seem to work, here's some more.

I need to spend a bit more time and get a few more in focus, not an attribute every picture shares equally!

Love the pics and the aviary pretty much what my dream aviary looks like!!!