Has anyone handreared Diamonds?

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mattymeischke
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Dear flockers,
I am studying this year, and one of my assignments is to write a husbandry manual for a chosen bird.
I have chosen the Diamonds, and will be shamelessly milking you all for information over the next few months.

My first specific question is above; Has anyone handreared Diamonds ever?
If so, how did it go? Were there any particular difficulties (or just the usual difficulty of handrearing finchlets)?
Has anyone ever used fosters (seems unlikely) or artificial incubation (seems even less likely)?

Thanks in anticipation,
mm. :ugeek: :cloppy:
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)
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spanna
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I haven't hand reared any, nor fostered any, as they do not like to be disturbed while nesting and will readily abandon if they are. I would think (based solely on my personal experiences) that there is little chance of hand rearing them, as most of us like to let them breed naturally, which means leaving them well enough alone! This to me implies that the odds of finding any abandoned young still alive are slim to none, as nest checking (compared to checking gouldian or painted firetail nests, for example) is both a bad idea given the high risk of abandonment, and very difficult given the shape and size of the nests. My birds always build monstrously big nests, with reasonably long entrance tunnels, so even with the use of a borescope they're very difficult to get into (tried a couple of times, but couldn't see a thing!!). I have been tempted to hand rear some, as I think with their size, patterns and sometimes boisterous personalities, they would make interesting little pets. I can give you plenty of info on hand rearing painted firetails instead if you'd like!! :lol:

I'm sure many people know a heck of a lot more than I, but feel free to PM me any questions, I've bred a decent number of them, some in colony situations, but have been much more successful with single pairs in a mixed collection. I also have a lot of free time on my hands as the stereotypical slack uni student :lol:
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mattymeischke
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Thanks, Spanna, I was sort of hoping that you might have...
So far, can find no record of anyone having ever done it.

Thank you also to those who replied by PM.
As I get further into it I will be asking further questions.
Thanks again,
mm.
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)
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spanna
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If I didn't have uni and work I'd be in half a mind to go pull a nest of 4 day old diamies and see how they went! Alas, life gets in the way of finching.
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COUNTRY CAPITAL
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Gday matty, just wondering how the husbandry manual is going.
sorry but i cannot help in regard to hand-rearing or fostering diamond firetails, i have left that to the parents.
hand-rearing should/could work in my opinion.... like spanna has achieved with his painteds.
i am not convinced that the resulting birds would behave as normal though regarding raising there own young due to the lack of imprinting during rearing/weaning, but as a last resort better than letting them perish. i am interested to see if anyone has had good results with them.
bengalese may be suitable foster parents or even gouldians but i dont have the necessary expertise to go down that path.
i have kept two breeding colonies of diamonds for the past six seasons and have averaged about thirty young per season.not very impressive really as i have had 6-10 pairs for most of that time so the dominant pairs raise most of the young. i keep mine in planted aviaries of at least fifty sq/m so they have sufficient room to spread out.
to maximise the number of young single pairs is best but with diamonds this is not as easy as it sounds. you can select birds, even dna them to insure male/female but this will not necessarily result in a compatible, successful pair. usually quite the opposite from my experience.
best to start with a "colony", ring them all and draft them off as they pair up themselves.

i guess it comes down to monetary value and availability with these sorts of finches regarding hand-rearing or fostering unfortunately but at least the young that do make it can go on to produce more generations to come.
:thumbup: 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.
CC
Aussie finch tragic.rodent/snake terroriser.
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Tiaris
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At least a couple of breeders have fostered Diamond mutations under bengalese regularly in recent years.
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mattymeischke
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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)
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GregH
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HI MM. I too have not successfully hand-reared any finch as from my experience it's a degree of difficulty above parrots and even softbills. Anyway what I was going to say is that in the Philippines I amazed my local club members by allowing my Diamonds to rear their own young where as they all foster under zebras. When I say all there were only 2 others that had them as they were too expensive for most. I can try to put you in contact with them if you'd like but the experience will be very different to here as these guys all employ staff to look after their bird-rooms (referred to as an aviary there).

Greg
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spanna
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Depending on how much you want the info, I may be able to hand rear some diamonds for your husbandry manual... Don't usually condone pulling healthy young from an attended nest, but may make an acception if something good were to come of it. PM me if you're really keen.
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Mortisha
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watch this the other day - might be of help

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fy3fJuO ... ature=plcp
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