first off i had used laserlite on the flight and seeing it gets extremely cold here in winter i completely covered the entrance to the aviary in plastic.
nice job too as warm as toast and as the temp went i started breeding birds in the winter in near zero temps.this went on for 2 or 3 months..................suddenly the birds stopped breeding and the ones which had been producing good clutches started producing clear eggs. this went on for several months. very very poor fertility but my other aviaries were fine.
my very first thought - the cock diamonds were out of condition. for those old hands here on the forum i don't mind telling you again - i bred heaps! so it was hard to take! the only trouble i ever had breeding diamonds was in the very beginning when i was sold 4 cock birds. after 3 months nothing!
anyway back to the crap! one day i was surfing the internet when i read about vitamin d3 and its importance to the fertility in birds. birds absorb this from direct sunlight through their feathers. they require 10 to 20 minutes daily. vitamin d3 cannot be transmitted to the bird through plastic or laserlite.
in my case i had the whole package plastic -laserlite - fully enclosed. so i researched further and stumbled across the vetafarm site and soluvite d3 and caged birds etc. i rang vetafarm and told them the drama and they said their product would have things back to normal in 6 weeks or so.
in reality it took a lot longer than that.......i'd say close to 4 months. everyday i placed half a teaspoon of their soluvite d3 product in 1 litre of fresh water plus i remove one panel of laserlight from the roof. after 2 or 3 months nothing had changed. sure i was breeding the odd few pied/fawn splits etc etc but nothing compared to the other fawn aviaries which were spitting them out.
about a month back i noticed that a few cock bird diamonds were missing head feathers and there was a bit of aggression in the aviary. this nest pictured drew my attention
residents light/med pied hen with normal/fawn pied. young birds say year plus old had 7 nests straight -NOT ONE FERTILE EGG! decided to check it out. pulled out the eggs. surprise 1 fertile. left it there it hatch she sat on it a couple of days and then it disappeared.
back to nest again and this time more fertile eggs and she has been feeding them well two or three young
the very nest next to this housed my heavy pied diamond cock with light/med hen. 7 to 10 nests straight -ALL CLEAR EGGS. prior to that 3 nest 7 young reared in total. he too had one fertile egg for the very first time in many months. that lone young today is out flying about. now i knew for sure something had gone wrong in the aviary.
at the moment there would be several diamonds on eggs or with young. things are starting to move again and i'm still dosing them with vetafarm soluvite d3. i will probably do this for another month then call it quits.i don't really know which fixed my fertility problem with the diamonds/firefinches/parrotfinches in the aviary. i do think it was the lack of vitamin d3 or direct sunlight or both. all i know - i had a very big problem and that aviary as a breeder was almost a total write-off.
i could have sat back and kept this to myself and let some-one else figure their own drama out. but this forum is about helping each other breed and look after birds. doesn't matter i you like the bloke telling you the story or not - its all about the health of birds in aviary conditions. plus if you gain any knowledge from what you have read.
in my case i think if your still reading i've done my part or you would have exited the site in the first couple of paragraphs. at the moment this info may or may not be of any use to you but maybe sometime in the future the time might come when something pops up and you can say i read about that on the finch forum and i know how you can fix it. if so my typing away has not been a waste of time.
bring em on!
