Hi , my name is Ahmed i am from Egypt and i have a little question for you guys i have 5 proven pairs of IRN and every thing is good but my question is did the nest box attached to the cage all the year or just in the breeding time ?
thank you all for information i had from your website
Nest Box helping please
Moderator: Mods
Re: Nest Box helping please
Hi Ahmed;
It really depends how you want to manege your birds. Possibilities:
1 . If you have paired birds together in independent cages all year around, you can let the nestboxes as Fah wrote to you. Doing this you could have some birds double clutching since you live in Egypt (low latitude) and, in your country there are soft changes in environemental cues (mainly lighting, humidity and temperature), leading to a longer breeding period. Disadvantages: the synchronization of birds lying eggs would not be optimal and you risk to lost eggs or chicks which could have been saved by fostering.
2 . If you have all your couples in a big aviary, you should put nestboxes quite far away one from each other, since IRN are very territorial, and the "center" of each territory is the nestbox. You should also manage to put several feeding trays, since it is at feeding time that fighting usually occurs. In this way you can not put a high density of birds together and there is a risk of loosing birds (mainly males)
3. Mixed: Finally you can keep your couples in a "private" cage during the breeding season and to put all the birds together in an aviary after the chicks are weaned. It almost mimicks what happens in nature: couples are dispersed during breeding and thereafter they join in big flocks to look for feeding. In this case it is better not to hang any nestbox in the aviary to limit fighting (in the wild IRN defend their nest-trees all year around).
Advantages: better synchronization of laying eggs, easier feeding and cleaning, easier exchange of birds to form new couples for the next breeding season, probably better socialisation of the young birds. As you can supose this is the solution I have chosen.
Hope it helps
Recio
It really depends how you want to manege your birds. Possibilities:
1 . If you have paired birds together in independent cages all year around, you can let the nestboxes as Fah wrote to you. Doing this you could have some birds double clutching since you live in Egypt (low latitude) and, in your country there are soft changes in environemental cues (mainly lighting, humidity and temperature), leading to a longer breeding period. Disadvantages: the synchronization of birds lying eggs would not be optimal and you risk to lost eggs or chicks which could have been saved by fostering.
2 . If you have all your couples in a big aviary, you should put nestboxes quite far away one from each other, since IRN are very territorial, and the "center" of each territory is the nestbox. You should also manage to put several feeding trays, since it is at feeding time that fighting usually occurs. In this way you can not put a high density of birds together and there is a risk of loosing birds (mainly males)
3. Mixed: Finally you can keep your couples in a "private" cage during the breeding season and to put all the birds together in an aviary after the chicks are weaned. It almost mimicks what happens in nature: couples are dispersed during breeding and thereafter they join in big flocks to look for feeding. In this case it is better not to hang any nestbox in the aviary to limit fighting (in the wild IRN defend their nest-trees all year around).
Advantages: better synchronization of laying eggs, easier feeding and cleaning, easier exchange of birds to form new couples for the next breeding season, probably better socialisation of the young birds. As you can supose this is the solution I have chosen.
Hope it helps
Recio