Parrots Wales

My Thoughts on Breeding

Housing
It must be remembered that parrots, especially African greys are intelligent animals. Therefore, first off, lets give consideration to the cages and flights. The living environment must be right for them. No point putting them in a flight or cage that shows them your garden or fields behind, same as having a clear roof, as the birds will be disturbed by other birds, domestic cats, foxes etc, they’ll use up all their time on the look out, so make the flight as private as possible.
Same goes for noises, just as importantly, I believe that the birds can just as easily be disturbed by foreign noises. So once your set up is in place leave it, don’t go changing your birds around all the time. Leave them settle, and make them feel secure, leave the classical music station of your radio on for them, maybe

Lighting
If you intend breeding in the winter time, a few extra hours of lighting would be very beneficial, and often the difference between winter success and failure, the parent birds need to be stimulated into breeding, not forgetting that the reason many birds breed in the winter is that where they’re originally from it’s summer, so while I’m at it, this winter has been particularly severe and as a result of days of freezing weather, we've found that our lorikeets were beginning to suffer, we decided that we had to bring several of our pairs of lorikeets into a warm room, as their wet tails were freezing and sticking to the outside of their nest boxes.
Don’t bathe them you may say, try stopping a lorikeet from bathing. So please consider a little heat where possible, without knowing the layout of other peoples set ups, just be warned that we’d have lost quite a few birds had we not brought them indoors when we did.

Diet
Lastly but equally importantly; once you’ve got the housing right, then the next step is diet, whilst I don’t intend to go into the science of diet, it’s important to get the diet right. They won’t breed on seed alone. Feed them high protein diet include cooked chicken bones, chicken, tuna and egg food along with the usual soaked pulses, fruit and vegetables. I know one guy from Manchester who I met and bought some growlers off a few decades ago, he kept all his greys on pulses alone, and had many several pairs kept for breeding and had resounding success with that diet. I was always reluctant to feed eggs (especially with the mashed up shell) giving chicken and bones to them, as I thought, was cannibalistic, equally, the feeding of tuna. I know a guy in Swansea who feeds fish fingers to his birds, with great success; he also fed them copious amounts of egg food and sweet corn. I always thought, well they don’t eat this stuff in the wild, where they obviously do very well, so why feed them in captivity.
I often wonder if there is some secret elixir for breeding success that those who know, carefully hide and keep it to themselves, the answer is, obviously, no, it’s about giving them the best food, and listening to what your peers tell you.