December report.

It has been a busy year in our aviaries - I don't know if the end of the drought has anything to do with it, but we've had many new babies, some of which didn't survive, but there were new ones hatching all the time.

The 12 eggs in the budgies' nest book only yielded three fledglings, of which there are a heap of photos here. I couldn't stop myself with the camera yesterday; we had them out of the aviary and were playing with them for ages (they are too young to fly away).

The two Gouldian juveniles are colouring up beautifully, and there are two more babies in the nest. They probably won't fledge for a few weeks.
Two canaries survived from the second lot to hatch, and they are just about fully grown. There are two more young ones in the nest, and we are crossing our fingers that they will survive, as the mother doesn't seem to be looking after them as well as she did with the previous clutch.

The quails have had several lots of eggs, with only one hatching. It survived for a couple of months, but eventually died. We suspect it was because of the cold at the time. Even though we brought it and the mother inside, it wasn't enough. She is now sitting on yet another clutch of eggs, so we'll just have to wait and see.

The Zebra finches have always got babies, so there's nothing new to report on them!

Oops! Nearly fell off!

That's better.

I love the colours of this blue and grey male, waiting for his mate to come out of the nest box.

You can see why budgies are called Love birds - isn't that sweet!





The bird on the left is a mature male, unrelated to the young ones. His face should be all black, but he has been moulting, and the feathers haven't yet come back completely. The bird in the centre is the juvenile female and the one on the right is the juvenile male. The female is going to have a black face, but we aren't sure about the male - it won't be black; possibly red or yellow, depending on who the parents were.
(Please ignore the date imprint on these photos - they were all taken this weekend, but I hadn't figured out how to change the date on the camera!)