Scarlet Chested parrot chicks have fledged!

It is just five weeks since the Scarlet Chested parrot babies hatched out, and today they all fledged the nest.  Ken was in the process of putting rings on their legs, and he got the first one out of the nest box to do, and before he knew what was happening, he was surrounded by little flying missiles as they all jumped out of the nest box one after the other!  Their last night in the nest box before they fledged:

 Dad calling them up to the hole to feed them.

 Mum had more success, the baby peeps out to be fed.

 Ken holding two of the babies, showing the colours on the wings.

Scarlet chested parrot chicks update.

Three weeks old and all five surviving!  We are so chuffed!

Scarlet Chested Parrots.

Ken bought a pair of Scarlets about six months ago, and it didn't take long for them to bond.   He put the appropriate nesting box into their aviary, and they have been busy in the past month, laying eggs and hatching them.  They have five healthy babies, and we are delighted!
The male is brightly coloured.

 The female slightly less so, without the scarlet chest, but still beautiful.

 One week old:

 Two weeks old:

Eastern Rosellas visiting our back yard.

There have always been Eastern Rosellas in the trees around our area, but they are very flighty, and don't often come down to the feeders on our front verandah. But when we had our front yard landscaped recently, we took an old feeding station down and put it in the back yard. We hadn't got around to putting it on a pole, so Ken simply parked the 'house' in the branches of a leafy tree outside the kitchen window. A pair of King Parrots were the first to discover it, and have been visiting most days since we started putting seed out.

The Galahs and Corellas have also noticed it, but they seem to prefer the front verandah, which suits us, as we like to see the Rosellas and King Parrots, and they won't come down if the bigger cockatoos are on the feeder.  The Rainbow Lorikeets alternate between the back yard and front yard!
Here are the Eastern Rosellas - lots of photos because I just couldn't stop at one picture of these beautiful birds.  The bird house had fallen from the tree one day, so we parked it on top of the compost bin, but the Rosellas didn't seem to mind!

Happy productive chooks.

The chooks have all settled in well and now they have all matured and gone through a moult, they are laying eggs regularly.  One nest box clearly wasn't enough, so we called on Greg from Yummy Gardens to add another nest box to the coop.  This was so successful that within half an hour of me putting hay in the new nest box, two eggs were laid in there!

Two more Wyandotte hens.

It was chaos today in our back yard.  We had just brought home two more Wyandotte hens, and Ken had successfully wormed the white hen and put her in to the chook house.  He had the Silver Lace ready to fix, but she got out of his arms and took off!  A couple of hours later with the help of our friendly neighbours next door, their three boys managed to find the hen in our front yard, and rounded her up the path to the back yard where one of the boys was able to catch her!  We were so grateful; we'd been worried that she would have been grabbed by foxes or cats if we hadn't got her back.  I didn't get a chance to photograph them while all that was going on, so I'll do that tomorrow.  In the meantime here are some pics of the chooks bred by our friend Bruce, at his house today.

More of Bruce's chooks.

Six new hens.

Today we bought six more bantam hens from a man who breeds champion Wyandottes and other bantams. Ken chose some of his favourites including the silver lace, gold lace, and pencil lace, as well as a plain black hen.  He said he has always wanted a little black hen!  Here are some photos:

Bird happenings so far this year.

The six chooks and their rooster have made themselves at home in the new chook house and are producing three to five eggs a day -  double what they did when they lived in an aviary.  Ken is planning to buy six more hens in March, from a friend who breeds Wyandottes and Silver lace chickens.

He has bought another Princess Parrot to keep the first one company.  We were told the first one was a female so we called her Polly, but after a few months it became obvious that Polly was a Wally, so Ken got a female to keep him company, and her name is Wilma.

Last night he came home from the Avicultural Society meeting with a pair of three year old Cockatiels.  He's always liked them but never owned one, so he's happy to have a breeding pair.
Here are the cockatiels:

These are four immature Gouldian finches, just fledged from their nest and flying around, but still sticking together when they are resting or going to sleep!

Wally and Wilma, the Princess Parrots.

Bird happenings at Eltham in 2014.

Our back yard has been very busy in the last six months.  We had a new chook house built for the hens, which freed up one of the finch aviaries for Ken to move some of the finches and quails back in there.  The aviaries look dwarfed by the chook house, but there is plenty of room for the small birds we have.

This was taken just before the chook house was built, and just after we had the paths and steps newly paved.
We have had an explosion in the population of quails, one pair hatching 9 chickens ain October, and now have another brood of eight.  Both lots are silver quail (the chicks are yellow at first).

Ken sold eight silver quail to a fellow aviculturist, who has hundreds of birds in his aviaries, including some of Ken's favourite parrot, the Princess parrot, so he bought a young female and put her in the newly cleaned aviary that was supposed to house more finches!

All of our birds are doing well, with several baby canaries hatching and surviving, but although the Goldfinches and Emblemas have been nest building and sitting on eggs, so far there are no hatchings.