Roger The Rooster and his Hens

Okay, so these aren't native Australian birds, but they are still in our back yard!  Roger is a young Wyandotte rooster. 

These two are Rhode Island Red hens.  We hatched them from eggs that were given to us by a chook breeding friend.  They always hang around together, so cute!

The white hen is a Columbian.  Not a good angle, but it's hard to photograph the chooks, they are always on the move, especially when they see us stalking them with our cameras!

Little Corellas

Little Corellas come into our yard now and then. There are flocks of them around here most of the time, and I guess they have a multitude of back yards to choose from to find food, either in the trees or put out for them by humans. I have a new camera, so I took these photos with it through the tinted window that looks out onto our front porch. My old camera didn't do a very good job, but I'm quite pleased with these photos.

King Parrot in our front yard.

There are a pair of these King Parrots that turn up every now and then to snack at our feeding station.  We've seen them around in other people's yards, so we think they are local residents who do a little tour of the bird friendly houses around here.  They are quite tame, and probably used to having their photo taken, as he didn't even flinch when the flash went off.  The last  photo here was taken when he came within a foot of me to perch on the fence, but unfortunately I'd been messing around with the setttings on my camera, so the colour is all wrong....waaaah!

Canaries and Gouldian Finches

Ken has decided to devote his aviaries to Gouldian Finches and Canaries (with one aviary set aside as a home for the chooks).

He sold all the budgies and Zebra Finches to free up aviary space, so he now has two aviaries with nest boxes in for breeding pairs of Gouldians, one aviary for the juveniles when they've fledged and can feed themselves, and one for mutations. Here he is trying to catch up birds to transfer them to their new homes...it takes him ages, they are like tiny missiles!

He has two pairs of canaries, each pair in separate aviaries with Gouldians, as they are quite compatible. The Canaries use open baskets to lay their eggs - hard to believe she will raise her babies in here once they hatch, but they do!   This one is sitting on eggs.

In the other aviary, three chicks are hatched and growing fast.

Mum has a job trying to feed them all!

The Gouldians use enclosed nest boxes, so there is no competition for nesting space.  Little face peering out of this nest box.  Ken has numbered the four boxes so he can keep track of who's who.

These two are so called mutations, with a white chest instead of purple or mauve.
  They can have black or red heads.

My camera doesn't always record the colour properly, but this photo has captured the purple chest on this male very well.  Notice his head is neither red nor black, but a shade of orange, which is also happens occasionally in breeding mixed pairs.

This photo taken at the sunny end of the aviary shows the brilliance of the red heads on these white breasted birds.

We spend hours out here on a weekend, just watching our beautiful birds!

King parrots

I don't know what woke us up at 8 am on Sunday, but whatever it was, we were grateful! On opening curtains to see what caused us to wake so suddenly, we saw a pair of King Parrots on the feeding station. Ken opened the door very quietly, and they didn't seem to worry, so he was able to put some more seed out there while they sat and watched. The male bird has the bright red chest, with a dash of light green on his dark green wing. Lovely!

Gouldian Finches, and Rhode Island Red chickens.

We 'adopted' some fertile eggs from a friend who breeds various kinds of chooks, and two Rhode Island Red chickens hatched out a month ago.  We think we have a rooster and a hen.  Foster Mum is a Columbian, although you'd never know from this angle!

Our flock of juvenile (under 12 months old) Gouldians are very healthy, and their colours are coming through now.

The bird with the white chest at the top left is a mutation. Some people deliberately breed Gouldians like this, but we didn't. The parent bird may have come from a breeder that had some white-chested birds in his aviaries.
The other two on the top perch look like they will be females, as their colours are muted compared to the males. The bird on the bottom perch at the right is from the last lot to hatch and is still too young to be showing any colours.

Our flock of Gouldian Finches

To anyone who is still visiting this blog, sorry it has been so long since I posted anything. Ken has made quite a few changes to the aviaries. He has sold most of the budgies, leaving only half a dozen, and they seem to be much happier now there is less of them in that aviary.
He has also sold all the Zebra finches except for four Charcoal finches, which have already hatched four eggs last month. They are in the same aviary as the four Canaries (two breeding pairs), but they haven't been successful in hatching the eggs they have laid.
The Gouldians are our success story. One of the reasons Ken sold the finches was to free up a second aviary for all the juvenile Gouldians we now have. So we now have three adult breeding pairs in one aviary (and they have four babies and more eggs at this moment), and 13 juveniles in the adjoining aviary.

Red headed male Gouldians.

Black headed male, red headed male, and a female in a very unusual position! She was preening herself just as I pressed the camera button! There is a red headed male just behind her.

Some of the juveniles. They are all about six months old except the male on the top perch, second from the left. He is about one year old, and has coloured up, but is going through his first moult. The young ones are just starting to colour up (it takes about a year) from their initial fawny feathers, to the green on their backs. The bright colours will start showing in little patches from now on, but we won't be able to tell which are male and female until they have coloured up completely.