A week to ten days is about all that is safe for the Bourke hen. I've had Bourke Parakeets feed baby lovebirds, although only for a short time because baby lovebirds have strong beaks that can damage the beak of a Bourke hen if they are left with the Bourke for too long a period of time. Sometimes my choice of fosters isn't a lovebird. Many times, I will leave one chick with her, especially if she's had several blank clutches. Once in a while, I have a foster hen that will start feeding a foster chick after it hatches. Once the chicks hatch, I give it back to its natural mom and remove a blank egg. I don't need the foster mom to feed/fledge. I don't even care about hatch range because the object here is to give the chicks a chance to hatch and to keep the natural mother sitting on eggs. The eggs to be fostered may or may not end up in the same nest. I take all the fertile eggs and replace them with blanks. A hen with a blank clutch is wonderful for this. If the natural parents will care for the chicks once they have hatched, I simply pick a hen with eggs in her nest. A good pair of foster parents or an incubator are the only solutions to this problem. The chick isn't ready for the egg to be opened so it dies. Removing the outer calcium shell allows moisture inside the egg to evaporate so everything dries out. The chick is so close to hatching, yet so far away. This kind of fostering is always my last choice because it involves the highest risk.Īn egg-peeling hen is a real challenge! I have no good explanation as to why this happens but it does. If, by chance, they hatch, the babies will be very small in comparison to the other chicks in the box so the hen may not even notice them, let alone, feed them. With other babies in the nest hatching first, the environment in the nestbox can become just unclean enough so that the fostered babies will die in the shell. Placing foster eggs in the nest of a hen whose own babies are due to hatch ahead of the foster eggs is my last course of action. I know this in advance, so I can pull those babies for handfeeding. Most foster hens usually won't kill chicks that hatch ahead of their own, but nor will they usually feed chicks that hatch too early. Given no other option, I place the eggs so that they will hatch ahead of the foster hen's own chicks. When I have to foster in this situation, I may or may not have the choice of placing the eggs within their own hatch range. If the egg is candled and the inside still has a reddish coloring, the chick is alive and capable of surviving. The unhatched chick is still hours away from being ready to hatch, so it dies.Įven eggs that have cooled to room temperature can still possibly hatch if moved to another nest. Or, an egg starts to pip (hatch) and the hen removes just the hard calcium shell. This can be very frustrating! The hen laid a clutch of eggs, sat well for the first 18 days of incubation time and then abandoned the eggs, most of which are fertile. Reason 2 - A hen that is a poor brooder or a hen that peels her eggs Crop milk is only produced for a certain amount of time, so hatch range is important. Most hens won't feed babies that hatch too far ahead/behind their own babies. The eggs that are being moved need to hatch within the same time frame as the foster hen's own eggs. You have the option of fostering fertile eggs to a hen with less than 4 fertile eggs in her own box or you can wait for the chicks to start hatching and actually foster babies. Reason 1 - More than 4 fertile eggs/babies in a nestbox If I'm out of range, again, I will have to foster at some point. Any egg to be fostered must be within the hatch range as those eggs already in the nestbox.If I foster to a nest that has more fertile eggs than there should be, I usually have to foster from that nest to another one at some point. No more than 4 chicks or potential chicks in a nestbox. Too big an age difference between babies so that the larger chicks get most of the food and the younger ones would die because they are too small to compete.A hen that is a poor brooder or a hen that peels her eggs.More than 4 fertile eggs/babies in one nestbox.I have had an excellent success rate with this technique as long as I stay within certain criteria. Whenever I have a problem pair, the easiest solution for me is to use "foster" parents. However, I find that I have fewer problems using lovebirds whose parents have had full control of their upbringing. That's not to say that mature, handfed birds can't be used in a breeding program because they most certainly can. From my own experience, the best lovebird parents were parent raised and fledged. Not all pairs of lovebirds are good parents, nor should just any pairs be used for breeding.
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