Of all the birds I keep I do not colony breed. With the exception of two pair of Gouldians per flight everything else is bred in single pairs. This is not to say colonies don’t work, it is saying it is not necessary.
The example is that if you have five pairs of a particular species in an aviary at the end of the year do you really know
- what has bred,
- what has had two or three nests,
- how many young has a particular pair bred,
- and what has not bred.
If you breed single pairs of species per aviary you know exactly what has happened in a particular season.
The most likely scenario for people who breed a colony of a particular species with another colony of species is hybridization. If you lose the odd bird from one species and the odd bird from another species, the likelihood of these odd birds pairing with the other odd birds is far greater and the unwanted hybrids will come from these pairings. If you breed single pairs and you lose one bird of a pair you know this very soon and are able to rectify the situation by providing a new partner or removing the odd partner.
If you lose a particular bird, do not be afraid to introduce a new partner because pair bonding only lasts until a new partner is introduced. A lot of people say finches pair for life, this is not true, as I have found in my experience if a bird is healthy and fit and loses its partner, it does not spend the rest of its life alone but will take the first mate that comes along.
Finches all over the world usually are a flock bird from just a few pairs to maybe flocks of hundreds or even thousands. If in the flock situation, a hawk or another predator attacks that flock and kills a bird, does the surviving partner of that bird take a new mate or does it not. I say it does.
In addition to this, if you have a particular pair that are bonded but are not breeding for example they may not be laying fertile eggs or just not really compatible, if you break that pair and put them with new partners this will be okay as long as you move the original pair as far away from each other as possible because an adjoining flight is not far enough. They will still sit side by side at the wire, but removed from each other and given new partners this will almost certainly prove fruitful for at least one of the pair. You will then be in a position to work out which of the birds was the problem as far as breeding goes.
In the single pair situation if a species breeds it is then up to the breeder as to how long the birds stay in with the parents. Early in the season I choose to take the young out of the aviary at least after the second nest has flown. This is obviously long enough for the birds to be with their parents as the parents’ attention goes to the new brood. It is not really a matter of 5-6 weeks as a standard, but when the parents have fledged the second nest. Towards the end of the season I will leave the young in with the parents longer, if overcrowding is not a problem. Of all the birds I keep, I don’t have any that are aggressive towards the previous young birds. Most times the previous young are removed from the parents sooner rather than later, to avoid the young being a distraction to the parents going back to nest if the parents have not already done so.
In the colony how do you ever work this out?
The colony young cannot be identified as positively as the young from a single pair. This is important for making up future pairs. It is very difficult to establish their parentage and blood lines if you don’t know exactly who the parents are.