Wow John 10 birds! They must make a racket in the morning! No need for an alarm clock. My tenants complained when the other tenants had had only two of those, don't know which kind, maybe budgies?

I know exactly what you mean! I put extra nappies in her "corner" at those times. I Also get her off her eggs (by pulling the cage bottom in and out a bit) and to perch early in the am then have a few nappies and hold it under her and encourage her to "go" .... takes a bit to train, but worth the effort to save washing the cage every morning.
Ya the egg binding has me scared also. Once Angel got up and an egg was partly out and smashed all over her bottom. Thankfully it was expelled, and I put a large plate of water for her to wash in.

Algis, sounds like it might be Budgies... or Lovebirds. They both can make a lot of racket. The Cockatiels are relatively quite unless they want out. Then the screaming begins. But let me tell you, after hearing Kiwi, even the loudest Cockatiel scream seems faint by comparison. Kiwi can freaking burst our ear drums when he cranks it all the way up (especially at feeding time). He often pushes my patience, LOL. He's so moody with me too, that I've decided Cockatiels are more my type. They are all so sweet and only want attention - never are mean. With Kiwi I need a bird psychologist, LOL.

JoAnn, I seem to remember reading that a plate of warm water can help the bird too. I tried that with Buddy when I thought that might be the problem, but no go. For all I know she might have had cancer or something. It just all seemed so sudden, and, well, like I said - lesson learned. Hopefully my other babies will live long and healthy lives. Since three of our Tiels are so young we're going to try and keep them on a better diet of both seed and veggies/fruit. Kiwi requires that in his diet (it's almost 50% actually) so it's easy to give them a little bit of it. Baby and Jasmine are already so old that they only hiss at anything but seed, so I've given up on them - but maybe when they see the others eating it they'll give it a try. They will, after all, hiss at anything at first. I just need to be persistent and patient with them.

How old is your oldest Tiel?

Another thing I have read, never tried, is to get some olive oil around the cloaca*, to help release the egg. Also a heating pad under the cage bottom.
Dusty the oldest is 17 this yr, Angel the layer, I've had since 2000 and not sure how hold she is. Someone found her walking a busy shopping area, and I ended up taking her in, cause I'd just had to put Chi Chi down a month before. Kidney tumor. She made it to 16yrs.

Wow, so these guys do live a long while. I didn't think most would live past 15. That's why I really want to get mine off a pure seed diet. How much would you estimate you're giving yours? 70% seed and 30% veggies/fruit or what?

I keep a dish of seed in all the time/no red millet. They go to the veggie dish first. so cant give you a percentage.
Their favorite is that very thin dry egg noodles, love it.
Also once a week they get a drop of iodine( from the vets!!) in the water to prevent goiter, and occasional some Prime vitimins.
I watch the tiel seed mixes, if way too many sunflower seed, I buy just a bag of budgie seed and add it to gether.
I make up 14 coop cups on a sunday for the week.
I vary the shape and size of veggies,
carrots either rice size or 1/2" and very thin
broccoli,cauliflower chopped
hard boiled egg chopped- if yolk has sulpher(black) remove.
chopped cooked chiken etc.
beet tops, parsly, lettuce, spinach,peas from garden
frozen corn
grain bread
they wont eat fruit. One tiel I had loved grapes, ended up diabetic and had to put her down.

That's excellent... thanks JoAnn

I meant to post about this earlier, but we have grown our flock a bit more. We felt so bad for the two we left behind, we had to adopt them as well. All said and done, we now have a full flock and this is IT... no more. LOL

We have so many, we had to go buy them a large parrot size cage.

Meet the crew...



I'm fairly positive Daisy and Peanut are sisters. It's possible that Ginger is their sister also, and Clover might be too. But Lucky is definitely not related. All the ones I named are young, under 8 months. The other two, Jasmine/'Baby' are both 8 and 6 years respectively if my math is right.

Peanut is by far the sweetest in the bunch... he/she is also a whistler, which makes us now think it's a male. Still hard to tell. I've had females whistle at a young age some before.

As I said, Peanut is the sweetest Tiel we've ever had. Our neighbors want to bird-nap her. How could you not love this face?

ohhh, what wonderful shots you got theres. beautiful.