FEATURE T


hese enchanting little Australian parakeets have been enjoyed by tens of thousands of bird


enthusiasts for 175 years as they came into Europe in the 1840’s and proved a prolific breeder. At their most popular there was an estimated million being kept as pets and breeding birds in the UK. The colour of the wild Budgerigar in Australia is light green they are 18 cm long and weigh 26 to 29 grams. As an inhabitant of the arid central belt of Australia their main diet is dried seeds which they find from searching the ground and dried up tussocks of grasses. Flocks of Budgerigars are always on the move in the wild as food is often scarce, as is water. To be able to breed in the wild they need to find a locality where it has recently rained for a few days which will allow the grasses to grow quickly and produce the much needed green soft seeds to feed to their babies as soon as they are hatched. Like the majority of psittacines they nest in cavities in trees laying white shelled eggs so that they can be seen in the dark of the hole. Four or five eggs are a normal sized clutch and laying occurs


every other day so it takes ten days to lay a clutch of five eggs. The incubation period is normally twenty-one days. Only the hen incubates which usually commences after the third egg appears and therefore the chicks hatch on different days and quite a size range of babies are found in the nest; Budgerigars are good parents even the last hatched survives possibly because this has a higher pitched call which the hen hunts out and feeds she also protects the smallest from being crushed or suffocated by its larger siblings. The young Budgerigars grow quickly in the wild and leave the nest site, normally a cavity in a tree, within six weeks fully able to join the flock and move on to a new locality when the food source diminishes. In captivity these timings are replicated but obviously they do not need to ‘move on’. The colour of the wild Budgerigar in Australia is light green, however with so many being bred each year it was not surprising that colour mutations developed and through controlled breeding in cages these new colours were rapidly produced.


Flocks of Budgerigars are always on the move in the wild as food is often scarce, as is water. To be able to breed in the wild they need to find a locality where it has recently rained for a few days which will allow the grasses to grow quickly and produce the much needed green soft seeds to feed to their babies as soon as they are hatched.


BIRD SCENE 07


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48