pair have produced three youngsters which are all hens so that will give me four pairs three of which will be unrelated. When breeding birds if possible I do not


like to disturb their breeding activity and would rather let the birds ‘get on with it’, fortunately with this pair on this occasion this policy worked well because when I did look there were five babies in the nest these were only I would guess 12 days old and there were no infertile eggs remaining so I can only conclude that five eggs were the clutch, which is about normal for Pennant’s. Over the past few years I have been close ringing more and more of my birds with Avian I D rings and


I decided to ring any young Pennant’s that I was lucky enough to breed during this year, the correct size being ‘P’. As I had bred quite a few Cockatiels I was short of ‘P’ sized rings but had plenty of the slightly smaller ‘N’ size. Rings are measured by their inside diameter ‘P’ being 5.99 mm and ‘N’ 5.33 mm so I used the ‘N’ rings and they seem to fit really well. When I went into the flight and made a further nest box inspection, there were still the five fine young babies about ten days old which looked just a little too small to ring so I quickly departed, after four days I returned armed with the rings and a sharpened matchstick which comes in handy to help


24 BIRD SCENE


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