too long. Overgrown claws can drag nesting material from the nest – and chicks along with it. We both inspect our nest-boxes regularly to make sure that all is well, but we stop looking once youngsters have been close rung – and certainly before they are 12 days old. This is to avoid chicks leaving the nest before they are mature enough to do so safely. It is normal for strong, feathered, healthy zebra finch chicks to leave the nest-box and return. Eventually, when they are fully fledged they leave for good. If a hen wants to get on with the next clutch of eggs before the chicks have left the nest- box, we either remove the eggs and foster them to another pair or add an extra nest-box so that the hen and her eggs can be in one while the chicks are in the other. You may see the parents start to pluck the feathers out of their youngsters. Primarily, this is to drive them away from the nest, but also can have a secondary purpose – to gather feathers for nesting material.
For the past few years we have both used cardboard nest-boxes. In our opinion, these are the finest addition to the range of zebra finch breeding equipment in the recent past. We can list the advantages – they are relatively cheap; they are supplied as flat packs and are easy to unfold and make into boxes; at the end of a breeding round they can be thrown away; you do not have to wash and disinfect them (as you do with wooden boxes); they come with breeding record cards printed on their sides and they do not take up a lot of storage space in the bird room for 6 months every year. The only disadvantage we have found is that the hole used to hang them up can wear. To counteract this, we fix them with screws that have large heads. If nails are used for hanging the cardboard nest-boxes they need to be set at an angle of 45 degrees so that the boxes slide down them and stay firmly in place. We will now list other zebra finch nest-box types
Cardboard nest box attached to a breeding cage
Pack of cardboard nest boxes
18 BIRD SCENE
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