FEATURE
continue experiencing the foods that they use to rear their youngsters during the summer months and what is more is that they seem to like the variety supplied over the four day period. There can be problems with intestinal
round worms with most Australian parakeets, these worms build up in the intestine and live on the digested food passing through the intestine. As just one worm can produce 2,000 eggs in a year it is easy to realise how a large infestation can build up on the floor of an aviary. Worm eggs are similar to turtle eggs (but very much smaller) in as much as they have a rubbery shell that stays viable on a damp aviary floor for many months. To mitigate this problem to some degree I have built aviaries with a dry sand floor (located under a glass fibre roof) so that the worm eggs dry up as soon as they land on the dry sand. My birds still have access to rain as the ends of the flights have an overhang similar to raised flights, this is not covered by glass fibre sheeting. In this area the droppings containing the worm eggs drop outside the aviary. This design has worked very well for many years, I still worm my collection using a syringe to dose the birds directly into the crop and at present for an Australian King I use 2.5% Panacur diluted 5 parts water to 1 part Panacur. One King receives 2 cc’s of this wormer. Panacur has proved a reliable wormer for many years and it has the distinct
advantage that birds can accept doses above those recommended with the likelihood of little effect on the bird. So to sum up if you design your aviaries to mitigate as far as possible the effects of worms and you also worm your birds twice a year you should avoid the loss of your valuable hobbyist breeding stock from this terrible scourge. Australian Kings will breed when they
are two years old, and I have bred from young cocks that were not in full colour. When the young leave the nest box they are feathered as the adult hen and I love to see the young cocks gradually develop over a number of years into their adult colouration. After a good breeding season I will however use DNA feather sexing to inform me of the sexes of the youngsters. This then allows me to know what I have bred, if I had 6 youngsters and they were all DNA sexed as cocks I would then know that I needed to obtain some hens! Young Kings are very tolerant of other parakeets and I am quite happy to house them in a mixed aviary (obviously no nest boxes present!) for a couple of years whilst they are ‘grown on’ they rarely show aggression to their aviary colleagues.
When the young leave the nest box they are feathered as the adult hen and I love to see the young cocks gradually develop over a number of years into their adult colouration.
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