Remember after Jenga’s horrible death the kids decided that we should welcome some love birds into the empty cage. After a rather disastrous search for these love birds on an island three islands away that involved Amory’s front tooth joining all the other treasure at the bottom of our ocean we found love birds.
Each child chose one. As we only have 5 children (only?) we only brought home 5 love birds.
“But they mate for life,” said David, “you can’t have one bird on his own.”
I reassured him that the fisherman who sold me the birds said 5 was fine. I assumed he would have tried to sell me 6 if 5 was not fine. But as time went by I fear David was right (David is always right.) The little blue bird sat by himself.
After a few months Wesley came back from school having made a Love Shack in carpentry for the birds.
“Now they will breed and the blue one will no longer be alone,” he said.
As if, I thought to myself.
Low and behold it worked. Yellow and Green did naughty things together in the shack and teeny tiny eggs appeared.
After an exhausting few weeks of Mama sitting on her eggs one of them hatched. It actually hatched. And out crept the smallest ball of grey fluff.
But now the trouble started. Papa bird would not let any one near the shack, with Mama and baby inside. He even tried to stop the other birds getting near the food, he was so intent on plumping up his baby. The blue bird and the others got thinner and thinner. Papa, Mama and baby bird got fatter and fatter.
David began to call them Hate Birds.
Baby bird’s grey fur coat is now changing to green, like his father, and each day he gets bolder, coming to the front of the shack peering out into the world. Each day the Blue bird watches, alone from his perch, across the cage. Any day now I reckon fat baby will be out of the shack and who do you think he is going to pair up with?
We’ll have to wait and see.
We breed birds. You really should take the breeding pair and their babies out of the main cage and put them alone in another cage, preferably in another room. The stress of being with the other birds could adversely affect the babies as well as their parents.
Hope they do well.
We will certainly look into that. Thank you. Of course we never thought we would really ever breed the birds!
You are the greatest, India! Love reading your adventures! Good for you to raise lovebirds with the family. Hope you get it right, like the breeder said, and all the little birds will live happily ever after!!
Birds are the best…
Now, you will be a lovebird breeder……LOL.
Enjoy and keep us posted….
oh but now I need to know if the blue bird ever gets a companion. *sigh*
Do tell us if the little blue bird has a friend now. . . BTW, we are an Expat family of 4 living in the Abacos on Elbow Cay (Hope Town)!