Cockatiel Egg and Chick Thread

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Checked the eggs again tonight. Egg A, the one that I patched last night, is dead :( The inside of the egg looks dull and there's a blood ring, which forms when the embryo dies. I don't know if it died because of the chip on the egg (seems unlikely since it was there for less than 24 hours and I was already wondering if the chick was alive the night before the chip formed) or just died for some reason.

However, Egg E, the one that was laid 2 days ago has the *tiniest* little heartbeat in it. I had to look really, really close, but I could see a teeeeeny bit of movement. There aren't even visible veins yet. I'm guessing that tomorrow night I'll be able to see some veins! 2 days is really early to see an embryo anyway, I only saw it because I was looking really hard. I also saw the baby in Egg D, which is the most developed egg (it's due to hatch in only 10-13 days!) moving around some. I couldn't see body parts, but I could see shadows moving. Cool!

So we still have 4 confirmed fertile eggs. Poppet hasn't laid another yet but I think she may tomorrow.
 
Hi Raspberry :) Cockatiel genetics are very interesting. I don't know if either bird carries another mutation (which is what the colorings/patterns are called, it doesn't mean anything bad), but if they do, they're sex linked mutations. Assuming Arthur's just a normal grey and Poppet is just a Lutino, all of the babies will be normal greys like Arthur, but the boys will carry the Lutino gene. If Arthur carries the Lutino gene (which is possible, he came from a small birds only pet store that bred their own birds and he was one of the only normal grey birds- the others were all different), then half the babies will be greys and half will be Lutinos. If Arthur carries the gene for the mutations of cinnamon or pearl, then all of the boys will be grey, half of the girls will be grey, and the other half of the girls will be whatever the mutation is. So it's not unlikely that we'd end up with most of the babies looking like Arthur, none of the babies looking like Poppet, then a baby or two that looks like neither of them! The funny thing is that because of how the sex linked mutations work, if Arthur was the Lutino and Poppet the normal grey, all of the girl babies would look like Arthur and all of the boy babies would look like Poppet.

Sorry, long answer that may not have been very clear, but, in short... I expect all the babies to look like Arthur :)
 
Donna, I want to just flash forward a couple weeks and have the chicks be here! Better yet, flash forward 3 months so I know the chicks hatched and grew up just fine. I'll be a little sad if some of the eggs don't hatch, but be much sadder if some of the chicks die :( I really hope we get at least one baby birdy out of this. I miss my wonderful tiel, Little Bird (he died several years ago), and with plenty of handling, these babies could easily turn out as sweet as he was.

Maria, the chicks will be parent raised. I don't have the skills to handfeed and there's no one to teach me. If the parents don't feed the babies, of course I'll try to step in. I could see feeding them by hand some when they're three or so weeks old- they're much less likely to aspirate or any of the dozens of things that can go wrong with handfeeding then. Tiny chicks are so delicate and it's so easy to kill them :( Even though the chicks will be raised by their parents, I plan to handle them a lot so they'll be sweet. Handle them every day for just a minute or so when they're tiny, then when they're 2 or 3 weeks old, handle them for longer periods of time every day. Hand feeding alone doesn't make birds tame- some people with lots of baby birds hand feed them, but only spend time with them when they're being fed so that doesn't really result in super tame babies.
 
I have been following this. My aunt and uncle used to raise them. They hand fed all their babies. My aunt spent more time with them than the parents.
 
Tonight's egg update! Egg E, the one that I saw nothing but the *tiniest* little bitty bit of a speck moving in 2 nights ago, now has lots of little veins and a wiggly embryo! The other three fertile eggs are developing nicely too :D In the older eggs I could see shadows of the baby moving around. The first egg is now halfway through its incubation! The chick inside looks something like this now: http://animalscience.ucdavis.edu/research/parrot/c/c08.htm

Tomorrow the chick will grow down feathers all over its body!

Alicia, I'm sure those babies were super sweet, too :D Little Bird was rescued by his parents at 3 days old- she opened the nest box to find that the parents had already killed the other chicks and were working on killing him. I actually got to see and hold him when he was 10 days old- didn't know I'd be taking him home then- and he still had a gigantic scab on his back from the attack. I don't know how he survived it! So he was hand raised from three days on. He spent most of his time with the breeder and was so incredibly sweet and well socialized!
 
I gotta say.... AWWWWWW!

I just read this thread from top to tail... what neat birds!
That's awesome that you are actually able to monitor embryo growth and help Poppet out with her eggs a bit.

I LOLd at the flight suits. Those are absolutely ingenious. That would totally sell me on having a bird :D

Looking forward to all the updates.. I hope you put up a cockatiel cam when the babies hatch.. heck, now would be good too :)
 
Autumn, I'm glad you're enjoying the thread :) I love the flight suits too! They're so practical. I hate being pooped on and having poop everywhere (bird poop is messier than bunny poop), so the flight suits are great. A lot of birds won't accept them right off the bat so you have to work with them, but it's worth it. Birdy likes it too if it means he gets so spend more time out of the cage :)

Today in egg news, the oldest chick is 13 days old and is now covered in down! He will hatch in just 5-8 more days! I'm a little anxious now because it was at this stage 8 years ago when Michaela died suddenly and left Arthur and her eggs behind. Everything was going so well until then :( Her death was an utter shock- I rushed her to the vet because she was kind of teetery, the vet gave her a calcium injection and said she'd be fine and we could bring her home in the morning. He called in the morning to say she'd died :( I was so heartbroken, but not as much as poor Arthur who did a wonderful job of incubating the eggs all by himself for a few days before he gave up because he missed Michaela. I tried to keep the eggs warm with a heating pad, warm crockery bowl and towel, and even putting them in my shirt (they need to be 98 degrees) for a day before I found a breeder to take them. The breeder came right over that afternoon to take the eggs home to her pair of experienced birds with infertile eggs, but they never hatched :( There were so many things that could have gone wrong in the previous couple of days. We ended up cracking the eggs open and saw 6 perfect little yellow down covered babies. I really hope poor Arthur actually gets to be a daddy this time around because he tried so hard last time and I'm sure he remembers it!
 
A cockatiel cam would be great, but I don't have any way to do that! The nest box is pretty much completely dark inside and also I don't have a web cam :) I will take some videos of the chicks once they hatch though!
 
I'm not a big fan of birds - but this thread is so fascinating.

I look for it every day at least once to see if it is updated...
 
Peg, it's funny that you don't like birds because you seem like you'd be a good bird person :) I'll bet if you had a really sweet bird, you would be absolutely in love with it! In any case, I'm glad you're reading along :)

Egg update for today: Oh my gosh! The oldest egg is 15 days today! That means we could have a chick here in as little as 3 days :shock: It will probably be more like 6 though. Maybe 7. It all depends on how warm the eggs are kept and when exactly the parents started to incubate :) The big milestone for the oldest chick is that today his intestines will be pulled into his body. Exciting! I'll probably candle them one more time tomorrow morning, then knock it off until the chick hatches. The chick has to peck its way out of the egg in a certain way, and can get disoriented if the egg is moved too much. If he gets disoriented, he may not peck the egg in the right direction and could die :( A lot of breeders monitor chicks that are in the process of hatching and candle them a couple times a day to make sure everything's going well, but I'm too nervous about disorienting the chick!
 
Oh and here are a couple Youtube videos of cockatiel babies moving in their eggs:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrGbn4fP8Ws&feature=related[/ame]

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQt9jz-1KR0&feature=related[/ame]

It's even cooler in person!
 
Oh gosh, I would fail at being a breeder because I'd keep all the babies. I put a little Craigslist post up just to see if anyone would be interested in baby cockatiels and explained that we're still about 3 months away from when the chicks would be ready to go and that there may not even be any chicks that need homes (like if none of them hatch or... uh... we decide to keep them all). That was a couple of hours ago and I've got 2 replies so far. I was a resident assistant when I lived in the dorms on campus, and one of the people who replied was actually one of the girls on my floor! I'm going to be SO picky about choosing people who will love and take care of MY babies for the rest of their (up to 40 years long) lives.

I know that every good breeder really wants to find their babies great homes. Of course! I'm not trying to pretend like these babies are more special than any other babies or more worthy of love. But I already feel so darned attached to the little things and they haven't even hatched. Birds are different than kitties or doggies because with mammals, you may suspect or even know that they're pregnant, but with birds, there is no doubt. Once those little eggs are laid, you can hold them in your hand. You can peek into the egg with a flashlight and see the tiny heartbeat and the baby wiggling around. Then sometimes when the chick is ready to hatch, you have to actually help it out if its shell. It isn't unusual either for chicks to rely 100% on humans from right when they hatch if the parents don't take care of them. It's interesting. I mean, no doubt I'd looooove the babies if my bunny had babies (and I'd be even less likely to be able to part with them), but I already feel so connected to these babies!
 
WHEW! Just had a moment of terror with Arthur. I decided to clip their toe nails since the chicks will be hatching soon and pointy nails can tear up their thin skin. Arthur is molting right now and has new flight feathers which I can't clip yet because they're still full of blood. When I clipped his last toe nail, he flew off my finger... and landed right on the front of the rat cage. As you can imagine, all 3 rats immediately converged on him. I screamed his name while launching off the couch and batted him off the cage with the bath towel I'd had on my lap. Might seem weird, but split second decision making said that I could swing the towel and hit him (gently) with it quicker than I could grab him with my hands since I was a few feet away. The towel knocked him off the cage and he fluttered to the ground. All in all, he was on the cage for probably less than a second. In that amount of time, Saskia already had ahold of his tail feathers and the other girls were grabbing him too! Thankfully, I checked him over and he doesn't seem to have any injuries. He didn't even lose any feathers. I'm a little concerned because about a minute after I picked him up, he shook his head and some liquid droplets came out (and got on my face and mouth, naturally). I think he had just been drinking water and it was still in his crop, so when he landed a bit got in his throat. This happened to Arthur's previous mate, Luca (only much worse, he was wheezing and choking) twice and Luca was okay after a couple minutes, so hopefully Arthur will be fine too! It's better than the alternative of the rats biting his foot off or something. Oh and Arthur was sitting on my finger, moving his head around as I scratched his neck about a minute later. I don't think he really knows what happened!

Just had to share my scary bird moment. That's a great example of why I clip their wings!
 
Tonight's egg update:

I candled them all again even though I just did it this morning. I was concerned about the dead egg breaking and contaminating the healthy eggs, and a breeder on a cockatiel forum told me to remove any eggs that were fertilized but then died for that very reason. She also showed me exactly how to tell if an egg has died. So I got another look at the egg that I patched, and it's definitely dead. Took a peek at the others too just to make sure everything is okay since I know for sure what dead ones look like! The 4 other eggs are nice and healthy with movin' babies :)

I removed the dead egg and the egg that was from their original clutch that I thought may have developed a tiny bit and then died. I was curious, so I put on rubber gloves and opened the eggs. The egg from the last clutch did indeed have a teeny, tiny little embryo in it... Only 2 or 3 days old. The embryo in the patched egg had eyes and a little bitty beak and wings. It died at about 6 days. Amazing how much more developed it was than the other egg, it was about 10 times bigger! It was sad opening the eggs, but interesting and I'm glad I took them out of the nest because they were pretty stinky inside.
 
SnowyShiloh wrote:
But I already feel so darned attached to the little things and they haven't even hatched. Birds are different than kitties or doggies because with mammals, you may suspect or even know that they're pregnant, but with birds, there is no doubt.

I mean, no doubt I'd looooove the babies if my bunny had babies (and I'd be even less likely to be able to part with them), but I already feel so connected to these babies!
Click to expand...
The minute I can see/feel babies kicking in mama's belly - I get the same way you are now. Those babies are now "my" babies and I wonder..."is it a girl? a boy? Will it have a sweet personality? be a diva?"

Even at 3 weeks old now - I can tell you about my babies' personalities thus far. There is a doe that has nice type for this age (she has the widest head and body of the does)...and she is a sweetheart. The two bucks are both sweeties too - but two of the does are more "diva" and a bit "standoffish". They will allow pets - they just don't "Crave" them like the others do.

So trust me - I understand how attached you can feel to them.
 
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