Finch parents

A couple of weeks ago a nice girl (who reads my blog) came up and bought this beautiful blue-backed female gouldian finch from me.





When she emailed me, she asked if I also had a non-crested female society finch available. I thought I had 7 society finches - 4 males and 3 females, but when I went in the aviary to search, I only found 2 females and they were both crested. I was puzzled, but decided that my missing female must have been one of the two that I gave to a neighbor. Naturally, the day after the gouldian was picked up by her new owner, my "missing" female society finch showed up. She had been sitting tight in one of the nest boxes. I dragged the ladder into the aviary to peek at what she had going and there were 2 brand new hatchlings in the nest - one society finch and one gouldian finch. Even as new hatchlings, it's easy to tell the difference between the two. Gouldian babies have very unusual blue mouth spots which society finches don't have. I didn't take a photo of them that day, but the photo below shows some newly hatched gouldian finches & you can see the mouth spots.





Well, even though one of the kids was obviously not hers, I was fully confident that my society finches would take good care of both babies. They are wonderful foster parents and many gouldian finch breeders also keep society finches on hand to raise abandoned gouldian finch babies (gouldian parents are sometimes a bit undependable).


Fast forward a couple of weeks - both babies doing fine - photo below...





Two days ago I saw a pair of gouldians going in and out of this same nest box. Hmm, this might not be good. If they had taken over the nest (and it looked like they had), I was pretty sure they wouldn't be feeding the society finch baby. Society finch babies have a much smaller mouth, no bright blue markings and they do a very strange twisting of the neck thing when they are begging for food. I couldn't imagine that the gouldians would handle that wierdness.


So, again with the ladder and sure enough the gouldian baby's crop was full and the society finch was empty. I mixed up some baby bird formula and fed him. I left him in the nest box, hoping that the society parents would get back in to feed him. No luck - that day I went in every couple of hours and fed him. Today I gave up hope that the society parents would re-claim the nest, so I removed the society baby and took over as mommy.





He's very cute, as you can see!


society finches