Greg and Kat's blog

So for the past month I’ve been on a mission. I have several adult House Finches that I caught last year in our aviary. Since I need a small army of juvenile House Finches this year for my research, I thought that I should try to breed the adults that I have. Now, I spent the entire time that I was in Vancouver breeding Zebra Finches, but that’s easy. They’re pet shop birds that breed readily in cages. But, I figured it was worth a shot with these birds.

So I set out to try to breed my House Finches. I’ve seen a couple of birds nesting on man-made platform-type structures: under awnings, in light fixtures around campus, and of course in trees. Well, each of our flight cages within our aviary has an old Christmas tree in it, but I wasn’t sure they’d nest in those. So I built 1’x1′ platforms for them and hung them from the ceiling of each flight cage. I also provided them with hay in these small open wire cages hoping that maybe they’d use them as nestboxes.

After 2-3 weeks, I was starting to get discouraged. They’re totally ignoring my beautiful platforms, and only 1 of the 5 pairs built a nest cup in the small open wire cages. Then I noticed that in all of the cages, the hay level was WAY lower than it was when I first put the hay in. Hmmmm…. where the heck did the hay go?

Go figure, they’re nesting in the trees! Heh. I think I’ve worked on Zebra Finches for too long. So I have 1 nest with 5 eggs and another nest cup, but no eggs yet. That makes 2 nest cups and 1 full nest! I haven’t been able to find the nests in the other 2 cages, but those Christmas trees are pretty dense, so they could be in there somewhere!

So yes, I am an avian matchmaker! 🙂