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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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!<\/p>\n
So yes, I am an avian matchmaker! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}