A Finch on Each Shoulder

by Heather Flowers

Last Christmas, one of my lifetime ambitions was realised. I was given my very own aviary. Sure, it had to be collected from the back of beyond and it needed a fair bit of work doing to it and it was just a smallish hexagonal jobby but it was all mine! Thanks to a friend with a Chevy Ute, we managed to get it home for the price of the petrol and a few beers. We positioned it in the perfect spot and began renovating and painting the same day. Within a week, I was able to go and buy my first birds. I’d decided to start modestly with a few Zebra finches, a couple of Bengalese and some Button Quail. Of course, being Christmas it wasn’t as easy as all that. My husband and I scoured the pet shops for finches but could only find one pair of Zebras and one pair of Bengalese. There was also a north island shortage of female quail I was reliably informed. Strangely enough the male that one pet store sold me turned out to be a female and, rather more alarmingly, only had one foot! She was very sweet but obviously had brain cells in the same ratio as feet and died shortly afterwards whilst standing out in a rainstorm. By that stage I had managed to acquire a proper male quail, a couple of females and two more Zebras from a local breeder. Sorted!

I was terribly excited and the Zebras set to, nest building and keeping us all amused with their antics. Within two weeks they had laid their first eggs. Being a total novice, I continued to add nesting materials to the aviary. Also being first timers, the finches continued to add nesting materials to their nest. The first lot of eggs disappeared and I suddenly realised what was going on! I removed the nesting materials and the finches ignored the first lot of eggs and began another nest with hay, etc from the original nest. This time they got it right and began the incubation process with no trouble at all. I cleaned out the first lot of eggs – only slightly awed by their size and the miracle of it all – and with a heavy heart chucked them in the bin. Meanwhile, the second pair, who had started incubation earlier, had their first hatchlings. I couldn’t get over the noise they were making considering the size they were. Sadly, at about five days the whole lot just died. I was devastated but guessed it was a learning process for all of us. Hopefully, they’d get it right next time. Within a day they were building a new nest on top of the dead babies! I began to re-think finch cuteness at that stage! Clearly this was a more complicated business, some might even say savage, than I had realised.

The first pair now had hatchlings as well. I took to biting my nails heavily. All went well until the end of the first week when they lobbed a baby out of the nest and I found it dead in the morning. Same thing two days later but this one was alive. I put it back in, they threw it back out, it died. Two more days went by and they did it again. We did the baby finch shuffle once or twice and then it died. Only two left now and they decided, way too early, that it was time to fledge! Can’t say I blamed them bearing in mind the fate of their siblings. The parents obviously realised they were running out of babies at this point and allowed them to stay when I returned them to the nest. Trouble was the little devils didn’t want to stay and I had to start trekking out to the aviary every hour to put them back in the nest. This wasn’t too bad during the day but I was probably less than diligent at night and first one died and then the other. This was just no fun at all! I vowed that the next lot were going to better even if it involved me sitting on them myself!

Having removed the original babies from the first nest, pair number two had room to lay more eggs without toppling out of the nest. Just when I was starting to breathe a little easier, they hatched. I took to strong drink. Day one, no probs. Day two, no probs. Day three, babies on the floor. Put them back, fortunately they’d only hatched two this time. Spent the day putting them back and then mum and dad spat the dummy and started building another nest. I went and stood in a cupboard and cried. Then I went back out, scooped up the starving babies and put them on a warm wheat bag in a critter carrier. I mixed up some Complan with some millet and fed them with a matchstick. It took a while and I was petrified but they seemed to enjoy it and they ended up with bright pink crops (strawberry Complan!) with yellow dots (white millet). I put them to bed and did the only thing open to me at that point – no, not the strong drink! – I got on the Internet and did a search for information on hand-rearing finches. My first surprise was that there was any information on this at all! Secondly, there seemed to be quite a few people out there who thought this was quite a normal thing to do. I made a list of what I needed. Top of the list was formula, which I didn’t even know existed up to that point. Until I could get hold of some I also found recipes for homemade formula based on – surprise, surprise – Complan! No millet but at least I knew I’d done the right thing, possibly for the first time since I began keeping birds. I also found that the method of choice for feeding baby finches is via syringe. A great deal quicker and easier than a matchstick in anybody’s book.

The most alarming thing I found out was that I was going to have to feed these babies every hour or two for the foreseeable future, well, the next week or so anyway. There was a lot of disagreement between those who knew about how long it was safe to leave the babies at night. I decided that four hours was as long as I was prepared to go, never mind the babies. This was probably wrong in retrospect, as I don’t think the feathered parents give the babies night feeds so it was probably pretty daft of me to do it. At the end of the first twenty-four hours the babies were contented, sitting on their wheat bag like little punk frogs and I was knackered. It was definitely as tough as having a new human baby. Between feeds I was getting the rest of my work done and scouring the net for more information and advice. I joined a couple of bird forums in order to ask questions and found them to be very reassuring places to be. In other words, there are loads of bird nuts out there just as inept as me and fortunately, quite a few who do actually know what they’re talking about. What a relief!

I decided not to name the babies as they seemed to have such a precarious hold on life and I didn’t want to get too attached. What a joke that was! I adored them and was devastated when the smaller of the two died. She was always more fragile and I think that the combination of that and my inexperience with hand feeding was too much. She died on day four. The remaining baby went from strength to strength and was incredibly greedy. I still hadn’t named him but every time anyone walked past his critter carrier and spotted him they would say ‘Oh, that’s hideous’ so Hideous he became. I thought he was beautiful. I was so excited when his feathers started to come through. Just when I was starting to relax into the routine, Hideous stopped eating. I couldn’t believe it was happening again! I bundled him off to the vet who declared Hid his smallest patient ever. The vet diagnosed a foot infection and put Hid on anti-biotics. My boy seemed to enjoy the attention and took his first dose of medicine like a star. The vet gave me a dosage sheet with the anti-biotics and it said ‘A smidgen twice daily’! Within two hours Hideous was eating normally again and by the following day was back to his old self.

As Hid grew I noticed that he had one or two problems. For a start, his feet had healed badly and both his thumbs were now pointing forwards. Back to the vets for splinting and advice. The splint lasted only a day and proved impossible to keep on. We did physio every feed time, opening his feet up and getting him to grip small perches. Warm baths every morning to relax the feet. Nothing worked so I gave up and adapted his new cage for a bird that couldn’t perch. One big platform, a smaller one on top of it and a flat, wide perch. It worked like a charm and he was soon hopping round his cage with no problems at all. I also noticed that he didn’t seem to be feathering up very well. He had wing feathers and tail feathers and feathers on his face and head but not a one on his little body. Things came to a head one day when he was in his cage by an open window. Even though it was sunny he got chilled and I had several anxious hours trying to get him back up to a liveable temperature. We so nearly lost him. I thought about knitting him a little vest but then decided a heat pad would probably be the best plan. This was one very expensive little finch!

At about this time, the first pair had hatched another clutch and decided that they weren’t going to feed the white ones. By now, I was starting to believe that finches were capable of anything. The first white one died and I grabbed the other and the critter carrier and started feeding two hourly again. This one was older – about 10 days when I pulled her – and took to hand feeding like she’d been doing it all her life. She was a real little charmer and became Hid’s cage mate after I had her established on formula. They were happy together and she was always very gentle with Hideous. In fact, she helped him understand how real finches behave. We called her Ambrosia. She grew steadily into a beautiful chestnut flanked white zebra. Now Hid had his facial colours we could see that he was a black face. Don’t know about the chest colours as he didn’t have any feathers there still! This caused problems in some odd ways. For instance, I had placed a piece of cuttle-bone on the floor of the cage so Hid could get to it easily. Because he had no feathers he managed to rip a hole in his chest on it. He lost a lot of blood but I spotted him in time and once I’d applied some pressure the bleeding stopped. I nearly had heart failure but he just carried on with life.

Both the babies were now grown up and I was very proud of my and their achievements. I was however becoming obvious that Hid was not weaning. Ambrosia had weaned completely at five weeks but two weeks further on, Hid was still having four feeds a day. I didn’t mind but we started to try and get him to eat different things. He loved his Gold’n’fruit and condition food. He would eat millet but not finch mix. Still, it didn’t seem to matter how much he ate on his own, he still wanted his hand-feeds. It was quite clear that he had more problems than just those that were visible and there were plenty of those! He was happy in himself and liked nothing more than sitting on my hand after I’d fed him and watching the world go by. Ambrosia would still come out at feed time and sit on my shoulder or interfere with something on the kitchen counter. Everyone was entranced by them. Even my big, tough twenty-year-old son was bowled over. Every time he came into the kitchen while Ambrosia was out, she would start nesting in his hoody!

One afternoon, I went to feed Hideous and he wouldn’t come out of the little polar fleece hut that I’d made for him. There was nothing apparently wrong but he wouldn’t eat. I managed to persuade him to take a little. I tried again a couple of hours later but by now he wouldn’t take anything at all. Nothing I tried would help and I slept with him by my bed that night. I woke at four o’clock and he hopped to the edge of the carrier and beeped to me when I peeped under his cover. I woke again at six and he was gone. I lost a wonderful little friend that day and a very special finch. It took me a long time to recover from the loss and I still miss him every day.

It was two days later when I realised that finches are no respecters of mourning periods. Hid’s parents had again lobbed a baby out of the nest and it was sitting glaring at me when I took breakfast in. It could only have been about three or four days off fledging but by this stage I wasn’t taking any chances. Being that bit older, I had to force feed this little one the first couple of times so she got named Guinea Pig. Actually, I was a lot surer of myself now so felt I was fairly safe in doing it. She certainly stood a great deal better chance with me than she did with her parents that’s for sure! Ambrosia had been shattered by the loss of her little mate Hid. She spent two days hopping round and round the cage making little muttering noises and looking for her friend. She wouldn’t have a bar of Guinea and plucked her and chased her round the cage so much that we had to remove her. We put them side by side in separate cages and peace reigned once more.

After about a week, Guinea developed the same foot problem that Hid had suffered from. I started her on anti-biotics straight away and she seemed to improve but then started to go down hill again. The vet was once again consulted and he put her on a much stronger anti-biotic. Thank heavens, I also had some pro-biotics that I’d ordered from America as the vet warned that this new medicine could cause her severe problems. She sailed through the course and has never looked back. When she finished the course, I decided to try her back in with Ambrosia again. They welcomed each other like long lost friends and have been inseparable ever since.

Both of my girls come out of their cage for half an hour each morning. They have a great time annoying the other birds and scaring the you know what out of unwary, sleepy teenage children. They help with getting breakfast ready for the entire flock by tasting everything they fancy and they leave poop in some very odd places! I still miss little Hiddy but nobody could be more privileged than to start the day with a finch on each shoulder.