Good Health

Its been a long time since I have posted anything. We have been enjoying the good health of our flock. We have had very hot dry weather here in the Texas Panhandle. Our birds don't seam to mind.

We have raised many cockatiels and parakeets this season. We even had to cockatoo's hatch. We named the first one Rio, he is a big healthy, but somewhat whinny male. The other one we named Peaches. She was a lot smaller than her brother and weaned several days ahead of him. They both sold shortly after weaning and I'm confident they both went to very loving homes. I wish them both the best and I pray they enjoy long healthy lives surrounded by people who love them as much as I did. It was so hard letting them go.

Homemade Toys

I read a blog post today about Homemade Bird toys. Its pretty cool! Check it out! http://bit.ly/birdtoys

I love her ideas! Here are a few of our birds favorite homemade toys.

Our Citrin Cockatoo loves popsicle sticks. She also loves the bottle tops off drink bottles. She holds them like a cup and dips them in her water then drinks from them.

Our parakeets love dice and small balls they can push around.

Our Cockatiels LOVE the plastic pull strips off of milk jugs. I have one tiel the likes to wear them like a necklace. I don't worry about him getting hung on it because its open at one end.

Other favorite toys are plastic slinkies, empty paper towel rolls, corn dog sticks and plain brown paper bags left open so they can go in and explore.

Our 1st budgie hatched!

I'm so excited! Our first baby budgie hatched today. Momma is green body with yellow wings, daddy is blue with a yellow head. There are 5 eggs total. The first baby is so tiny it would fit on a nickle lol. The picture in this post is not our baby. The momma bird is too nervous for pictures. I borrowed this picture off the net so you can get a idea of how small it is.

More Pictures

If you are interested in more pictures of our set up you can see them on "twitpic" http://twitpic.com/photos/TumbleweedBirds If you Twitter ( http://twitter.com/ ) please follow me @TumbleweedBirds

Our first fledged finch.

Poor little guy is trying to get away from me. I think he's camera shy

Sprouts Day 3

This is day 3 of my seed sprout experiment. They smell fresh and nutty. I started a new batch. This time I'm using more blackoil sunflower and some saflower in the mix. I must admit, some birds (mostly the finches) flocked to them right away. But the cockatiels wasn't as excited about breakfast as I had hoped. I'm a little disappointed in that because I have 3 nest boxes with babies right now. I might have to give out a 2nd breakfast of some bird bread to them.

My version of this soaked seed recipe. http://www.javafinch.co.uk/soak/soakndx.html

I'll post more pics tomorrow to show you how it turned out.
I used a basic premium cockatiel blend that did not contain pellets.

I did not have a small piece of muslin cloth, so I used a new dish rag. lol