They are in a large nesting box and both parents are in there right now. I can hear the baby chirping and got a quick glance at it. It’s so tiny! There are still 6 eggs that need to hatch. I think the best thing I can do is to not disturb them much. I don’t want them to get nervous and hurt the baby or damage the other eggs. I mean, natural instinct will tell them what to do, right? When do you start hand feeding if you choose to? And how often do you feed them and do you need to keep a heat lamp on them? By the way, my birds cage is in our family room which is 65 degrees farenheit. That’s not too cold, is it? I figure the parents are keeping the eggs and the baby warm. Usually they take turns but since the baby hatched, they both have been in there most of the time. Are there certain foods that I should be giving them? I’ve been giving them cockatiel food, a special additive for nesting birds, egg biscuits, millet (which is their favorite!, a treat stick, and Cheerios.
Just let them be until they are all hatched. Please do not attempt to hand feed unless you have been given hands on instructions by someone that really knows what they are doing. It’s very easy to aspirate (choke) a baby bird. If you do hand feed, let the parents feed them for about a week so they can get antibodies from them, just as a human baby would get from his mothers breast milk. The birds will have a much higher mortality rate when you do this. The parents will keep the babies warm. Just keep feeding the way you have been, you’re doin a good job. You could add some fruit and veggies to the parents diet, but wait til the babies are weaned. Please read my profile
Have owned Aracunas (plus many other species of chicken), and currently own a Rhode Island Red.
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You should NEVER hand feed unless the parents die or reject the young. They will 99% die if you try to hand rear them, just leave the parents to handle things.
Have owned Aracunas (plus many other species of chicken), and currently own a Rhode Island Red.
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If you wanted to handfeed- You’re about 3 months too late in planning. You should’ve started reading about breeding & hand feeding LONG before you let your pair reproduce.
In order to properly wean those chicks yourself, you’ll need to invest in a Brooder. You need about 300 mini-pipettes, and six 1 cc Syringes, a quality formula, legbands, and a portable brooder, if you plan on leaving your house within the next few weeks-Month.
The quality brooder will cost around $400, if you plan to make your own from scratch, you should plan on spending about $150 on it, and having to constantly maintain the temp & humidity as well as light levels in the brooder. The portable brooder will cost $100 if you make it, and you can buy a pre-made portable brooder for $175.
You pull the babies @ 5 days to band them, and 7 days to hand feed them. ONLY after you’ve thouroughly researched handfeeding and had an experienced breeder and/or cert. avian vet show you how.
Also- Your parent birds should be on a much healthier diet to be rearing young. You should get some nest food- feed them birdie breads, muffins, vegetables high in vit. d3, like Yams, pumpkins, kale, etc.
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I used to hadnfeed my babies when I bred cocktiels ages ago. I pulled the babies at two weeks. This gave them a good headstart with the parents and still ended up nice and tame when they were finished.
Sixty-five degrees is way too cold for babies without their parents. You’ll need to have something to keep the babies warm. My contraption was simple and effective. I put a ceramic lizard heater in the bottom of a small six-pack size cooler. Then I filled the rest of the cooler with pine (not cedar!) shavings so that there was a even level of shavings across the bottom with a thinnish level over the heater. The heater was in a corner so that as the babies got older and more covered in feathers they could move farther away from the heat source. A towel draped over the top kept the heat and the babies inside.
The baby food was a recommended and proven formula made from Wheatena, ground sunflower, jarred baby food carrots and greens and egg yolks, and possibly a few other things. (It was a long time ago.) Freeze it in small batches, perhaps in a ice cube tray or in the used baby food jars once you accumulate enough. That way you thaw just enough and it keeps until you run out and make more.
I fed the chicks with either an eye dropper, or better yet a syringe with the end carved to a shallow dull point. The food needs to be lukewarm. Test it like a baby bottle. I heated mine in the microwave, but it is vritical that you stir it eight ways to Sunday and feel it carefully since the microwave makes hotspots. Part of the formula can be perfect for feeding and then you hit a hot spot that can burn right through a baby’s crop.
Since the babies were pulled at two weeks instead of 7 days they are a little less fragile and can really catch on quickly to the feeding routine. Your problem will be over feeding. Luckily at first their crops are very visibile and you can see how close you are to the top. The babies themselves don’t know when to quit, so you just have to put them back when they are full enough but not too full.
The whole process is not too hard, but you will need to get up extra early and stay up extra late to handfeed the kids every day. It gets tiring, but the babies turn out so well when they are handfed.
Now that I’ve given you the idea that this is easy, you do need to know that things can go very badly, sometimes very quickly. If you want to handfeed, you really should get a mentor in the form of someone who does this regularly who you can call in the case of emergencies. Also get them to show you how to handfeed once so you can see it in action.
Here is an article that may help:
http://www.cockatiel.org/articles/handfeeding.html
It comes from the National Cockatiel Society. You should explore the rest of their website and consider joining. You’ll learn so much. http://www.cockatiels.com
Good luck and remember that the hardest part of raising handfed birds is letting them go on to permanent homes when they are finished. Set yourself up right now to say good bye to them. You can’t keep them all….
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All the other answers are very good, except that I never invested in a brooder. Few of my babies died, and none of them from the hand feeding process. The funniest part of feeding was when the babies began to wean from a pipette to a tiny spoon. They would be all together on the table and ended up not waiting their turn but sitting on the edge of a food bowl and dipping their heads into it.
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