Nesting instincts
Sunshine the canary had a little surprise for us last week. "He" laid an egg! So much for being a guaranteed male -- not that it matters, really, since I was looking for a companion bird more than a singer.
Once I realized I had a girl and not a boy, I read up on what a female bird needs, and that turned out to be a nest. Sunshine had been trying to tell me this for a while: so desperate was her desire for nesting material she had been plucking her own feathers. (I treated her for mites instead, no doubt adding insult to injury.) But now the cage is outfitted with a little wicker nest and three types of nesting material. OK, four if you count my hair, which seems to have made its way into the nest, as it has every other corner of the house.
It took Sunshine a few days to get the nest thing figured out, but once she realized what it was all about she wasted no time customizing it to her liking. She's very proud of her efforts, and every day when we come home from work, she's eager to show us what she's done! And happily , the feather picking seems to have stopped.
Nesting instincts
Sunshine the canary had a little surprise for us last week. "He" laid an egg! So much for being a guaranteed male -- not that it matters, really, since I was looking for a companion bird more than a singer.
Once I realized I had a girl and not a boy, I read up on what a female bird needs, and that turned out to be a nest. Sunshine had been trying to tell me this for a while: so desperate was her desire for nesting material she had been plucking her own feathers. (I treated her for mites instead, no doubt adding insult to injury.) But now the cage is outfitted with a little wicker nest and three types of nesting material. OK, four if you count my hair, which seems to have made its way into the nest, as it has every other corner of the house.
It took Sunshine a few days to get the nest thing figured out, but once she realized what it was all about she wasted no time customizing it to her liking. She's very proud of her efforts, and every day when we come home from work, she's eager to show us what she's done! And happily , the feather picking seems to have stopped.