This is the  Resting Room,   as Jo calls it.     Resting means we just had a clutch of babies and were put in this room to recondition and get our bodies back to normal and ready for more clutches.

     Jo only likes us to breed every 5 or 6 months.  Some of us give her a hard time and try every which way possible to breed before our time, but she keeps changing our homes around or taking away our happy huts to  try and make us forget.  To make matters worse,  she keeps close watch and if she sees us wives building on the bottom of the cage or us Dads regurating to Mom, presto - - Our homes are remodeled. 

     Then there's this room that us guys like to call our version of the HAPPY HUT.   This is  where we all come to have babies.  Jo keeps our Hut  really quiet, she’s the only one we see when we are in here mostly.  Jo, she’s really considerate – she knows we like piece and quiet and no disturbances when we are taking care of our eggs and babies.  We always get fed good  when we are resting, but in here we really get the royal treatment.  We would appreciate more seeds, but she is still pretty stingy with these, until our chicks hatch.  Then we get a little dish at supper every night.  She keeps a close watch over the heat and humidity in our Hut, for our eggs and babies.  She  doesn’t let the humidity go any lower than 50%, usually she like it higher.  If she notices the humidity has been lower than she likes it, she will mist our eggs for us.    Normally us wives will lay anyway from  5 to 8 eggs for her.  Most of us are just like clockwork (both us lineolated and lovebirds too), 23 days later, the eggs start  pipping and popping.   We only have our babies for 12 days or so, as then she takes them and feeds them for us. Most us are not scared of her, as when we are in the Resting Room, we let her hand feed us seed and the odd few of us  lovebirds  she lets escape and stay out for a new minutes, so we know Jo will take good care of our babies for us.  Our room is nice, all windows with 8 foot ceilings.  But Jo’s living room has 19 foot ceilings with a hot wood stove, so she never lets us stay out too long so we won’t escape, by choice or by accident,  into that part of the house. 

NURSERY: So the first thing us babies  see in the Nursery  when we open our eyes, is JO.  Boy, is our Mom ever big!  We are just little farts!!  Well she keeps us nice and warm and we get fed really often, about 5 times a day. Unless for some reason, she has had to pull babies really young (5 days).  She dosen’t like pulling that young, but if she has too, she feeds the little guy every two hours.  Our Nursery is upstairs in a Room of our very own, far away from the stove and big windows.  This way we can romp and roam around (with supervision of course) as much as we want.  She usually maintains the temperature in this room around 25-30 deg.C., depending on the age of us.

  She really keeps a close watch on our heat and humidity levels too.  Usually when we are about  8 - 12 days old, she puts this closed metal band on our right leg.  I guess that tells our new Moms and Dads where we came from.    I hear she even has them engraved with TRA (Tiny Rascals Aviary).  As we get older, she really keeps a close watch on our weight as we get moved from the Brooder, over to the Big Guy Condos.  She starts putting bits of food, cereals and pellets and broccoli and stuff on the bottom of our cages.  She even trusts us with a bit of water.  We don’t make her feed us as much now, she’s had enough, and we start to pick at the big bird food. 
     She weights us morning and night and takes us out a lot during the day for short plays.  Some of us are stubborn and make her feed us right till we are 8, 9, some of us even 10 weeks, but she doesn’t give up on us and keeps feeding us as long as we want is. Eventually we give in and eat all our pellets and cereals and veggies and stuff.  She won’t let us go to new homes till we can maintain our weight for at least 3 or 4 days.   Our Jo, she is so fussy.   Only after we can maintain our ideal weight, which varies between all the different species of us, do we learn what seeds are all about and man are they good!!   We all get to roam around on this big warm blanket when we are just wee farts  and at Christmas some guys got their  picture took with Santa.   Jo and Lou, they love taking our pictures.  If you like they will e-mail you pictures upon request.   We also got this play gym  we like a lot.   We like to play out of our Condos and the older we get, the longer we get to stay out and play.   As soon as we let on to Jo that we can fly pretty good, she clips some of our flight feathers.  We can still fly around “our” Nursery, but Jo don’t want us escaping up into the rafters in that big room.   They have a monster fan in that room and we could end up in a big accident.   See, with some of our flights clipped, we can’t really fly to good “up”, just “down” or across.  This is sorta something like clipping our toe nails, we would only recommend the experienced Mom or Dad clip us.    Usually we only stay with Jo and Lou till we’re 8 or 9 weeks old, then we go to our new Mom and Dad’s home.  This is what Jo has been preparing us for. 

     A lot of people Jo sells one of us to, come back and see her  again in 5 or 6 months to get   us a friend.  We both still love our  new Mom and Dads but we love each other too and now we have someone to play with all day if our Mom and Dads are working.  We even stay really friendly to our Moms and Dads when we grow up and have our own babies.    If you want, Jo has this Available Babies page, on our Web Site and you can e-mail or call or and reserve one of us.     If you want to talk to Jo she really loves to talk to everyone about us.

AVIARIES Hi, Kibbles here to talk about our homes. The flock got together and voted for me to describe them.  I guess It’s because me and Peanut pretty much tried them all, seeing’s we’ve been here the longest and all. Well the big one up top is the first one Lou built. He figured that it would give us lots a room to fly around. Its 6ft L X 30in W X 4 ft H. If I remember correctly we were 6 of us in there at first. Well it was great until on day Lacey and Buttercup got into a fight. Poor old Lacey got a bloody eye lid from the rucas. Well that was the end of communal living for us couples. That’s when the condos, as Jo called them, started coming. Here’s the next project. You see Lou figured that we should have enough room to fly so 3ft was going to be the minimum length, and 30 in the minimum width given to any of our cages. That way there’s enough room for perches at both ends, lots of toys and swings, and still enough room to fly. They know we like to fly, and we need the exercise. Good food, good environment and lots of exercise makes for a healthy mind and a healthy body. Well back to the cages, Lou figured that he should give a bit of flexibility to these new homes and that’s were the condos started coming. Sort of like hotels with adjoining rooms. The first one was the double unit you see above. It was 3 ft tall and had a divider in the middle that he could just slide in and out. That way they had the option of using it as a good 6 ft long flight cage or 2 good homes for some of us couples.    One thing I learned about Lou, he’s always trying to think of ways to make Jo’s job of cleaning easier and making sure we get as good a home as possible. Big doors were one thing Jo wanted. See, she gets right in there with everything except the kitchen sink. Vacuum cleaner and all. Saturday is the “big clean” we like to call it. We usually all get together and sing our lungs out when the vacuuming starts. Ya talk about music, he, ha! Yep, a little bit of Enviroclens, a bucket of hot water, and look out. Talk about the white tornado from tide, well its nothing compared to Jo when it comes to insisting on clean homes.  She knows how important it is for all of us, cause we can get pretty messy with all the pooping, playing all over the cage, and some of us are pretty sloppy with the food too. I mean come on, we don’t use towels to clean our beaks, we just go for the cage wire and the perches. Peanut and Betty have got to be the number one and two sneakiest of the bunch. They always get out of the cages. They usually start by jumping on Jo’s head and then it’s off to the races. After a bit of a chase, they usually just give Jo a break and jump on her willingly,  knowing she’s gonna put them back in. When I get out though, she’s in for a long chase before I give up. Well enough of that back to the cages. You see as our flock grew, more homes were needed. Some that’s when the first 4 unit came along. He figured that we usually fly horizontally rather than vertical to do our thing, so height became less of a factor. So this next condo had 4 cages of 2 ft high each. Stacked. He still kept putting dividers rather than permanent walls so we would have those nice flight options.      Well they were getting a little short on room after a while so Lou built a big six unit against the back wall. Ya see by then he had converted the big flight into a 4 unit and even the 2 unit got changed to a 4 unit. So we ended up with everyone around the room facing each other. It's great,  we can all see and talk to each other. Jo’s got a big table in the middle of the room where she keeps all of our stuff handy. In all he can make 18 cages or 9 big flights from the 4 condos if he wants, or any combination. The one thing we all like is that the room where in is all window on 3 sides. We all have a view of the outdoors and good natural light. Lots of birds outside too that we get to talk to during the day. Well things are pretty well set up now that we’ve completely taken over the sun room as they used to call it.       Well by the time all the large cages were built, the flock had grown and we even had the linnies living with us. They’d been around for a little while but we hadn’t met. See they were in what we now call the Breeding Hut. We didn’t know it at the time but Lou had turned Jo’s Craft Hut into a Breeding Hut for us guys. Up until last year, we always stayed in the Resting Room, breeding or not, but a few of us, I won’t mention any names but her husband is Barney, got a little over anxious and decided to double clutch. (2 clutches, one after the other). Well Jo wanted none of that hanky panky so she decided that the breeding would be done in the “Breeding Hut” as we now call it. Its just outside the house, is fully insulated and is all ours now. On one side Lou built 2 rows of 3 cages each row. Both rows are 9.5 ft long with dividers so they could be made into 2 long flights if they want, but so far its only been used to breed and introduce new birds. The cage dividers are double cage wire so we can see and interact with whoever is in the next cage, but we can't get to each other, so no problems are created. That way Jo can keep a good eye on us and know when we’re ready to go together or not. To completely separate the cages even from each other he just slides something in between the wires.  Its been better for us breeding as now Jo can easily control the temperature and humidity in the smaller room. Plus it’s a lot more quiet. Boy is it quiet, no one but Jo and once in a blue moon Lou is allowed in, no surprise visits from neighbors and friends to distract us. We’ve also got a big 4ft L x 4ft H x 3ft D cage in there that she can use as well. It’s a good place to put one of us pairs right after we breed. Sort of like the honeymoon suite for a weekend getaway before we return to our regular cage in the Resting Room.  Well the Resting Room is pretty much a rest area now, lights out early, lower temperature, less humidity. Jo hates it when we breed more than 2 times a yr. She feels it’s too hard on us. But most of us get away with a third clutch every other year or so. She can’t watch us 24 hours a day, but she’s got a few tricks up her sleeve like, changing our cages, new toys, anything to distract the old love bug.      About the only thing I can add to all of this is that he started building single cages as well. He made them so he could stack them one on top of each other. Jo has 2 racks of 3 cages each for extra cages. Jo likes them because they are portable and about the same size as the other aviaries. They’ve become pretty popular with the people who buy our babies. A lot have gotten Lou to build them one. He tells them that he will make whatever size they want. All of ours (except for the 6 unit) are on stands with wheels. That way Jo can wheel us around and easily clean around the aviaries. All cages are built with 16 gauge steel mesh, 1 in x ½ in, so we can’t get caught trying to get out and it’s good and sturdy for climbing.  Lou grinds down all the sharp edges on the mesh before assembling our new homes. We spend a lot of time climbing all over the place you know. The wire has to be welded after galvanizing because the other stuff is dipped and the coating can easily come off. It can get especially dangerous for us with our beaks being used as feet all the time when we climb. If we ingest it, it can poison us. The cage is built in panels, with pine wood framing. Pine is safe for us guys, cause even though its outside the wire we can still get at it for a little chew once in a while. He’s not to worried about us damaging the cages though cause he can easily replace any damaged parts. Everything is fastened by screws and can easily be dismantled. All the cage floors are in melamine for easy cleaning too.