melissasparrots
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I'm not exactly sure of the specifics since I don't check the box very often and this is the first time I've caught the mom off the nest for over a week. The oldest baby might be approaching a week old. I'm pretty sure I documented hatchday somewhere for that baby. The other baby I think hatched sometime in the last 48 hours, but he could have just been hiding under mom's wing when I checked earlier this week. I think there were a couple of infertile eggs in the clutch and I don't know if they were the last ones laid or if their was an infertile or dead in shell somewhere between the two successful hatches. This is the parents 3rd clutch, so I have been trusting that they know what they are doing and just periodically take a peak to make sure there is actually still a baby in there. Parents seem to be feeding them well. I go in a couple times a day and load them up with cooked or sprouted grains and other veggies. I'm a little bit of a slacker in terms of monitoring babies in the nest for parrotlets. I don't like handling babies so small, I don't like having to physically move the mom just to look at the babies, so I tend to only have a general idea of what is going on in parrotlet nest boxes until I pull for hand-feeding. I'll probably wait until they are about 2.5 weeks and then pull them out to hand-feed.Oh Melissa how exciting.
If you get the chance can you tell us more?
How did the hatching go?
How are the parents feeding them?
Was this their first clutch?
Come on - spill it for us! The good and the bad.
BTW - those chicks are ugly and they are NAKED.
No homes set up yet. Parrotlet babies are fairly easy to sell even if I'm picky. And with only two of them, I'm not terribly worried about not being able to sell them. Parrotlet babies vary. It took me quite a number of years to figure out the secret to making sweet parrotlets. Its basically, don't handle them much. If I try to hold them a lot, then they decide my flesh is fun to make bleed and it becomes habit forming. I think it frustrates them if I try to hold them too much and they'd rather flit back and forth and fly and play. If I have them do a quick step up and a kiss and then step back down and let them play with their siblings while they work through their I Want to Bite Everything phase, then they turn out pretty sweet. Most are very people oriented so long as I start hand-feeding before they are 21 days old.What are the babies like when they are ready to leave? When I got Yoshi he was very people oriented because of how his breeder raised him. Do you have homes set up already??
As pets I think the sexes are pretty similar. It seems like females always get a bad rap for being aggressive but as pets I don't see it. As breeders, yes the females are more aggressive. If I have to clean cages and remove one of the untame breeders by hand, the female is always the one that bites me hard. Both sexes as pets can be territiorial around their cage. My mom's male which is the uncle of these babies on the dad's side is cage territorial. My female which is the aunt on the mother's side is also cage territorial, but she took longer to get that way. Both are fine when removed from the cage. Actually, I normally just open the cage door and let them come out on their own.I'm so tempted to bring in another parrotlet. Yoshi really is so much fun, even with all his moods. He is just very easy for me to understand and I like that. I just don't know if I would be interested in a female or male. Are they pretty much the same in your experience? How are the females mood swings compared to the males?
Hate to bother you with the questions...I just see babies and... there I go thinking!!