Successful breeding of the Meyer’s Parrot. PART II

Breeding

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Read also the first part of this article:

Successful breeding of the Meyer’s Parrot. PART I

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When the chick was 18 years old, I put a ring of size 6,5mm on its leg. It was handfed by formula “Psittacus neonatal” for the first two weeks.  Then I used “Psittacus Energy Handfeeding Formula” (This brand comes from Spanish and the product is designed for feeding of parrot babies in which feather pins have already started emerged and which require higher proportion of fat in their diet – macaws, african parrots, …). Within the first days, formula had more liquid consistency. After some time, I made it thicker but between the third and fourth week of age it seemed that the chick is a little bit dehydrated. Therefore, I used cumin tea. For the whole time, the chick was digesting and growing well. Since the sixth week of age, it started eating soaked seeds, unripe corn, apple, carrot, banana, broccoli and cherries. On 45th day, the baby was put to an inside cage with room temperature.

I have raised a few dozens of Poicephalus parrots artificially and therefore I knew that proper socialization with other parrot babies is necessary. Unfortunately, I did not have any other young African parrots so I took a budgie chick from the nestbox and handfed both babies together. At the age of nine weeks, the Meyer’s Parrot was completely weaned and because of that I placed it together with the budgie to outside aviary three meters long. At this moment, it is paired with a male of the same species and age. But he was raised naturally.  Hopefully, the pair will breed some chicks for me in a couple of years. My granddaughter keeps going inside the aviary and plays with the female, the bird never bites (contrary to our handfed Senegal parrots).

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At the end of 2015, my breeding pair laid three fertile eggs. However, female left the clutch after 12 days. I found the eggs when they were already cold and I decided to place them to incubator. After a few days, one chick hatched. In the remaining two eggs, embryos died during late phase of development.

In the second half od 2016, five more eggs were laid. Curiously, laying gap between the third and fourth egg and between fourth and fifth egg was four days long. After ten days of incubation, I took them all to incubator. All were fertile, two of them hatched.

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Note:

The breeding pair was set up from two birds of similar coloration and size. Both had the same blue shade on belly and similar distribution of yellow color on the head. The first nesting was successful despite the fact that birds were just two years old. I believe that it is maybe to late to distinguish subspecies of the Meyer’s Parrot in captivity because all have been hybridized in the past. On the other hand, it still makes sense in case of Poicephalus gulielmi and Poicepalus senegalus.

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Meyer’s Parrot baby 7 weeks old (c) Oldrich Siska

Meyer’s Parrot breeding female (c) Oldrich Siska

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As for my experience, we should not keep Poicephalus parrots at the same place as South American parrots. This was not the first case in my breeding when Poicephalus parrots were disturbed. In the past, I also kept three proven breeding pairs of Senegal Parrots along with Blue-throated Conures and all pairs  failed in that season. They were obviously disturbed and broke their clutches.

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author: Oldrich Siska

Title photo: (c) Hans Hillewaert. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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