A Look at Why Parrots Don't Breed, Part 1

Renowned author and aviculturist Rosemary Low shares stories illustrating how to get your parrots to breed.

By Rosemary Low

It is always unwise to generalize where birds are concerned. There are no rules that allow one to predict how parrots will behave in a given situation. However, there is one rule that applies to those who are raising parrots: The basics of breeding parrots should be learned with free-breeding species. With other birds, it will be years before you learn enough because they are too difficult to rear or their breeding cycle is so slow. So start with prolific, small and inexpensive species such as budgerigars, lovebirds, cockatiels and kakarikis.

Some of these are extremely easy to breed if you provide them with their basic requirements. Others are much more difficult, but even a beginner might have success if he or she put a lot of time and thought into getting the conditions right for a particular pair. Let me give you an example:

For 26 years, I have bred a rare species of small lorikeet. In 1991, a female hatched that proved very difficult to pair up. She had been kept with three different males but she was compatible with none of them. She was not happy, and this fact was clearly indicated. She habitually bit off her flight feathers on one wing.

When she was nearly 5 years old and had never laid an egg, I gave her another new partner, a mature bird of 12 years. At last! Their compatibility was evident. Indeed, just over three weeks later she laid her first clutch. The eggs were not fertile--but she had laid after such a short time with the male that this was not surprising. Soon she ceased to mutilate her flight feathers, so I knew that the stressful element of living with a male she did not like had been removed from her life.

Over the next 16 months, she laid six more clutches. In each case, only one egg was fertile and the embryo died about two thirds of the way through the incubation period. I say only one egg was fertile but it is possible that the other contained an embryo that died before five days, before one could detect embryonic growth. This female did not incubate well, especially during the first few days. She is an aggressive bird and would leave the nest as soon as she heard anyone approach.

After the seventh nest failed I decided I had to do something drastic. She is a genetically important bird, and I needed to produce young from her. I had recently given two males of the same species, but past breeding age, to a friend who has absolutely no experience in breeding parrots. She cared for them exceptionally well.

I therefore decided to give this pair to her. This was last October. There was then a remarkable progression of events. In December the female laid. For the first time both eggs were fertile. However, as before the embryos died a few days before they were due to hatch. In February the female laid again. Both eggs were fertile and both hatched but one chick died on the day of hatching. The other chick was well-fed for three weeks, then abandoned, so I hand-reared it. Whether the fact that the chick was abandoned was the female's fault or an element of the diet that did not suit the chick is not clear at this stage. But the nectar was changed because it seemed that the type formerly used was not easily digested by the chick.

The female laid again in May and reared two chicks. A different type of nectar has been used throughout the rearing period, and the weight gains are superior to those of the first chick. If these two are reared, it will have taken seven years for her to have become a successful mother. Or to put it another way, it has taken me seven years to find the conditions necessary for this to happen.

The major difference in her current circumstances is that she is in a home where there are a total of seven birds. An enormous amount of time and observation are lavished on them, their accommodations and diet.

This story emphasizes some of the key elements for successful breeding. Careful observation often leads to success. It is essential to observe each pair in order to understand what they need. In this case, a room in which there was only one other pair of birds seemed to be the factor behind the improved incubation technique of the female. A different diet may also have played a part.

Home, Sweet Home?

There are various other factors that determine whether or not a pair will reproduce. They must be happy in their environment. If they are housed next to loud or aggressive birds, they may be too nervous to reproduce. For example, quiet and sensitive birds like greys do not appreciate being close to Amazons or macaws. With the more aggressive parrots, another mistake is to keep pairs of the same species or same genus in adjoining aviaries. For example, it is better to separate pairs of rosellas or cockatoos with something quite different, such as lorikeets or ringnecks.

The day that I was writing this article I received an appropriate telephone call that further emphasized that birds will not breed if the environment is not to their liking. The call came from a friend who has successfully bred hawk-headed parrots of the nominate race for years. For more than 20 years he has also kept a pair of the Brazilian race with the dark forehead, fuscifrons. This subspecies is much rarer in aviculture. He had despaired of them ever breeding. They had never, to his knowledge, entered either of the two nest boxes. One was placed in the flight and the other in the shelter.

Privacy, Please

During the 20-year period, no courtship behavior had ever been seen but their sexes had been confirmed by surgical sexing. He had exciting news. The pair were mating and excavating the nest box! And, yes, something had changed in their environment. There was now a thick growth of clematis over the aviary, making the interior much darker.

The pair were, of course, wild-caught birds. The conditions necessary to induce them to breed probably needed to be nearer to that of their natural habitat than those for captive-bred birds. I suspect it was the heavy foliage cover that provided them the incentive to nest. I await the outcome with interest.

It is very important to know about the temperament of the species in your care. A breeder in the United Kingdom had a successful pair of Musschenbroek's lorikeets. Unlike most of the few people who keep them, he was doing well. He decided to obtain any odd birds that became available and to make up several more breeding pairs. When he told me that he had built a special unit to house them all in adjoining aviaries, I suggested that this was not a good idea. In my own experience, this species is highly territorial and if another pair is housed close by aggression will occur. It also resulted in my females plucking themselves. Several months later I spoke to the breeder again and asked how the Musschenbroek's were doing. He had a very sad story to tell. On the same day he had found two females dead in the nest box, killed by the males. I am sure this would not have happened if the pairs had been housed out of sight of each other.

Why were the females killed? I suspect that it was because highly territorial species become overly defensive of the nest box if other members of the species are in view. They cannot vent their aggression on what they see as an intruder, so they kill their females instead. This is what scientists refer to as displaced aggression. I had to provide two nest boxes for one pair of my Musschenbroek's because the male was so defensive of the nest he would not even permit the female to enter. This solved the problem and the female laid in the new box.

An interesting story was told by an Australian keeper of Leadbeater's cockatoos. In Australia, they are comparatively low-priced birds so he bought two young pairs. During the next 10 years he did everything he knew to persuade them to breed, but without success. They would not even venture inside the nest-boxes. Finally, he was so tired of listening to them screeching and making no attempt to reproduce that he sold one pair. The very next day the female of the remaining pair was seen coming out of the nest box. There again, the close presence of another pair of the same species had inhibited the desire to breed. Within a couple of weeks, the female had laid four eggs. They all hatched and all the chicks were reared.

There is another story I would like to tell about this beautiful cockatoo. When I was curator at Palmitos Park, we kept several pairs in the breeding center in the same block of aviaries. Only one pair ever hatched chicks but they still failed to rear the chicks. I was convinced that this was because they did not like the aviaries which, in my opinion, were not tall enough or long enough. As a result, they seemed to be very nervous and ill at ease. After they had been there several years, a large aviary for Australian parrots was built in the park. It measured 35 feet long by 10 feet high. It had no straight lines but various recessed areas, water running over rocks and growing plants behind welded mesh. When the Leadbeater's were released into this aviary the change in them was miraculous to see. They lost their nervousness, and they started to behave as they would in the wild, moving as a flock over the grass floor. They were not intended to breed there, but one pair nested in an ornamental tree trunk and reared three lovely young.

The white cockatoos, with the exception of the bare eye, are definitely among the more difficult parrots to breed because they need a much larger aviary than most people can afford. Without it there are terrible problems, the most usual being that the male kills the female or rips off her upper mandible. Breeding cockatoos is definitely not something that should be attempted by beginners.

Rosemary Low has kept and bred parrots for over 30 years. She has written many books and articles on various aspects of aviculture, and is a frequent lecturer. She resides at Palmitos Park in the Canary Islands where she works with a wide variety of avian species.

Part two will include tips on aviary planning, diet and number of species kept.