The advice sometimes given to Beginners and Novices in our hobby can be very confusing.
How many times have you read the words: ‘When you need exhibition stock go to a Champion who wins consistently with young birds’. The difficulty is finding such a Champion these days!
When I started in the hobby those words were certainly correct because we had Champions who were winning consistently on the show bench. They were practically household names and if you needed a Lutino, a Cinnamon, a Light Green, or a Blue, for example, you had a choice of breeders who were specialists in those varieties. They were breeders who were consistently showing thirty or more birds at our biggest shows and seeing a ‘new face’ carrying away a top prize could be quite a shock. It was unheard of for anybody in the lower ranks to win a Best in Show. That had to come from amidst the Champions - where it usually did.
Nowadays the tide has changed and it would be a very unwise man who would stick his neck out and name the next B.S. winner (one did try his hand at this just a couple of years ago and found himself falling flat on his face). The bird he wrote about as being a miracle bird turned out to be just a figure of his imagination. And the fact that it had been bred by a partnership of many years experience was of no consequence.
Novices are usually looked upon as learners in any form and some Champions frown upon their knowledge - until those Champions are beaten on the show bench. Then they wish to forget about the whole episode and try to cover up their humiliation by inventing all types of excuses. The usual one is that ‘the Novice just had the luck. He has very little experience’. What a load of rubbish!
In our hobby you come across people who are born stockmen. They are people who simply have the gift of knowing how to pair up successfully and breeding winning show birds. The proof of their capabilities are seen on the show bench. And I doubt if this comes from having spent years in the hobby. It is something you are gifted with. There are others who have been in the hobby most of their lives and their only wins have come from bought in stock. That however is sufficient to boast about and is used to sell their stock to a gullible purchaser.
A Champion does learn a great deal over the many years spent in the hobby, but that does not mean that he can be a better breeder than a Beginner or a Novice. He could know far more about management and bred hundreds more budgerigars than the Novice, but unfortunately the winning strains seem to elude him.
Many a Novice breeder puts far more effort into producing the type of bird that wins whereas the Champion thinks more about the selling angle. Many of the Novices I have spoken with will spend hours discussing the qualities of a bird whilst I can name quite a few Champions who will turn the conversation at the first opportunity to the price they feel their stock is worth. You do get others, of course, who are genuine fanciers and a joy to talk with, but those feather-merchants who will bleed you dry for the last penny just make me sick. Thank goodness they are in the minority.
This is not a modern-day disease. I can well recall the first time I visited a well known fancier in Southern California and he told me that he was buying the best six youngsters bred every year from a certain U.K. breeder. They cost £1000 and were the biggest rip-off I have seen. They were simply pet shop birds, but carried the ring of the man he adored. I learnt that this fancier had been buying birds from the same source for more than fifteen years and they got him nowhere. We can well repeat this story today.
An unusual problem
The year so far, here in the U.K. has been a very wet one. Apart from a week or two we have not experienced what we term the old fashioned summers. I attribute this month’s experience to the weather!
Over the past few years I noticed that the pairs I put up for breeding in October/ November in those cages facing South were far more successful than the ones facing North, whereas I was getting better results from those facing North when paired up in March/ April. If I was to experience trouble then I could expect it in those cages facing the wrong way.
However, I noticed that in one upper corner a pair was reluctant to go to nest despite the fact that they looked fit and ready. I came to the conclusion that they either did not like the nest box or the breeding cage position. I moved them into another cage and they bred well.
I replaced the pair with another and experienced the same problem. The birds would not go to nest. I could not understand what was wrong until one evening I noticed a slimey trail alongside the nest box, which I recognised as the trail of a snail. I removed the box and saw garden snails had visited it regularly. Could these have affected the birds and prevented them from going to nest?
I removed the birds and put in a small container of snail pellets. The following day a couple of dead snails were there. I replenished the pellets and after a week there were no more snail trails. I reintroduced the pair and had no further problems.
My birdroom is in my garden and the snails were coming in through a vent. I think they were eating the seed thrown about by the birds. I could be wrong, but I feel I am right in deciding they were the cause of the birds not going to nest.
This might be looked at as being a bit of a leg pull, but once I got rid of the snails there were no more problems. Has anybody else come against something similar to this?
© Gwyn Evans 2000
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