Editorial January 2001
Another New Year and the Start of a New Season
I am always the first to recommend a new product that I have found to be good. This year, instead of using either wooden cat litter pellets (a discovery of a couple of year ago) or wood shavings in my breeding cages and nest boxes, I have used a product called Dry Bird. This is a natural product and looks like small wood chips. It has the advantage over the pellets of sitting better on the cage floor and may also be used in nest boxes. It is denser than wood shavings and consequently does not blow out of the cage the same extent as shavings. A word of warning though, it is not cheap in comparison to the other items (probably twice the price) but on economy of use and improvement it is well worth the extra.
Getting Your Pairings Right
Have you ever stopped to think why some fanciers breed winners consistently and others don't. In fact I can think of some breeders who have spent many thousands of pounds in the top studs in this country and yet, still have not produced a winner. Why is it that they possess birds of the highest quality but cannot produce comparable offspring? The simple answer is that their pairings must be wrong.
When selecting breeding pairs visual consideration is essential, but so too is a knowledge of the bird's pedigree. For without the pedigree information it is impossible to take into account recessive characteristics, which may be passed on to their progeny. The way to the top in this hobby is to purchase really good birds at the start and then maintain and improve upon their quality in future generations.
Every year, all over the world, there are those fanciers, which, like all of us, crave success. The way in which they seek it, is to make yet another expensive purchase in the hope that this will be the bird to revolutionise their birdroom. What can happen though, is that they will purchase a really super cock bird and mate it to their best hen and although with different partners both are capable of producing a winner, but with each other it is a different story.
To look at her, she was an ideal mate. There was no duplication of faults, in fact visually a "number one pair". So what went wrong? The reason for the poor result was a genetic "mish-mash" of opposing features resulting in all the faults being doubled up and coming to the fore. Hence, visual rubbish in the youngsters being produced.
If you are fortunate enough to be the owner of an established aviary of budgerigars, which is constituted such, that it may be termed a stud, you will have been breeding with these birds for several generations. Having done this, a great deal of knowledge is accumulated as to the background of your birds and to the features desirable or otherwise of their ancestors. With this type of information, pair selection becomes considerably easier.
So where does this leave us? It just confirms that one cannot buy success in the breeder section of the top shows in the country. It re-affirms the advice of limiting purchases to one or two top studs and it re-emphasises the need for dedication, determination and most of all patience.
Not All Good News
Communication that I have had from members of the BS tells me that many fanciers today see the Budgerigar Society as a distant, virtually secret, organisation that doesn’t represent them at all. They join only for the rings so that they can show their birds at BS Patronage Shows and of course most shows have some sort of BS Patronage. Members of the General Council are viewed as doing their own thing with the members picking up the tab and officially they are not allowed to talk about or discuss Council business outside of Council meetings. The BS has a total of 40 Council Members, which is one to approximately 100 members. Twenty of these are elected but once elected don’t actually represent anyone. The other twenty are Area Society Delegates; two from each Area Society, but in many cases they are not elected by the Area Society Members, and in fact don’t actually represent the membership of the Area they represent.
For example, one Area Society according to the list in its latest magazine has 150 budgerigar members, which is down 40% on the numbers given for the previous year. These 150 represent 4% of the BS Membership and yet they still get two Delegates. Typical of other Areas, they are not elected by the membership to sit on the General Council and are not accountable to the Area Society Membership and therefore cannot be instructed on how they should vote.
AGMs’ of the BS are usually attended by about 2% of the membership, half of whom are Council Members themselves and because the General Council has met for two days beforehand, at the members expense, are actually being financially supported to attend, as opposed to those others attending who have paid their own travel costs etc. So in reality, discounting the General Council members, only 1% of the membership attends. Also, General Council Members are not allowed to vote against General Council decisions, no matter how an individual might feel. As most decisions require a two-thirds majority of those attending the meeting, this begs the question, why have AGMs’ at all? You can now perhaps understand why postal votes have not been forthcoming.
The above concerns have been expressed to Budgerigar World because they have fallen on deaf BS ears and while I am the first to decry the politics of the hobby we need to get these sorts of things out into the open for general debate in the hobby. We must not loose sight that it is the BS that needs the hobby and not the hobby that necessarily needs the BS.