Today, one of our young Bengalese Finches born January last year has died. Aquila had been having trouble passing an egg for the last 2 days and had become quite tired. We had been helping her by giving her liquid calcium and using olive oil to lubricate her backside, but she had been unable to pass the egg to her rear.

This morning we attempted to massage the egg along which stimulated Aquila to push the egg out eventually. She seemed better and had gone to sleep to rest, but later she was found pressed up against the food bowl dead. When we checked her, her breastbone was visual, and it appeared there might have been a second egg inside her.

Egg binding is a common way for female birds to die. So far Florence has been egg bound twice and survived, and Aquila had been egg bound a few months ago (where the egg ruptured internally) and survived. For details on egg binding in finches, how to prevent it and help those who are egg bound, see: http://www.finchniche.com/features_eggbinding.php.

R.I.P Aquila

 
Florence and Darwin where our original finches which we got about 2.5years ago. Most of that time they have been kept as a pair by them selves, because Zebra Finches have a tendency to be aggressive towards other species. However, seeing as our Bengalese and Cherry  Finches live happily in groups we felt it was unfair to leave our Zebra Finches alone. So 4 weeks ago we bought 4 new Zebra Finches, kept them in separate pairs in quarantine and now finally introduced them to our original 2 Zebra Finches.

From information we have seen online, Zebra Finches are very territorial and should be kept either as a single pair or in multiples of at least 3 pairs. This seemed to be the case with ours as we tried shuffling them around in set lots of 4 and they started fighting almost instantly. Now all 6 are together they no longer fight. They do poke each other in another invades their private space but there has not been any chasing which is good.

This image is of the 4 new Zebra Finches. They are called Tonberry, Storm, Jelly and Von le Blonc. Tonberry is the only new Male. When we bought them, the shop keeper told us Von was a Male when we thought it was a Female. Turned out Von was Female because we have since seen her lay eggs...
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New Zebra Finches; Tonberry (Top Left), Storm (Top Right), Von le Blonc (Bottom Left) and Jelly (Bottom Right)