Yesterday I lost one of my dear boys that I've had for years after he got his foot stuck in between the bars of his cage. When I found him he was hanging by his leg as it was stuck between two metal bars where the two sections of the cage met. I had to carefully attempt to get his leg out from between the bars without injuring his leg more while holding him with my other hand. I did manage to get him free but one of his toes appeared to be broken (which seemed to have happened before I freed his foot from the bars).

After freeing him I put him in an isolation cage with food, water, and some avain calming formula, antibiotic, and vitamins. To my suprise he was jumping around and attempting to fly even though his food was injured. This gave me some hope that he would make it.

The next morning I found him dead. I will now note that I have had almost the exact same situation happen before with another bird except this time the bird had his foot caught around a string that came from a fabric bird bed. When I cut the string and got him down he was extremely lethargic which prompted me to take him to the emergency vet. There they recommended a steroid shot but informed me the additional stress from the shot may kill him. It did kill him and he died shortly after me arriving home. This is why I decided not to rush my late bird to the emergency vet yesterday (it was also the middle of the night and doubt I could find an exotic vet at that hour anyway). I was planning on keeping his wound clean with iodine and giving him antibiotics if he did make it but unfortunely he did not.

I am still sad and mourning. Having these delicate and fragile birds that can either drop dead with no explanation at times or die from stress from nonfatal injuries can be truely heartbreaking at times although I wouldn't give them up for the world. The joy they bring me outweighs the pain of their deaths.

Now for the second portion of this post concluding my long winded vent. This situation has prompted me to start making some solid first steps in building a custom bird cage.

My room is in the attic with slanted ceilings since I am directly under the roof. I currently have two bird cages one with 4 birds and the other with 2. One of the 4 is recently fletched.

I am thinking of making the cage out of wood frames then using either chicken wire or screening to enclose it. Any tips for materials or building, links, and or resources would be greatly appreciated. I want to build something safe and large enough to combine my two cages.

Thank you to anyone who decided to take the time to read this all the way through ❤️

Here’s the important stuff to simplify it:

• my finches are spice and society

• I live in southeast asia and for seed mixes I’ve only found local brands that often aren’t very detailed when they’re putting in the ingredients description.

• their everyday diet consists of: leafy greens(bokcoy/kale/spinach) in the morning, sprays as treats and foraging toys (rice, foxtail, panicle, sorghum, oats but they barely eat the last two tho they love to chew it), and seed mix + vetafarm crumbles 50/50

• with how hard it is to find info on the seed mix brands, I just try to check their ingredients one by one (last one had some pellets with artificial coloring).

? Any suggestions on what ingredients I should be looking for/avoid?

? One brand that caught my eye had more ingredients than most mixes I’ve seen : canary seed, white millet, red millet, foxtail, mustard seed, vegetable extract, nyjer seed, linseed, rapeseed, fruit extract. Is that a yes or no?

He is my first canary and I’ve had him for about a year and a half now. He sang the first summer I had him, but isn’t interested in singing now. He does chirp and get excited when I talk to him, so I don’t think he’s sick. I play canary songs and all of his needs are met. Is he just super chill or could I be doing more for him?

For context: his cage is actually two cages put together and surrounded by pet safe plants so it’s spacious but still cozy.

I have this female zebra finch that is about 3 months old, and lately I've noticed that she seemed a bit tired and her feathers a little more fluffy than usual, so I went to grab her and a bunch of feathers fell out. All of my finches are well fed and some even fat. What could be the reason for this?

I recently started an animal discord community to bring us all together in a place where we can chat and share photos of our pets🐾🕊️

I would love for all of you to join us❤️

Here’s an invite link friends: https://discord.gg/Fn6Ds4GWfk

Hi, is it normal for a zebra finch's beak to look like this? It seems to look different every day. She started dropping feathers around two-three weeks ago (that is also when I first noticed this, plus she would occasionally sneeze) so I went to the vet two weeks ago because she was also more tired and he said it could be a molt, even though I read on the internet that they do not replace many feathers suddenly but replace them one by one throughout the year, but I also read that they can drop in larger quantities suddenly and that you need to give them more protein (this is a problem as I have stopped giving her egg food so that she does not lay eggs, and also reduced daylight hours because she laid way too many eggs this year.. she wouldn't stop). He recommended me a vitamin product to put into her water until her feathers regrow so I am doing that. You can already see the new feather pins but I am not sure about this white stuff. Sorry for the low quality of some of the photos, it's not easy to take a good photo as she does not like phones. She used to breathe fast at some times (she was treated with antibiotics for this last year) but this has stopped a bit over a month ago. She is still not quite as active as before all the clutches she laid but she eats and is very hormonal as well. Not sure if this is the beak flaking or something else. She mostly eats a seed mix that has pellets in it which I think she ignores as she doesn't like them, red millet and crushed oyster shells and I am supplementing her with vitamins, minerals and also a liver detox supplement made for finches and other birds every now and then as she was on antibiotics for 3 weeks last year. She gets 9 hours of daylight to prevent egg laying and so far she hasn't laid a new egg in around a month and a half. She has a male friend with her in the cage who also has lines on his beak but they are more yellowish (it has been a reoccuring thing for him).

https://preview.redd.it/t6ki5aw6tudd1.jpg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=19a7852f3db30a35514532d49d5d93e47a675237

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https://preview.redd.it/1wtqp9w6tudd1.jpg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=65a867d49e91b3f25552e5961cc868507acc358c

https://preview.redd.it/bvgj2tw6tudd1.jpg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a27aa78f01877602e43aa6666f656ca3d1e8c708

https://preview.redd.it/fi0hecw6tudd1.jpg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b1f2052d78b8a6c94d52ea29d821e64a14fdda4

https://preview.redd.it/25e12ix6tudd1.jpg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4290333e1ff60915862cf0518103995ed45e4e21

https://preview.redd.it/9672faw6tudd1.jpg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=010c614c8f36fb166f0a633d7d365a350735f641

https://preview.redd.it/2p1psgw6tudd1.jpg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0fa4945c19bea02d19f35eb91f8e0a7d459b1d9f

https://preview.redd.it/bf2c9bw6tudd1.jpg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=285d9a97ab0bfca3caca0722be74f64bf37653fe

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Hey, we have them visiting our home often, please give me details on them.

Not that I don’t like it but I would rather not being force into fatherhood too much 😂

Its a RTFP (again but not the same parents ) from my outside aviary

That poor baby was kick out of the nest multiple time today by his two bigger sibling, it’s been two days it’s ultra hot outside so I guess natural section happened, that sucks cuz I think he only needed 2-3 more days and he would have been probably fine on the floor

Not sure about the age I don’t keep records for the outside aviary, more than 1 week less than 2 that’s for sure haha !

He was deshydrated and hungry crop was dry as hell, in 5min I managed to make him eat ( a bit too watery on purpose to re hydrate him, now he sleeps 😌)

Hey! I have had two female zebra finches (Mabel and Babs) for the past year that are a mated pair. When I say mated, i mean that they literally hump and lay (unfertilized) eggs every day. I used to buy them little huts/nests to hang up in their cage, but they started getting pretty pissed off at each other when the eggs weren’t hatching (because they’re unfertilized lol) and would attack each other. I was hesitant to stop giving them nests because I didn’t want to stress them out, but one day Babs ripped a clump of Mabel’s feathers out during a fight and I decided enough was enough, and I removed the nest and stopped buying them. This was around 6 months ago.

Everything was going fine until about a month ago when i noticed that the feathers were thinning on Babs’ neck. Then i was watching them groom each other, and i saw Mabel was yanking out Babs’ neck feathers. Its obvious that Mabel doesn’t enjoy having her feathers yanked out, but she doesn’t fight back.

Originally I was thinking that they’re bored, but I’ve always let them free fly around my room and I wfh so they are almost never confined to the cage. So for enrichment I tried a variety of things:

• Toys (they don’t respond to them)
• Setting up a spot for them to build a nest and providing nesting materials (they work really hard on the nests but they kind of suck at it so I don’t know if that’s really helping)
• Fresh veggies (they enjoy them but it didn’t help the plucking)
• New perches including some perches on the windows (their cage is also in front of a window)

I have a few questions I was hoping to get answered: 1.) Is this something I should be concerned about in the first place? 2.) Has anyone else experienced this, and how do you deal with it? 3.) The only thing I haven’t tried yet (that I can think of) is to go back to putting the “premade” nests in their cage so that they have a spot to lay their eggs. But they didn’t start doing the plucking until like 6 months after I stopped using the premade nests, so im not so sure that that’s what started the plucking.

Just as a side note, I also understand that laying eggs can be somewhat bad for birds, but they lay them with or without a spot to nest. Kind of like how chickens will lay eggs anywhere. Before I gave them nesting spots they would just lay them on the windowsills and the floor and then eat them.

TLDR: I took away my birds’ nesting spots 6 months ago, and 1 month ago one of the birds started plucking the other one’s feathers out. I tried different ways to entertain them, but im not seeing an improvement in the plucking.

Hi guys, finch mom here. Our girl suga needs to be given antibiotics 2 times a day. The issue is: she won’t open her beak. If I have her in my hand, her beak is like zip locked. Can’t even force open it. This makes giving her the antibiotic totally difficult and frustrating. Plus she always escapes from my hand after 3-5 minutes and I need to wait until she rest to catch her again. I really start to hate smaller birds because of that issue. With my larger parrots I don’t have the issue at all. They have taken their medics like champs.

Hi everyone-

I have been keeping Society finches for about a year and a half now. I’ve had 8 finches in that time (not all at once) and have lost 5 of them.

I am starting to feel like I’m not cut out for taking care of finches- I’m wondering if this is normal or I just have bad luck or am doing something wrong?

I feel like I’m a really good caretaker. I’ve spent hours and hours reading and learning about the best ways to take care of them. They have the best food you can get (Harrison’s mixed with 30% seed), I give them fresh veg and boiled egg frequently. I clean their cage multiple times a week, I change their water every 3 days, I give them a bath 3-4x a week. I give them the occasional supplement ie Guardian Angel, Thrive, etc. Their cage is big enough. I just don’t understand what I could be doing wrong.

One died about two weeks after I got him (the only Gouldian I ever tried), another died I am pretty sure because she got her foot stuck in her food dish (very sad). Another one, a Zebra who was my favorite bird, had a somewhat slow decline after about 6 months and I took her to the vet who not only didn’t know what was wrong with her but also killed her trying to figure it out. The other two that passed were babies of two of my others, who both just one day started acting sick out of nowhere and then died shortly thereafter. I don’t think they were egg bound or had air sac mites. Notably, 5 out of the 6 I’ve lost have been female (I do make sure to provide enough calcium).

I am just feeling pretty defeated. I love keeping finches, they bring me so much joy- but it is heartbreaking to keep losing them time and time again.

Will post pictures of the other 3 java babies soon!😊 They make everything better.

I’m a little confused on their toenails and whether I have to trim them or not. How do I do that or do they trim themselves?

Luckily they’re both girls so they’re not fertilized eggs. I used to give them those little huts to lay their eggs in but they ended up getting aggressive with each other when their eggs didn’t hatch. But they still lay the eggs, even without the hut, so I put a little setup in the corner of their cage for them to work on a nest. They really like working on it, even though most of the nesting material ends up on the ground 😂

Zebra finch mutation? Hi guys i have this type of Zebra finch (the one who have the bright grey color) he's little bit big than the ancestral one and beak form different too his eyes form after research i find, it's a English/Dutch mutation anyway just wanted to share and see if others else have this kinda of Zebra finch thanks guys good evening.

I believe I can from my research, but I wanted to check if there's any especial reason why I can't keep a mixed aviary of the following species: owl finch, parrot finch and either gouldian or star finch (leaning towards star). My aviary is going to be L4' x W2.5' x H3' and I would be having a pair of each. I'm going to make sure there's some plants, nest boxes, and perches throughout for them. So would they all be fine to be put together? Thanks

1. I am buy A21 for handfeeding
2. What temperature should be settle for them
3. How many times should I feed them a day ?

I have two finches. one being a common waxbill finch and an orange cheeked waxbill finch. I have bought two types of seed mixes an expensive one being dr harvey's fabulous finch food. which they just sort of picked what they like leaving a lot of left over and a cheaper mix which they do the same. I also feed them millet (here and there), egg food, greens. however, i feel like i can't get the seed mix down. any recommendations or is this just normal for finches. also I'm not breeding them.