Abstract
Many people ask us how we breed Jenday conures and after our reply we receive many raised eye brows. It's not the food we feed or our automatic watering system that people react to, but the bird's housing. All our jendays are cage bred with a plain old ordinary cockatiel nest box attached to the outside with pine shavings inside. Some of our cages are 18"x 18"x 24" tall and a few are larger. All our metal cages have metal rabbit feeders attached to them with each one containing parakeet mix, safflower and sunflower seed. They also receive a daily bowl of sprouted seeds (sunflower, safflower, millet and canary), apple, oranges, peas, corn, beets, carrots, vitamins, cod liver oil and wheat germ oil all mixed together. Each cage has a crock pot with fresh water for drinking and also for bathing in. They also each have a mineral block and grit.
But now lets get down to the nitty, gritty pairing! We have heard of many ways of sexing jendays by their looks. Well, we're still looking! We've read that the skin around the eye in the hens is very white and the males is an off-white. When I tell my proven male that he's supposed to be a hen he looks at me as if I'm nuts! We have also read that the iris in the male is very dark and in the female it is lighter. We have found that this does not hold true for we have a proven male with a very light colored iris. Also all our hens have very dark eyes. We have been told by a pet dealer that females bite and males don't. We have had many a time when blood was flying (ours, not the birds') and believe me, both sexes bite. We have many pairs of jendays and I will say that they are all colored up beautifully. The females are just as colorful and bright as the males. Even their shape (body and head) is the same. The way we try to choose pairs is by their pelvic bones and then we have them surgically sexed to be completely sure. In the pelvic bone method the males two vent bones are sharp and very close
together and the hens' are usually somewhat duller to the touch and are further apart. It does take some practice but soon you can tell that there is a difference. Of course there are quite a few birds where this method of sexing doesn't hold true, especially in very young birds. We have found that selecting them first by the pelvic bone (my husband being 90% right) has saved us many unpaired birds sitting around waiting for mates.
Now, about the question of how old a jenday has to be to go to nest. We have had jendays go to nest as early as nine months of age, but it is best to wait till they are between eighteen and twentyfour months old. We have found that at a very young age they will go to nest but sometimes not hatch their eggs or feed their babies. We have even had some young pairs break and eat their eggs. It seems like once they reach about two years old they stop all the monkey business and get down to work.
Another question that is usually asked is how long does it take for a pair of jendays to go to nest? An honest straight answer is; when the birds are good and ready to nest that's when they'll nest and not before! We have one pair that a lady owned for three years. They were set up in hopes that they would breed and produce young but they never did. She tired of feeding them and waiting so she sold them to us. Less than three weeks after we purchased them they were on an egg and soon after raised two babies. Some jendays, if compatible, will go to nest in a matter of weeks and some will wait over a year! I have another interesting story on one of our pairs of jendays. We had a proven male jenday that was someone's pet at one time. We went out and purchased a female who also had been a pet and was surgically sexed to find it was a hen. We put the hen in with the male and he instantly attacked her, so we removed her. (By the way, this was a new cage for the male also at that time.) We tried again and the same thing happened. We then removed the male, put the hen in the cage first, and then put him in with her. He again attacked her chasing and biting her. We were about ready to give up when we decided to try one more thing. We took the two jendays and put them in the cage right next to the one they were fighting in earlier. It was just like love at first sight. They started preening each other instantly and he started to feed her. Within five minutes the two were together in the nest box. Less than two weeks after that she was on her first egg! To this day we have never been able to figure out why he would attack her in the other cage. Both cages were set up the same, actually the...