Abstract
Articles usually deal with the management of a given species or with a breeder's experience with a specific pair of birds. My own beliefs on proper management for many different types of birds, not just finches, are described in The TFH Book of Finches, so I'd like to use this space instead to propose a ''business-and-pleasure management approach" to breeding.
We've gotten a great deal of pleasure and a modest amount of financial return from following a few simple principles. Because we use the profits from one breeding effort to finance the next one we're eager to undertake, the orientation to financial return is directly related to our personal satisfaction.
I think, by the way, that in return for that satisfaction we each owe it to our hobby to devote another part of our time to efforts to breed some threatened variety of bird. It may be threatened legally, due to intrusions into its native habitat, or simply precarious in its role in aviculture because of difficult breeding habits. A section of my book deals at length with the likelihood that many common African finches would immediately become scarce or unavailable to us, should imports be stopped, because we've not given them the attention they deserve. Still, this aspect of your breeding efforts is likely to cost you dearly in time and money. Your other, business-and-pleasure-managed efforts can support this more important activity.
The first question you must ask is whether there are birds you'd enjoy working with which offer greater potential return on your investment. Star finches breed about as well as zebra finches, but sell for ten times as much. Australian grass parakeets breed about as well as budgies, and require little more space, yet are worth ten times more.
The fact that both examples refer to Australian species is not accidental: because that continent's borders have been closed to export of native animals for more than two decades, you have to compete only with other captive-bred specimens. You can struggle to raise violet-eared waxbills, or Quaker parakeets (and both are worth the effort) but you run the risk of imported birds being offered suddenly at $28/pair, in the case of the finches, or $16/bird, in the case of the Quakers.
I suggest this kind of analysis because I've seen so many breeders who work diligently and intelligently to breed their birds, and to whom some financial return, if nothing more than to cover costs, is important, yet their choices of birds limit strictly the financial possibilities.