Russell Kingston visited the other weekend, so I took the opportunity of locking him in his bedroom until he came up with a definitive list of finches that had been lost to Australian aviculture over this last 20 years or so. By the time we let him out, approximately two days later, he had come up with a frightening list of 41 species!!!!!
This rough but holy justified treatment of my honoured guest was stimulated by an article he wrote in ABK Vol 21 Issue 5 and by the interest created when I spoke on a similar subject at my local Hunter Finch Club.
A number of us are concerned that we are in the process of losing even more species and Russ has categorised these as endangered in his ABK article.
Russell's Endangered List includes:
Red Headed Finch
Blue Headed Cordon Bleu
Himalayan Greenfinch
Eurasian Linnet
Javan Munia
Red Faced or Yellow Winged Pytyllia
Pelzelin Saffron Finch
Red Shouldered Whydah
European Serin
Grey Singing Finch
Golden Song sparrow
Black Rumped Waxbill
Orange Cheeked Waxbill
Purple Grenadier Waxbill
Orange Bishop Weaver
Napoleon Weaver
Yellow Bunting
The only listing I would disagree with is the Javan Munia which I would take off his 'Endangered 'List and put into his 'At Risk' category and the Peters Twinspot which he has put in 'At Risk' I would put into 'Endangered'
My logic behind this is that certainly down this end of the country a number of people are breeding Javan Munias in decent numbers. The Peters Twinspot on the other hand is still very rare.
The only people in the country with good numbers of this species are Ray and Wendy Lowe who bred 38 last year [ they actually had nestlings at the turn of the year so it could be more! ] They have sold a number of pairs to 10 people out of whom 6 have successfully bred them, 2 have not and 2 of whom we have no knowledge.
It would be good if the six who have successfully bred them formed a consortium to swap blood and information, but to really get them going it needs another two to three groups to get together and start breeding them too..
According to my reckoning, if we do nothing about it, we will probably lose another 10 species over the next decade which would be a crime of neglect.
A few of us at our Hunter Finch Club meeting were discussing what would have to be done to 'Save A Species' and I promised I would write an article for the club magazine. On reflection however, I thought it was important enough to send it to a wider audience.
Saving the species on the 'Endangered' list will take dedication and co operation. The reason we are likely to lose the species on the endangered list is because each of them have to be treated, in one way or another, differently from the' standard' way we keep our birds. Sometimes the changes are only small or subtle, the Blue Headed Cordon Bleu is on the 'Endangered' list. I believe it now has a good chance of survival as a number of people are beginning to breed it successfully. At least as far as I know, all the people who are successfully breeding them keep them in small flights with just a single pair to each flight. They treat them exactly the same as Red Cheeked Cordon Bleus, but the innovation was discovering that they cannot compete in a communal aviary.
As some of you may know, the Lowes and I co operated to try and get the Peters Twinspots more firmly established and we now believe we can tell the world exactly how to keep and breed them. Most people would not touch them with a bargepole when we first got them as they had a poor survival reputation. They were selling for around $3000 per pair, so beautiful and interesting though they were, if you were only going to keep them alive for about 6 weeks it was an expensive pastime!
We thought it might be helpful if we outlined the thinking and process we went through to 'de-code' the Peters and incidentally, to try and get them established, Ray & Wendy are currently selling them at half price.
HOW DO WE GO ABOUT SAVING A SPECIES?
1: Co-operate - it usually takes more than one person to work on a rare species. Partly because by definition they are more difficult to breed, so bouncing experiences and ideas off each other is an important part of the process and partly because one usually has to provide dedicated space to the chosen species, so one person is not likely to have enough room. Also one person is unlikely to be able to keep enough birds to maintain genetic diversity which generates obvious problems, because if they are rare, you cannot guarantee buying in an outcross from elsewhere.
From experience I would suggest that a handful of people who are friends and form an informal but dedicated group are more likely to succeed than any kind of formal structure which would inevitably end in a falling out of one sort or another. However, it might be handy if a body like the NFSA collated and published results and perhaps acted as a clearing house for people wanting to get in touch with other like minded people.
The problem is that you have to give and take selflessly, so if it is not a mate whom you know, trust and has equal skill to yourself, you are unlikely to give him or her your expensive spare birds. Neither would you trust a stranger to swap you a perfect young specimen for a perfect young specimen etc, etc.
2: Desk Research:-Once you have formed your breeding group and chosen the target species you should then start with desk research. The rarer the species the more difficult this research is and even worse is the amount of misleading information.
My main criteria is ---- do not trust the input from other aviculturalists writing on the internet and don't trust Wikapaedia!
According to Wikapaedia and other sources you can breed Peters Twinspots in colonies!!
Well you could if you enjoy blood sports!
I also have a distrust for people who "used to breed hundreds of those, they are easy." Sometimes they are worth listening to but unfortunately there are also a lot of self publicists around too!!
Try and find out as much as you can about them in the wild; habitat, climate etc. I usually try and find research papers which mostly provide accurate information.
Our trouble is we keep finches, so once again it is harder because very little research work is done on finches. When researching the Peters Twinspots it appeared that they were mainly found at higher elevations in dry scrub land like the Masai Steppes in Tanzania. Here the climate is described as semi temperate with considerable seasonal variation in temperature.
Further research indicated that temperature variations were similar to what I get in my area of NSW i.e. night winter temperatures varying between 10C< 15C occasionally colder and summer day highs of upper 30Cs with the occasional 40C+. The Masai Steppe is classified as dry getting between 300mm & 500mm, with the main rainfall being in April/May/June.
3: Accommodation/ Habitat/ Diet
The desk research will also give an indication of what kind of habitat the species lives in the wild. With the Peters it was dry, arid but near water.
When 'learning' a new species I prefer to keep them in single pair flights of roughly 600mm wide by 2 to 3 metres long. This allows me to closely monitor their behaviour, habitat preferment and diet.
In a large communal aviary this is more difficult.
By providing a range of foods I can quickly determine what they will or won't eat. Sometimes a species will not eat a new food as it does not recognise it as edible. When I suspect this is the case I introduce a pair of 'teachers' which have a wider or different food choice. Eventually, however, by having an educated guess at the kind of foods that would be available to them in the wild and determining whether they are up birds or down birds i.e. what is their preferential feeding point, together with food choice experiments, one can pretty well determine what diet one should be providing.
Determining habitat is a bit similar to determining diet. By sitting and watching the birds you can determine whether they spend more time on the ground or more time in the top quarter of the flight and by providing a mix of habitat you can determine habitat preferences.
So following these procedures we were able to determine that Peters Twinspots spend a large amount of their time foraging on the ground but will fly high when disturbed.
The fact that they spent so much time on the ground also indicated that perhaps they were heavily insectivorous.
In the event that supposition was proven wrong when we did the food choice experiments. They will eat maggots and mealworms, they love termites, moths and other insects, but outside the breeding season they only eat a few insects per day.
Habitat choice was easier. They like a bit of brush in one of the corners on the floor but perched high when resting and at night. The floor covering of choice was something softer like mulch or straw. Because they spend so much time on the floor it is important to keep this dry and reasonably clean.
Both Ray, Wendy and myself have come to the conclusion that the earlier 'pioneers' of this species had trouble keeping them alive because they cannot stand a wet floor and easily pick up disease and parasites from other birds droppings. It definitely was not temperature. We have never seen these birds uncomfortable either when it is very hot or very cold. They seem to be typical semi desert birds perfectly evolved to withstand freezing cold nights and boiling hot days and are generally as tough as old boots!!
4: Breeding and General Management:
Three things trigger the breeding of most birds; diet, light and seasonality. However each species is influenced by the three triggers to different degrees, so the first group of experiments is to find out what the 'key drivers' are.
The Peters Twinspots were difficult to determine to begin with. Both the Lowes and myself were feeding a full range of foods whilst we found their diet preferences and as a result a few pairs went down to breed. OK that indicated food quality played a significant role but was it the 'key driver'? The following year I kept the diet the same but decreased light for a period. This seemed to have little effect as some pairs still bred.
OK so day length does not seem to play a role, or if it does it is not overly significant.
The biggest breakthrough came when we did a graph of when most pairs bred and this quickly showed that a majority of pairs bred during our winter starting in May, peaking in July, August and tailing off after December. This indicated that seasonality played a role in breeding condition.
So the next thing to do was to combine all the triggers.
During the non breeding part of the year we keep our Peters on a 'maintenance' diet which consists of a seed mix and a small amount of green milk seed + Mike Fidler soft food per day - just a few insects.
In the middle week of March we put them on 'austerity'-just one or two seeds in their mix, nothing else. In middle April we increase the amount of light to 13 hours per day & put them on the full breeding diet. OK, so we have said light does not have an effect, but experiments on small numbers are not conclusive so we play it safe!! Within 4 weeks the first pairs to go down are breeding. For the first few years the Lowes' and my breeding results were comparable but then in the latter 2 years my breeding results were much poorer than theirs.
When we compared management again, we were both doing exactly the same EXCEPT they were feeding termites and I had stopped due to the fact that I cannot get them locally and it seemed unfair to keep asking people to get them for me.
Interestingly, when I looked back at my records, breeding results fell off the cliff the moment I replaced termites with maggots and mealworms. Before anyone jumps to conclusions re termites this was the only species I breed that had this effect.
As further proof, when my birds were transferred to the Lowes and fed termites, they immediately bred.
So as you gather by now we had pretty well worked out exactly how to breed them. In summary:
Small flights. The Lowes are 600mm wide by 2 m long by 2 m high mine are a little bigger. They are best kept just a single pair to the cage but if space is at a premium they could share with one other compatible species.
A soft floor. I prefer mulch, the Lowes use wheaten chaff. A pile of brush in the corner, perches up high, they nest on the floor in the brush. Light 13 hours a day during the breeding season. Eleven and a half hours during maintenance. Standard austerity period prior to breeding. Peak breeding time is winter. A good standard finch mix during breeding time, together with green milk seed + 10% Mike Fidler soft food plus termites (!) and maggots.
So the only other management experiments that had to be done were compatibility studies. We, very early on, discovered that Peters are very aggressive to each other.
In the early days before we put brush cover on the floor in the corner, we had occasional males kill their partner. Certainly adult males kept with other adult males will kill each other until only one is left and the females are almost equally as bad with other females.
We did discover that you could keep uncoloured juveniles together until they started moulting at around four months old.
This aggressive behaviour means that every individual spare Peters has to be kept in a separate enclosure which eventually causes a space problem unless you have a large set up. Peters can be put in with absolutely any other species. They show no aggression what so ever and do not seek to dominate the flight or aviary. In fact they spend most of the time on the floor away from everyone else.
Juveniles can be left with their parents for up to eight weeks after which they have to be removed to avoid deaths.
The only other problem we had was in the early years when we were producing a huge imbalance of males. One season I had bred 23 young males and 1 female but this problem was corrected by using a bit of the latest science. Females paired to well coloured males will produce a preponderance of males whilst females paired to poor coloured males produce a preponderance of females. And yes, we were pairing up our brightest coloured cocks with a view to producing a good strain! Once we began using poor coloured cocks too, the whole thing swung into balance!!
So we hope that the methodology and thought process we went through to establish the Peters Twinspot can be helpful to people who would like to re establish some of the species which have now become rare in Australian aviculture. Or to encourage more people to help re-establish the Peters Twinspot.
The start of the process is to accept that a rare species needs to be given different treatment to the common finches. By definition a rare finch is rare because it does not respond to the typical 'Aussie Aviary' mixed collection approach.