Turkistan Roach

Was thinking of destroying or giving away my culture of Turkistan Roaches. The aviary birds don't really fancy eating them. The caged birds, out of lack of choice, if given the Turks, will gladly devour them. Problem is they are quite fast moving and difficult to catch. sometimes when the bird pecks at them and leave them on the floor they quickly ran away, which may pose a problem later on....

So, I replaced egg trays with bunched up newspapers as hiding areas for them. Harvesting is also made easier as it is much more convenient to handle the much smaller bunched up newspaper than the egg trays. Knocking them into plastic tubs and picks up suitable size roaches with a pair of tweezers and squeeze them half dead.

Hmmm.... lets not waste good food. Will continue feeding them to caged birds.... just a little bit more work :)

Polygamy in the wild

Recently a friend narrated an interesting obsrvation of polygamous breeding of Oriental Magpie Robin in the wild. I trust his observatory skills (well, some people who are not as keen in Magpie chciks collection may mistaken a family unit as a two adult females with a male)

Anyway as the story goes, an old orchid flower pot that was hanging in front of a house became nesting home to 2 female Magpie Robin. Only a single male was seen in the vicinity. A total of 8 eggs was laid in the same flower pot, out of which all 8 hatched.

Asking permission from the Malay house owner, he took 3 chicks away from the clutch after making sure they are males and left the 5 females behind. It is interesting as this is the first time that I have heard of such nest sharing in territorial birds like the Magpie Robin.

Shows how little I understand and how much more there is to learn about our own local birds :)

Evening feeding

Every evening around 5 to 7p.m. Caged birds are fed approximately 3g of mealworms. I used to count them but then decided weighing is a faster method & with better accuracy.
Thinking of increasing to 4g....

Bumper harvest.... feeder fish

It is almost impossible to get good stock of feeder fish. Nobody seems to be carrying stock of such fishes for sale around the area where I live. Catching some myself from the wild has proven to be a little time consuming & not justifiable by the amount of time & effort put into it.

From experience, timing is of essence. Below is the harvest of 3 scoops from the monsoon drain after a heavy downpour using a normal fish net sold in the aquarium shop.

Have to stop at 3 scoops as any more would only raise the mortality of the fishes. The bottom of the pail cannot be seen, giving an indication of the amount harvested and speedy transport of the fishes to a bigger holding tub is Important. The whole fiasco lasted only about half an hour as water level from the monsoon drain quickly subsides.

Must look out for heavy downpour nowadays :)

Local bred Straw-headed Bulbul

Personally I had no success breeding the Straw-headed Bulbul, but it is always a pleasure to learn of other's successes. There is a serious need for more captive bred successes with this bulbul.

The below photo is a second clutch bred by a hobbyist in Muar. So far 3 clutches successfully hatched. Maybe I should get from him the 4th clutch chicks to raise :)