Moving Forward with Breeding

My posts have been a bit "light on" over the last few months so I have to catch you all up on some things that have been happening.
A good friend of mine has agreed to let me keep an Aviary at his property at Dural so that i can continue to breed and purchase stock for the future. So that is very exciting and at this stage the Aviary that I have bought is almost finished and in the mean time I am keeping my birds in one of his holding flights.  This is my aviary partially finished which is two 1.8m X 1.8m aviaries joined together.

So that is super exciting because now I can actually keep more than just a few birds and take the time to develop some good stock for next year when I will hopefully move into a house with my wife. Good Stuff.

So once that was settled I felt confident in approaching some of my Queensland friends about picking up some Bengalese from them. It was then decided that I would meet up with James and Tim at the Grafton Bird Show at the end of March.

This is the Grafton Hall where the Show was held

Numbers were reported to be half that of the previous years at the Show

Here is James keenly watching over his Bengalese being judged by Steve.












So it was excellent to catch up with Tim and also meet James for the first time. Tim had recently picked up some pairs of Dilute Gingers (Pastels) and he brought me down the birds that he did not want. James also brought me through a good number of his Chocolates and Chestnuts.

Out of James Bengos that he gave me, he gave me one of his show birds (above) straight off the bench on the day which was very nice of him.

Through James we visited a local Bengalese breeder in Grafton. It was very nice to meet Arthur and he had a good number of pied and Self Bengalese.

It was really great to discover another keen Bengalese breeder. Above is one of Arthur's holding flights. I picked up a pair of Chocolate Selfs from Arthur but unfortunately his birds were quite stressed from the drive back and one died the next day. It was a real shame because his Bengos are very good.
All in All it was an excellent weekend. 

So here is a picture of my happy family at Dural...

From the pictures above and below you can clearly see the difference in size when comparing a Sydney Show Pied and a Show Self Bengalese. They are not the best pics to describe Type but certainly show the larger size of head and general bulk and size of the Sydney Pied. You can see here how much work needs to be done to bring the Self Bengalese up to the same level.