Don't worry, I skipped quarantine with my new birds too. I would never tell anyone besides this forum. I remember I got bashed in another forum when I skipped quarantine with Cloudia.

I like winter themed names for white birds. It gives it that fresh cold feeling. I have to get my birds a rope perch. I bet they would really appreciate it. It looks like Silver and Emma are now kissing lol. It seems like this new rearrangement was a happy ending for everybody. You got a new bird, Emma and Piper gets a new appropriate mate, and Silver isn't so lonely anymore.

I skipped or broke all my quarantines. It wasn't even intentional, birds just flew into the other room. My house is way too small for a successful 1 month quarantine.

Really Baruch? Was it the other forum?

I don't skip quarantine but I cheat on it lol. After two weeks I figure it's OK and put them together, and even before that I'll sometimes let them look at each other from a distance.

It sounds like romance is blooming at your house. Does anyone want to place bets on how long it will be before there are two pairs of raging hormones to deal with?

Well, Piper is a horn-dog, but he just met Winter, and Winter looks like a girl with standards, so I am going to bet that Sliver and Emma team up before the budgies, even if Emma needs convincing.

Yeah Bluekeet, it was on TC. But that member left a while ago.



I'm going with the budgies. As long as Emma and Silver have known eachother, they weren't interested. Piper is a real flirt and I bet he will use his sexy moves to win Winter.

I'm glad you like the Vision cage. I have one for the budgies and I like it just fine. At first I thought taking it off the base to clean out the bottom part was a pain but now I realize how easy it is. I too put paper on top of the grate and when I change the paper, based on how much debris has fallen to the bottom part, I'll take it outside to dump it. Since it's plastic, it weighs very little so it's a super minor chore. Wrestling out the "easy" slide out part of Coyote's big rolly metal cage is way more difficult.

As for quarantine... you know, I'm a nurse and I've spent most of my nursing career ('bout 5-6 yrs now) working in areas where infection control is an issue (like lots of patients with MRSA, VRE, CDiff and some TB). I've been very good about quarantining my birds (except Cloud and Ninja since they came from the same store and even the same lot of birds, I got them so close together). The thing is, for a month long quarantine, the only way it can truly work is if one were to not only wash hands well, but change clothes entirely and make sure that where they keep their clean clothes and dirty clothes have no way of contacting one another, so that would require a naked walk through the house for most people. Oh and completely disinfect (with the hardcore stuff hospitals use) their floors at least once every 24 hours and consider anything that touched the floor a goner, no 5 second rule allowed. And since it seems like lots of the diseases birds can spread are actually somewhat airborne (from poop and feather dust being thrown up in the air when the bird flaps around), you'd actually really need two separate houses to truly keep their germs to themselves.

The only reason I was pretty good about quarantine was the idea that I was new to all this and "everyone" seemed to think it was a good idea and maybe they knew something I didn't. Also, from what I now understand, lots of those same diseases are also spread from preening. So I guess I see some value in quarantining, but in most households, the value is not as much as most people seem to think and therefore, if you live in a particularly small house with several birds that are flying around, I don't see that quarantining is all that realistic or helpful. Maybe a little helpful to prevent preening and any transmission that might happen that way, but that's it. Germs are good at being germs and it's hard to keep them separated even when you do everything "right".

I'm definitely open to info that would shed light on the value of general household quarantining though. Seems like some scientist out there should get right on that. We need some evidence based info instead of all this mumbo jumbo that makes it seem like if you don't make life as hard as you can on yourself, that you're somehow being a bad pet owner (or mother, or whatever).

Household quarantining generally isn't going to be 100% effective in keeping the germs away from the birds. It does limit the exposure however; two birds in the same cage will be exchanging germs at a much higher rate than two birds who are at opposite ends of the house. In the case of germs where it's possible to build up immunity, the initial low-level exposure would provide some time for this to happen before the birds are put together. So I think it's more about reducing the risks than eliminating the risk completely. Some contagious germs might be present in a bird but not manifest at all in that particular bird, and quarantine won't help you spot that problem.

That does make a lot of sense and I can see the value in limiting exposure. I guess when I read about bird illnesses, it seems like it's a black and white thing, that their immune systems are rudimentary and if they get exposed to Germ A then they're going to get Disease A, hands down. It's hard to figure out what corners are OK to cut and which ones aren't when all the stuff I read sounds so dire.

As far as I know their immune systems aren't significantly weaker than ours. The main problem with birds is that they hide illness so the rest of the flock doesn't drive them away. So if you see symptoms it means the bird is too weak to hide them any more and is seriously ill.

The conventional explanation is that the flock chases away a sick bird because it will attract predators. This doesn't make any sense to me. I think it's more likely that chasing away a sick bird evolved as a way to minimize the risk of a contagious disease wiping out the whole flock. A flock that didn't chase away a sick bird was more likely to perish than one that DID chase away a sick bird. In terms of predator protection, having a sick bird in the flock would actually increase the survival odds of the healthy birds, since predators would go after the sick one not the healthy ones.

That's what I always thought it was Carolyn. I figured they send away the sick so that the rest of the flock has a lesser chance of catching it.

Isn't that why sometimes parent birds will squish a baby bird who got sick and died to dry out the body faster so it's less of a danger to the rest of the clutch?