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Hello back and welcome to the best Grey forum on the internet

Just a quick note to say Thank You for letting me join and a bit about myself. We are husband and wife Rob & Carol and we are currently in week 5 of hand rearing Ella a female AG, her parents are prolific egg layers but just can't seem to get eggs to hatch DIS at various stages so we decided to see if we could do any better incubating with the last round and had two clear and one fertile. We have some previous hand rearing experience with an umbrella cockatoo some twenty years ago but never a day old grey hatchling before, what an intense learning curve its been, helped by the nursery section of this board (so thank you) I have been keeping a log of weight, feed quantity, temperature videos and photos and will post them if they are of any interest to anyone. Bye for now Carol.

I want to start this thread off on the right foot. #1 I am not an advocate for shouldering a parrot. #2 I am not an advocate against shouldering a parrot. When a relationship is strong and the time is right it is a beautiful thing; But you can`t rush into this. Weather you shoulder your parrot or do not shoulder your parrot is your decision. It`s not right for everyone. My left shoulder was her shoulder of choice. If I let her I think she would have spent her whole life there. She would climb up there and preen her feathers and enjoy the world around her, The one thing she would always do is get close to my head and lean against it and coo into my ear. God I miss that !!! .

They sure grow fast! From something that doesn't look very bird-like to beautiful baby greys in such a short time. Fascinating

I've updated the Facebook post with a couple of video updates as Ella is now 0n 30ml of formula 4 times a day now and she has started to sprout her little red tail feathers plus she is preening herself all the time now. I also would like to say although i'm posting updates quite regularly on FB i do not want to encourage anyone who has no experience to take on a chick that is not weaned, this might sound like do as i say not as i do but i have been OCD with video's, forums and general googling, books etc and we triple check everything we do with Ella's food temperature, disinfecting everything hands, feeding utensils and clean bedding after every feed. It's not easy believe me and you need a lot of expensive equipment already to hand before starting. So unless there is no choice then let someone else do the hard work and better still if you can visit the breeder and ask if you can help feed the chick supervised then thats defo the way to go. The Nursery on this forum has some excellent advice on hand rearing and also check https://www.africangreybabyparrot.co.uk/index.php/12_weeks_progress/?k=:2:: another great reference plus read everything you can before you do anything. Rob & Carol.

Welcome to Greyforums!

It's definitely been a challenge the first 2 days of on the hour every hour was not easy (lack of sleep wise) but when she was happy with one night feed at 3am it got slightly easier after a week she now goes 7 hrs through the night and we got our sanity back 🤪she is fairly straight forward feeding now but not looking forward to weaning her, just hope she gets the hang of it when the time comes. We started trying to breed AG's about 2 to 3 years ago with 2 pairs but about a 1 year ago we lost a hen after she ate a slug and died unfortunately, the second pair laid after a couple of months of owning them but she just can't seem to hatch them herself, we must have had at least 8 clutches of mainly fertile eggs that just never made it to hatch so Ella was incubated and it was a real surprise to us as we just expected the same result again. My first love has always been cockatoos but where we live now in a built up area it just wasn't practical, although the greys are also gorgeous and a damn sight quieter 🙄 Carol.

Hello and welcome! I enjoyed watching the "hatch" video and hope Ella thrives under your care.

Hello! Welcome to the forums! How exciting about Ella. It's not a challenge I would be prepared to take on myself! Would love to know more about Ella and your other birds!