Sadie laid an egg

[Karcar]

Hi everyone,

I hate to sound so stupid but in this case I am, as some of you know or remember Sadie is my recent rescue and as I was cleaning out cages this morning I found an egg. Is there anything I need to do? Will there be more ? Should I give her some extra calcium. It is Sunday or I would call the vet. what happens next should I check on something to make sure everything is the way it should be? I just feel slightly worried as you can tell. If there is anything I need to know please contact me.

 

Thank you, Karen

[Dave007]

First off, don't take the egg away. Quickly taking the egg away will only stimulate her to lay another.If she shows interest, she'll keep it with herself. Leave the egg alone for about 25 to 30 days or until she completely loses interest. If there was anything in the cage that resembled a nesting area, remove it. If the egg is already in a nesting area with her, leave it alone. She'll eventually lose interest because it's an infertile egg. If the egg is on the bottom of the cage abd she knocks it around and cracks it, take it out. Sometimes this happens with greys and many other species of birds even though there's no mate.

[katana600]

Bless her heart. Of course you would be worried for her, she is so new to you and this is a new experience too. The saving grace is that she must feel like your home is safe with an abundance of food or she wouldn't be trying to start a family there. I don't know the steps to take to keep her healthy because we haven't been through this. When we got our female bird, I did a lot of reading and they suggest twelve hours of darkness a day for females so they don't get the idea it is springtime. I have only had my girl for four years so I don't even know if she has gone through her puberty, but so far, no eggs. I would suspect that vitamin depletion etc comes from laying many eggs, so you have time to talk it over with your vet. Dave's suggestions are excellent and it will be interesting to know what she does with the egg.

[Birdnut]

We went through this a lot with our little lovebird. (Very different kind of bird, but the principles have got to be the same.) She went through a couple of spells where she laid several eggs. She had to have some vet assistance with a couple of them, so it was kind of rough on her. She was put on a calcium supplement for a time, but, as I said, she had laid several eggs. The supplement was to help ensure that any eggs she produced would have good hard shells. If the shells aren't good and firm the bird can become egg bound. Fortunately, she has not tried to lay in quite some time now.

 

I'll share the advice we were given to help prevent this.

 

Limit the period of light during the day, as katana mentioned, to fewer than 12 hours. Remove any access to "nesty" places or potential nest building materials, like shredding toys, as Dave mentioned. Izze sleeps in a tent, and we still let her have a tent to sleep in, but only a small one that she can barely get into and her tail sticks out. Back off on soft and fresh foods, as this creates the perception of abundance, something that seems to stimulate breeding activity. (I don't know if you'd want to do this -- we didn't want to either -- but just sharing what we were advised.)

 

We did leave the eggs for her to sit until she no longer showed interest in them, as Dave advised.

 

With Izze, we were advised to disturb her environment by rearranging her cage furnishings and/or relocating her cage. This kind of thing is supposed to decrease her level of "bio-security." Now, this was a good idea for Izze, but I can appreciate that, with your new rescue, you definitely do not want to disturb her feeling of security, so that's a tricky one. Do you have things arranged in Sadie's cage to create a "screen" for privacy, as is sometimes done? If so, you might try moving some of those things around, if this does not upset Sadie.

 

Good luck with this. Hopefully you can get some good advice from your vet tomorrow. This can be a worrisome issue to address, as we experienced with our little bird.