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My interest in breeding birds began when I was five years old,when my father gave me my first pairo f canaries.
When I was seventeen years old, I started breeding south american finches: carduellis cucullata, carduelis xanthogaster, carduelis psaltria, carduelis tristis and carduelis yarrelli.
Ten years ago I saw a photograph of a fisher touraco in a magazine of the Spanish Ornithology Federation.At the end of the page said: “ the touracos are perhaps the oldest birds in the world”. At the moment I realised that I would like to know something about these birds.
In Spain it is very difficult to obtain information about touracos because a great number of breeders dedicate their time to breeding small birds.
In the last National Championship 16.500 birds were exhibited. Of course more than them were canaries, english paraketees, exotic and european finches and such-like, but there were no touracos or similar birds.
Gradually I met some people who breed or keep touracos.
Once of them had a female of hartlaub touraco available and so I bought it.
A few months later I bought three hartaub´s and two livingstone´s from a french importer.When I sexed the birds, one of them was a male and the other four were females.
After this I bought one violaceus and two buffon´s in Portugal , and they were all females too.
All my touracos are housed in the same aviary. It is 12m-3m-2.5m.
Last july, when the touracos had been in the aviary for six months, I found one egg on the floor and two days later another egg.
Twenty days later I could see one femaleof hartlaub building a nest in a dry branch of eucaliptus. I inmediatly put a basket with a fine nest inside, where she was trying to build. The female laid two eggs in the nest and began to incubate, with the help of the male.
A week later I looked into the nest and could see four eggs. Over the nest few days I observed the male and two females sitting- all this with the other touracos in the same aviary!.
Five days before the chiks hatched, one of the four eggs was broken because the male began to attack the other touracos. I decided then to remove the other six touracos to another aviary. Only two chiks hatched.
My girlfriend Mari and I were then very busy gathering berries for them.All these berries were provided in addition to their normal fruit diet of golden apple, papaya ( dry fruit) and some greens.
Some days I added a few larvae to the food. These larvae were consumed very quickly, but only by the male.
The larvae are from honeycomb moths.I use these larvae because I keep a lot of beehives in the mountains. I also use dry food ( T16 from Versege Laga) to feed the touracos.
When the chiks were 20 days old I decided to remove the family to another aviary because in the original aviary the branches were very tall and the chiks kept falling to the ground.
Nota: este artículo ha sido publicado en la revista nº 21 de la International Touraco Society de Gran Bretaña correspondiente al año 2004.
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Autor: Valentín Castiñeira Abilleira
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