Breeding for Tameness

Since it came up on Anita's thread, thought I'd start a new one on the subject.

So, I have noticed some predictable personality/temperament differences among babies of different pairs. I haven't bred enough birds for my anecdotal stories to really prove anything.

Along the line of breeding wild animals for easier going temperaments, there have been experiments done. I wonder if birds can be domesticated in the same manner. Right now, I believe budgies and cockatiels are the only ones considered "domesticated". But we call all see they're not tame in personality from domestication. In budgies and tiels I don't think people have bred them for selected personalities, but for color so we can't rule out that selective breeding wouldn't make them more docile.

Fox experiments:
https://johnwade.ca/attachments/article/359/russianfoxfarmstudy.pdf
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/taming-wild-animals/ratliff-text/2
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/1999/2/early-canid-domestication-the-farm-fox-experiment/2
http://www.ratbehavior.org/CoatColor.htm

I do believer that the temperament of parents plays a role in how the babies turn out to be.
Jean Pattison in FL wrote an article about her experiences with many African Grey pairs, and how certain pairs will always produce babies with noticeable traits.

GlassOnion wrote:

I do believer that the temperament of parents plays a role in how the babies turn out to be.
Jean Pattison in FL wrote an article about her experiences with many African Grey pairs, and how certain pairs will always produce babies with noticeable traits.

Yes, but if I recall correctly, in her article there was no genetic conclusion drawn. Just that calmer parents had calmer babies, which could be the nurture aspect - the parents don't freak out when humans are around so the babies don't learn freaking out behavior.

It would be a very interesting experiment for Ms. Pattison to put the eggs of the easy going parents under nervous pairs and vice versa to see how the babies turned out.

I'd love to do that experiment, but I don't have enough pairs to be able to coordinate the timing right to do it.

I can't recall if it was the same article, but she also mentioned that some pairs always had babies who turned out to be better talkers and other pairs had Buddhist birds.

I have had clutch mates where some where talkers and others not.The tameness thing i'm not to sure about.If you pull the babies and hand raise, the parents have very little influence , if parent raised they seem to be hard to tame. I know babies removed from the nest in the wild make very tame pets,ie;Jake.

henpecked wrote:

(...) I know babies removed from the nest in the wild make very tame pets,ie;Jake.

Yes, about Jake,
I found your info somewhere and I was pretty shocked, that Jake was wild bird. He looks on videos so tame and so addicted to you, that it's like unbelievable to make wild bird so domesticated. It's just so amazing about her

My old boss's zon is pushing 30. It was a wild caught and not tame when he got it. I don't recall if he told me how old she was when he got her. It took him a couple of years to tame her and build a relationship with her. Today she is as tame as any handfed baby I've ever met (towards people she likes at least).

Was a time, not so many parrot generations ago, when ALL companion parrots were wild-caught. And I expect that in and of itself to some degree manipulated the gene pool.

I don't think the way to think about it is that "tameness" is an inherited trait, but more that underlying characteristics which add up to a propensity to tameness may be heritable. It's the old nature vs. nurture, and IMO it's now pretty clear that the answer is both are important.

One thing that seems to me to make selective breeding of parrots complicated is that they mate for life and they have opinions on the matter. Y'all with experience can correct me, but I don't have the impression you can just pick a female and a male with desirable traits and breed them as you can a horse or dog. Does anyone talk about AI in birds? That way you could let them pair, but still control at least some of the offspring.

Has anyone ever done an experiment switching eggs between pairs? Would they reject them out of hand? It would be interesting to see how much of the apparent difference between offspring of different pairs was inherent vs. evironmental/learned.

ALso wonder what y'all think about co-parenting. Scotty was bred by EB Cravens who does co-parenting. He claims the babies are "better at being birds" and able to be more independent and in the long run more successful in captivity. Scotty is certainly his own bird, and he's quite good at entertaining himself. He's also got a propesity to bite in a species that's not known for that.

I've done a little co-parenting with the zons but stopped.The parents stress so much when you mess with their babies and if the hen thinks your going to pull the babies she'll stay in the box and wait for you to try(and remove fingers when you do).I'm a bit old school in that i leave my babies in the box for 3wks or so.Long enough that they know that they're a bird.Most breeders now days pull the eggs when laid and handfeed babies from day one.I'm sure they produce more babies than i and avoid problems like my recent ones.Josie and i have made the decision to start using a incubator/brooder in the future,maybe then we would have more insight on tamness of birds completely hand raised.

ScooterNScotty wrote:

One thing that seems to me to make selective breeding of parrots complicated is that they mate for life and they have opinions on the matter. Y'all with experience can correct me, but I don't have the impression you can just pick a female and a male with desirable traits and breed them as you can a horse or dog. Does anyone talk about AI in birds? That way you could let them pair, but still control at least some of the offspring.

Depends on the species of parrot. The suns, jendays, tiels, maroon bellied conures, GCCs, IRNs easily play musical spouses. If I have any problem pairs a mate swap usually fixes things. The eclectus are notorious for being hard to pair up - females scare the boys.

ScooterNScotty wrote:

Has anyone ever done an experiment switching eggs between pairs? Would they reject them out of hand? It would be interesting to see how much of the apparent difference between offspring of different pairs was inherent vs. evironmental/learned.

No they will not reject them out of hand. W/ the conures, IRNs and tiels I can play musical eggs. The eggs just have to be very close in age.

ScooterNScotty wrote:

ALso wonder what y'all think about co-parenting. Scotty was bred by EB Cravens who does co-parenting. He claims the babies are "better at being birds" and able to be more independent and in the long run more successful in captivity. Scotty is certainly his own bird, and he's quite good at entertaining himself. He's also got a propesity to bite in a species that's not known for that.

I've tried co-parenting and I suppose it may just be laziness on my part; but 6-12 weeks of going into a nest box multiple times a day to play with the babies is harder for me than to handfeed 4 xs a day for 6-12 weeks. And, as Capt says, sometimes it's VERY hard on the pair. Conures generally don't get too upset by nestbox intrusions, but I do have one pair of sun conures that completely shocked me by killing and eating the toes and wing tips off a clutch of babies. I was besides myself trying to figure out what their problem was. I have now come to the conclusion that pair does not tolerate daily nest box checks. Now I only peek in on them once a week and they're now on four babies (oldest is almost 4 weeks old) and all are just fat and fine.

Personally, I think the ability to entertain themselves can be human taught. Ducky does it just fine. All the pet birds I've had were able to self-entertain even with humans sitting in the same room watching TV and ignoring them.

How did you find out who the breeder of Scotty was? I thought he was bred locally in your area? Isn't EB Cravens in HI?

I don't incubate and handfeed from day one if at all possible. The babies grow slower than parent started. I'm one of those "mother's milk is best" kinda people. I don't believe humans can replace what nature's perfected. Also, handfed from day one doesn't necessarily mean they're any tamer. I handfed from hatch an IRN years ago. I swear the day that ringneck weaned it psycho'd out.

patdbunny wrote:

I don't incubate and handfeed from day one if at all possible. The babies grow slower than parent started. I'm one of those "mother's milk is best" kinda people. I don't believe humans can replace what nature's perfected. Also, handfed from day one doesn't necessarily mean they're any tamer. I handfed from hatch an IRN years ago. I swear the day that ringneck weaned it psycho'd out.

I think I own that IRN now.
I am quite aprehensive about incubating and feeding from day 1...for all of the obvious reasons and a few others.

flappinhappy wrote:

patdbunny wrote:

I don't incubate and handfeed from day one if at all possible. The babies grow slower than parent started. I'm one of those "mother's milk is best" kinda people. I don't believe humans can replace what nature's perfected. Also, handfed from day one doesn't necessarily mean they're any tamer. I handfed from hatch an IRN years ago. I swear the day that ringneck weaned it psycho'd out.

I think I own that IRN now.
I am quite aprehensive about incubating and feeding from day 1...for all of the obvious reasons and a few others.

If not done "correctly" they can stunt. Even us "experienced" handfeeders can experience stunting. My first experience handfeeding from day one was with a couple of caiques about 12 years ago. I took the babies to the vet at about 2 weeks of age for something else and the vet said they were stunting. He gave me very specific instructions on what I needed to do and the babies caught up, but I don't like the possibility of problems and avoid day one feeding if at all possible. If the choice is death or day one feeding, of course I'll feed day one babies.

patdbunny wrote:

How did you find out who the breeder of Scotty was? I thought he was bred locally in your area? Isn't EB Cravens in HI?

We purchased him from a local breeder that runs a store. Scotty had come to them from EB -- they are now breeding Capes, and I assume he came in a shipment of potential breeders. She has a pet Cape of her own, a female, and perhaps they were a failed pair? We never really got a straight story about his past or any of the paperwork, but I did verify with EB that he'd sent her babies on several occasions, so there is very little reason to think the info we got wasn't true. Everyone in the store recalled he was from EB, but they had differing ideas of how long he'd been in the store... kind of frustrating, but we love him anyway! (Scotty, not EB, that is. HAven't met EB, but might try to tour his place next time on on the Big Island for my Keck archive.).