The Parrotlet Stork landed in Illinois

and brought us

Peanut & Jilly's Clutch!

Meet the Jillynuts:)

hatch dates July 2, 2000 thru July 11, 2000

After almost 3 years, my *pet* parrotlets Peanut & Jilly surprised us with a clutch. The parents are both Pacific parrotlets.

It all started with an egg. The first egg was no good cause Jilly laid it from her top perch and it cracked. The second egg was infertile. 8 days later she laid 6 more eggs. All those hatched --YAAAAAAY! They were fantastic first time parents. Peanut even sat on the eggs and helped Jilly feed the babies.

I handfed all the babies using the spoon feeding method. Each baby sat in the palm of my hand --the only place they would eat-- and I handfed them. (That picture up top...I'm surprised it even came out. You can't see it but the baby's head was bobbing very very fast when John snapped that pic.) Spoon feeding is much slower than syringe feeding but the advantage is the babies get very very used to hands and people this way and turn out really sweet. *Lots and lots* of additional cuddling didn't hurt either:) Once the babies feathered out we knew we had 3 boys and 3 girls.

Here are a few pictures of them as they grew. Hope you enjoy them!

In that picture above the oldest baby is 2nd from the left and the youngest baby is 4th from the left. Parrotlets hatch about every other day and grow so fast that you can really see a differance between them.

This is the infant toy that I used to put in the corner of their brooder. When I was done handfeeding and placed them back in their brooder they would make a beeline for it and clump up around it. Lots of burrowing and digging to be the one who got to be the closest to it, LOL (I learned from a breeder friend of mine that you shouldn't handle babies right after they've been fed. It can cause the formula to back up and choke them. So while their crops emptied this little toy was a surrogate Mom:) Its safe to handle them again and cuddle them when their crops aren't that full.)

Here are the jillynuts just after the youngest weaned. They weaned at 5 1/2 weeks. The oldest is in his 6th week here and the youngest in his 5th week.

Update: Peanut & Jilly had 4 clutches and Atom and Eevy had 1 clutch. I handfed all of them. This is a picture of Atom & Eevy's two little girls which we named "Little Baby" and "Big Baby." It is one of my favorite pics.

Email me! Pat

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