Bird Care - theunissenlab/lab-documentation GitHub Wiki
Colony Room
General
NAF staff should give the birds food and water multiple times a week, change the paper in the cages, mist the birds (they like it!), and change the cages once a month.
They also give the birds lettuce and egg-food supplement once a week (on Fridays), and keep the cages stocked with nesting material (which is better to call "bedding", as this terminology makes it more clear how important is is for the birds).
Someone from the lab should check on the birds every other day or so to make sure everything looks good. In particular the NAF staff never seems to keep the bedding containers full. Also important is that sometimes the water containers not work right and won't dispense water. If you see sick birds in a cage check the water bottles!
Breeding
We keep notes of all the breeding ourselves, which is a fair amount of work. We keep the notes on two google docs (nest database and colony database- available on the lab's google drives here). Nest boxes are labeled 1-10 on the big flight cages (A and B). Cage A is closest to the door, cage B is in the back of the room. The next boxes are numbered starting with the two boxes on the side wall (1 and 2) and then continuing on in a right-to-left direction along the top row (3, 4, 5, 6) and then the bottom row (7, 8, 9, 10). It is not very intuitive so I repeat- they are labeled from right to left.
We are trying to keep our big cages limited to between 10 and 20 birds. To maintain the proper number of birds we often remove eggs from nests so we don't have too many babies. If we don't do this, and we aren't using the birds fast enough, then we can try to transfer birds to someone else if they want them, or we might have to euthanize extra animals, but hopefully not very often.
Cage Cards
We keep cage cards in the colony room with lists of bird by their bands and dates of birth. This is easiest when the colony database is up to date, the tab "Cage Cards" should provide an up to date list of birds in each cage sorted by male/female with their dates of birth. This can be copy pasted, printed, and attached to a card to post on each cage. This should be done whenever the cards are no longer up to date, probably approximately monthly.
Other Rooms
We are allowed to take birds to 125 and 131. IF YOU TAKE A BIRD OUT OF THE COLONY ROOM YOU HAVE FULL RESPONSIBILITIES FOR IT UNTIL YOU PUT IT BACK IN, including food, water, paper changes, cage changes, etc.
Cleaning log for NAF 125.