Small egg found in lovebird cage after 4 years of no egg. Is that normal.?

Question

We purchased a lovebird from a garage sale about 4 years ago. We were told his mate had died while laying an egg. A couple of years later we introduced him to a female lovebird in NY. The female got all excited moving her wings around the way they do when getting ready to mate. That made us more sure that our bird was a male. He didn't seem that interested and would peck at her when she came too close. Perhaps that was because he's not a male. A year later I found an egg in his cage in our home in Rhode Island. We have no other birds in our home in Rhode Island. The egg is about a quarter of the size of a chicken egg. If he is a she than why for the last 4 years were there no eggs? Do lovebirds need a special nesting environment to lay an egg?

He must be a she. What's puzzling is that for so many years our bird did not lay an egg. I thought female lovebirds constantly lay eggs.

Our there any other female lovebird owners out there who can tell me how often their birds lay eggs. Why was the female lovebird so interested in our lovebird. Don't lovebirds know if the other lovebird is a male or female?

Answer 1

Your bird is most definitely female :-)

Females can lay at any time.  They can go a number of years without ever laying and out of the blue decide to lay.  Hopefully this is infrequent and your bird won't lay again.  But it IS perfectly normal.  Allow her to keep her egg until she tires of it.  Otherwise she may decide to "replace" it and you don't want her laying egg after egg.  

If in the future you see signs of her being "nesty", cut back on her daylight  hours, make sure she's getting 10-12 hours of dark, uninterrupted sleep each night and don't allow her access to any dark spaces she may perceive as a nest.  

As long as your bird is okay, I wouldn't worry about her.  (Birds sometimes do engage in recreational s*x.  If they don't have access to a mate, a girlfriend will do.  You just won't have the worry over whether or not the eggs are fertile).

Colette

http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/Parro...

Answer 2

Well For know the s*x of the love birds you will need see some physical characteristics of the bird, that mean, take the bird, touch it and stress it. The most of the birds are easy to identificate and know the s*x, if have shiny colors is male, if have banished colors is female, but lookslike love birds are more difficult.

In this web page you can find information about all the species of love birds, because, for make this problem more complex, exist 9 species of birds that have the common name of love bird, and of course one specie can´t reproduce with a individual of other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovebird

You need identificate both birds and know first if both are from the same specie, latter you need know a little more about its life, and in this way try to make it feel more in home.

?You know¿, exist a kind of alteration named "The animal zoo feeling" and we suffer the same, when an animal is taked from its habitat he don´t will sleep or eat very well the first few hours because he don´t feel in home and safe, takes a little adapt to th new conditions. Well the smae happens with us (the humans when we travel on vacations).

Remember that the birds have feelings and they have also mental sickens like depression, I think that that bird have something like that.