I have kept Bourke parrots for longer than I care to remember, but I still love them. I think they have such a quiet gentle way with them and that lovely tinkling whistle as they follow you around. When I got my first pair I was still building the aviary and the cock would follow me about and I would whistle to him. He would whistle back and sit on the perch and flip his wings at me, and I have loved them ever since.

The Bourke is a little brown parrot with pink feathers on its chest, the cock has a blue band on his forehead just above the top of the beak, and he also has blue feathers on the shoulders. Where as, the hen has very little blue on her at all, and she has a white stripe under the wing, the cock does not carry this stripe after the first moult.

They are a very gentle little parrot that can be kept with other birds such as finches or doves or in a colony.

I once had three hens all sisters out of the one nest, and I bought a cock, and as they were only young I put them all together in an aviary where I had bred Cockatiels. There were two nest boxes in there and one day I noticed one of the hens missing, so I started to look and found her in one of the nest boxes on 9 eggs. I found out later that two of the hens were laying and sitting in the same nest. They hatched 8 young ones and reared 7. The one cock looked after both the hens in the one box. The other hen laid 5 eggs in the other box and sat on them but they were all infertile. So you can run 2 hens with 1 cock, but I have only done it the once.

I have had some Bourke's that are very good parents, but I have had some that have been bad parents.

I once bought a pair of normals that later turned out to be split creams, some of the young were hatched with red eyes and as soon as the hen saw them she would throw them out of the nest and only rear the normal looking ones. She once hatched a nest of two red eyed young and reared the two of them to flying stage but one died, the other one lived for 12 months but she (it turned out to be a hen) was always weak and had something wrong with her.

Later this pair did hatch a young red eyed one and it lived for 10 days and was doing well, then one night it snowed, next morning it was dead in the nest with a full crop, I think it froze to death.

I have had a bit more luck with the Rosas. I bought a split Rosa cock a couple of years ago to put with a hen that I had and bred 2 Rosa hens. I mated one of them to another split Rosa cock from the same breeder last year and they went to nest and reared me three Rosa hens and a normal split Rosa cock, all looked beautiful.

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