Sharing a bond over birds

Alayla Van Niekerk and her dad Dion Van Niekerk bond over birds.

The father-daughter duo breed budgies at their Tauranga home.

"I like spending time with my dad and having fun with the birds," Alaylah, 9, says. "We have about 45 at the moment."

The Van Niekerks brought one of their budgies, Chiko, to the annual Tauranga Bird Club Show at the Mount Sports Centre at the weekend. Chiko was one of more than 600 birds on show.

"She is a Spangle," Alaylah tells me, which is one of the more common types of budgies.

"She is just a baby, only 8 months old and is mostly dark yellow," the 9-year-old says. "We had to hand feed most of her friends and brothers and sisters because their parents didn't feed them."

The young budgie enthusiast also has a Texas Clearbody named Trouble, but she says he didn't get to come along to the show.

"He's called trouble because he causes a lot of trouble," she says.

Alaylah and her father have been breeding budgies in Tauranga for about three years and keep most of their birds at home in two separate cages.

One is for breeding and the other is a free cage for the birds to fly freely, the youngster says.

"We breed two special types of birds," Alaylah says. "One is a Featherduster, which is a very poofy bird. It's feather's grow very quickly and they only live a very short life."

The other is a Lacewing, which Alaylah says can grow to be any colour.

I ask how she feeds the birds and Alaylah continues to recite her budgie knowledge.

"We feed the babies with a crop needle, which is like a little syringe, and we squeeze soft food down into its crop," she says.

A crop, Alaylah tells me, is where a budgie stores its food before it starts to digest it.

"You have to be gentle though to make sure you don't overflow the crop," she says.

Alaylah's dad Dion says his daughter has learned her knowledge from having budgies when she was younger.

"We used to have budgies when we lived in South Africa and she was very upset when we had to get rid of them to move here," he says.

So the pair picked up the breeding in New Zealand.

"It's something we can do as dad and daughter," Dion says.

Terrence Lowe and his naturally fed yellow canary. Photo / Andrew Warner

Among the rows and rows of birds, we spot Terrence Lowe's bright yellow canary.

"I predominantly breed the yellow ones," he says.

But he is staunch on not colour feeding his birds.

"It's all in the diet," he says. "One of the best things to feed them is rapeseed. That brings out the colour."

The Welcome Bay novice breeder joined the Tauranga Bird Club only a few years ago.

"I started off with just one pair, then I started buying and breeding more," he says. "We have got about 50 birds now."

That includes canaries, British birds and Gouldian Finches. "They are the smallest and the prettiest birds in the world," he says.

Lowe says his father got him interested in birds when he was a boy and the retired farmer has been breeding on and off over the years since then.

"We've always had birds," he says.