Reptile & Amphibian Forums

hi everyone...
this is my first time posting on here.
i noticed today one of my tiels has layed a long thin egg..im not sure what bird it was but the egg was same length as a normal egg just alot thinner,,it was probably not even half the width of normal egg,,
has anyone experienced this before????
im new to aviarys and bird breeding,and it seems a very odd looking egg...
also ive read in books that feeding vegtables etc is good..so should i cook the likes of brocoli or feed raw????

and finally what is sweet apples ???
i read they love them,,are they the apples you use for cooking etc.???as im in uk ive never heard pf sweet apples..we only have apples for making pies etc..and a pples for eating like granny smiths

any help would be great

The misshaped egg could be a sign of an infection. Or a lack of calcium.

They need to eat a variety of foods to stay healthy. You don't have to cook brocolli to feed it to them. I tie a stalk to the inside of their cage for an hour or two everyday. If you leave it in longer than that it can develop mold that will make birds ill or kill them. That's true with any wet food you feed them.

They can get protein from cooked beans. Wholewheat bread is a favorite of mine. Kale (a green leafy lettuce) corn, peas, carrots.

If they are unfamiliar with these foods they may not eat them the first few times they see them because they won't recognize them as food. But be persistent. They are curious creatures and will try this stuff eventually. I sprinkled my veggies with millet seed to entice them at first and it seemed to work.

I haven't heard of the berries you mentioned.

I would guess that by sweet apple they just mean... apples. But perhaps they prefer sweet to tart?

As for veggies, a variety of flavors and textures is always appreciated. So you can offer it raw one day and cooked another. Whole one day, diced another. Get creative and your birds`ll love you for it. It`ll take them a while to accept it as food, though, if they`ve never been exposed to it before.

thanks guys

If your bird isn't going to be brooding the egg, I'd be tempted to open it and see if there were any other abnormalities.

Birds do lay some very strange eggs. Wind eggs are one that really surprise people when they find one, as they are like a regular egg, with yolk, albumin, and the membrane around it, but no calcium shell. It is soft and squishy. It's kind of perplexing as to WHY they lay these, as they may lay one like that with all others being normal,a nd then never do it again.

I also had one hen try and lay an egg twice normal size (she eggbound and we had to put her under isoflurene gas to relax her enough to manipulate it out), which was closely followed by the tiniest little egg about the size of a small Budgie egg.

Some of them have no yolk, some have double yolks. The worst are the ones with the thickened, rough shells that are due to calcium and vitamin D imbalances (nearly as anyone can figure out) that result in egg binding and are very hard to get free.

Sweet apples, as was guessed, are the dessert apple catagory that are sweeter to the palate, and are usually eaten raw, as opposed to the tarter, cooking variety apples, or even the very tart cider apples.

Dessert apples would cover things like Yellow Delicious, Gala, Orange Pippins, Lady apples, Honeycrisp, or Fuji.

All purpose are more like Macintosh, Jonathan, Winesap,Granny Smith,etc.

Cider apples are not usually sold in stores and are often unnamed varieties as well as a few named ones.

Then there are also Crab apples, most of which are not very palatable fresh to downright horrid; and even pickled and sweetened, only a few, like Dolgo, make anything edible.