(click to enlarge)
This site describes
a kind of unique aviary for small birds. If you're crazy enough to build something
like this, we hope this helps open up a few options.
We built the
best aviary we could but with lots of tradeoffs for what was most important
to us...
- Low Maintenance
- More than anything else, we only want to spend 5-10 minutes a
day caring for of up to 75 birds. This means not over stocking the aviary,
and having a natural gravel floor that
drains well. A little planning needs to be done in perch and next placement
to avoid soiling things that birds walk on. Eventually, we want to build small
access hatches in the side for changing food and water without entering the
aviary. It's a work in progress...
- Looks -
We put it where it can be seen from 4 rooms: Patio,
Kitchen, Our
Bedroom and Guest Bedroom, and
we spent lots of time on aesthetics from trim,
textures and
multiple colors, to hiding screws and
making fossil patterns in stucco. The aviary's designed so that the roof opens
up toward the house, catching light from the open
orchid area and exposing the birds to
us.
- Health and Safety
- Perhaps most important to health, the birds are in a large
enough environment to exercise, explore and interact almost naturally.
We only made one potential compromises here by choosing to house them all
in one flight space were disease could spread. But we minimized the possibilities
of that by roofing the entire structure.
This prevents diseases coming in through wild bird feces. It's also screened
to prevent pox spread by mosquitos.
- Breeding
- This is what we gave up big time. If all the
birds are feed out of common containers breeding can't be managed well. And
some birds just breed more when they have nothing to do but stare at each
other in small cages.
- Expense
- This was decreased by doing all the work ourselves, but increased by using
only high quality materials. We probably spent $5,000 over a 7 month construction
period.
- Multifunction
- We combined the orchid house and aviary under the same structure because
they seemed to fit. The open orchid house provides a source of filtered light
between us and the birds through a canapé
of orchids. And the structure became just an extension of our screened
patio after we tore down the wall separating us from it. The aviary's
not suitable for hookbills however, because it's screened on the inside with
Pfeiffer wire (insect screen), and they would tear through it.
- Durability
- Short of building it out of concrete, we made it as strong and permanent
as we could imagine. After all, it's part of the house! All wood is CDX (pressure
treated), the roof is multiple layers under metal, the framing
is 4 * 6s, and posts are buried 2' deep
with a cement foundation. Everything was painted 2-3 times.
Feel free to take a look at the other parts of this sight
to check out some photos and see how we planned
and built it.
A good place for questions on aviary construction is
Finchworld's Finch
Forum, or feel free to contact us by
email
Also, take a look at:
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