faithful mates ?

[chamuca48]

When you have a mated pair and introduce another mated pair or a pair of their own offspring will the original pair stay paired or will one or the other wander ?


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Sheila in Mexico

[pigeonplanet]

They should stay mated, and I would be very suprized if they didn't. They will play around, but they always seem to go back to the original mating.

[Birdmom4ever]

In my experience they are fairly monogamous, but like people some will cheat.

Case in point: I have an infertile male who has been paired with the same hen for two years now. I replace the other pigeons' eggs with wooden ones as soon as they are laid, but I never bothered to take eggs from this particular pair because they never hatched anyway. Well...in December I saw, much to my surprise, that one of the eggs was fertile!! "Miracle Baby" hatched on Christmas Eve. He's well-feathered now and looks nothing like his papa, so I believe his mama had a little fling with a particularly handsome and persuasive young male in the loft.

However, two established pairs will probably stay with their mates. I've noticed that the hanky-panky started when I had a lot of young, single birds in the loft. Like teenagers, they have you-know-what on the brain. (Sorry kids!)

[DaveD]

Birdmom nailed this one. Every now and then they will cheat. I've seen this several times when one of the pair doesn't feel great, it's almost like thier mates simply get tired of waiting for thier mate to recover. I've also have a few pairs here where one male is nested with 2 hens, but with three parents they raise very healthy babies.

This does remind me of something odd we had here last year. We had a blue check female roller, who was one of our orginal 10 birds. This particular hen never stayed with one mate. She'd pick one out, nest, and when the babies were about three weeks old, she'd leave and find a new mate. This pattern continued for over two years, by my count she either had 7 or 8 diffrent mates during the two years. She would split up existing pairs, and left a lot of confused males behind her, as they all were suprised to find that when they were ready to mate again, she wasn't intrested in them at all. She never acted attached to any of the males. Sadly, she was killed by a hawk this spring. However, her last offspring is about a year old now, and she's already on her second mate as well. Guess it runs in the family. I guess my question is, did she act this way simply because of her personality, or is the instinct to stay with one male simply absent in this family line??? I do like her last daughter, but not sure I'm ready to watch the string of heartbroken males continue for years to come!!!!

Good day all!!!

[Birdmom4ever]

Wow! Sounds like you had a real run-around-Sue on your hands, Dave. Never heard of that behavior, but I have heard traits like aggressiveness or extreme nest defensiveness are passed on, so it's not surprising your hen's fickleness would be passed on to her daughter. Must be mighty confusing to the poor cocks!

[Trees Gray]

I have a Bandit, named Pixie, who is on her third mate. Her original mate, Bear broke his leg so he was out of the coop in intensive care for a month, then in rehab. Anyway, she was chased out of her cubby (because Bear wasn't there to fight for the cubby), and found another mate out of necessity. She wanted a cubby.

After that she spotted a another Bandit, Arnold, who had the cubby next to her, but it was much bigger. She left her mate, jumped into his cubby and put her head under his and started cooing. After trying to peck at her and get her out, Arnold eventually tollerated her, and fell in love.
She simply wanted to "move up in the world."
She wanted a bigger apartment.

I had a long talk with her, that it wasn't nice what she did, but I accepted it because the two of them look so much alike, they were probably "meant for each other." She stayed with him. Treesa