I forgot to mention my location is the North East Coast of Scotland
sounds like you are doing all you should. with the dovecote, the birds are more or less like free birds that you feed, so if ferals can have babies and they do survive they can get old enough to fly and then follow the parent birds around and they will do as they do by picking and eating. the male bird should be feeding them at this point and when they get their wings so to speak they will come out of the cote and fly with the male bird. it is hard to manage free birds unlike a loft where you have control of things, so mother nature has a big part here. just hope the hawk does not get all of them.Can anybody give a fairly inexperienced fantail keeper some advice. My birds live in a dovecote and after two had been taken by a hawk late last year I built a new homing cage around the cote, netted it at night when they were in and had my two remaining doves caught. I bought four new birds and put them in to home them over winter and after a few failed attempts at incubation over the winter when it was far too cold we now have two new babies,who are three weeks old and also two birds on eggs.
The birds have been in now for 12 weeks and should be well and truly homed I hope and I would let them fly free but I am unsure what to do about the new squabs. They were hatched in the highest nest holes and I am concerned about how they cope, getting up and down for food etc when the time comes for them to leave the nest.
I have not found much information about dovecote doves, I know an aviary would be easier to manage but I like the idea of the dovectote and last summer it was brilliant seeing the birds flying free.
Are you birds garden fantails or garden doves? If they are, they are very easy to home and, if they have been under a net for 12 weeks they should easily be homed. If they are homing pigeons and were adult when you bought them then you will just have to take a chance that they stay and do not fly back to where they were reared. The best time to remove the net, in this case, would be when they are sitting on eggs.rolleyes:Can anybody give a fairly inexperienced fantail keeper some advice. My birds live in a dovecote and after two had been taken by a hawk late last year I built a new homing cage around the cote, netted it at night when they were in and had my two remaining doves caught. I bought four new birds and put them in to home them over winter and after a few failed attempts at incubation over the winter when it was far too cold we now have two new babies,who are three weeks old and also two birds on eggs.
The birds have been in now for 12 weeks and should be well and truly homed I hope and I would let them fly free but I am unsure what to do about the new squabs. They were hatched in the highest nest holes and I am concerned about how they cope, getting up and down for food etc when the time comes for them to leave the nest.
I have not found much information about dovecote doves, I know an aviary would be easier to manage but I like the idea of the dovectote and last summer it was brilliant seeing the birds flying free.
I THINK, their Fantails are different than the kind we think of when we hear, Fantail.Are all your pigeons fantails? If so, you need to understand that they aren't good flyers and are easy pickings for hawks. If there is a time of year when hawks aren't around a lot, you could let them out to roam around your garden, but when hawks are around you must keep them in or you will lose them. A racing homer can out fly a hawk but a fantail can't. They are also more vulnerable to four-legged predators. Where we live in northern California, there are hawks around from late summer through early spring and we gave up flying our pigeons altogether because I don't like losing them to hawks.
Chances are great, that if they have already been flying outside before you got them, they may go back to the original home, if they have the homing instinct.When you get an older bird how long do you need to keep them confined before you allow them to fly free? I am afraid that my new birds will head back to where they came from, they have been with me since Mid December. One of the males is very large and appears not to have any fan to his tail at all and looks more like a normal white homing pigeon! Also they had already been flying before they came to me.
True, if they are more white homing pigeons that garden fantails.Chances are great, that if they have already been flying outside before you got them, they may go back to the original home, if they have the homing instinct.