Cockatoos

Cockatoos in Field and Aviary · Tony Silva

Forty-three years of keeping, breeding and watching cockatoos, in 516 pages and 716 photographs. The third title in Tony Silva’s in Field and Aviary series, after Macaws and Amazon Parrots, and the first new book we have published in four years.

“My first contact with a cockatoo occurred in 1976 when I worked at a pet store. By the early 1980s I was breeding cockatoos but felt that the birds were never truly happy. I saved my money and traveled to Australia for the summer. That field experience proved to me that cockatoos were special; they were not the typical parrot kept in aviculture. Someday, I said to myself in 1982, I would write a book on this group.”

Tony Silva

He finished it forty-three years later. In that time he has kept or cared for every species of cockatoo and has bred all of them but three. Where his own experience ends, the book draws on other keepers and field observers, named and dated, so that the reader gets more than one man’s opinion.

What is in it

• Species accounts. Each one opens with a distribution map showing every subspecies in its own colour and a panel of the numbers that matter: length, weight, egg size, clutch size, incubation period and CITES listing. Then synonyms, scientific name, type locality, etymology and diagnostic features, with the sources given.
• Breeding, documented. Recorded breedings by country and by breeder, with years and numbers of young, so you can see who has done what and where.
• Hand-rearing. A chapter on the practice, and within the species accounts, feeding schedules by the hour and tables of chick weights day by day from hatching to weaning, with what changed at each stage.
• Housing. Aviary types and dimensions, suspended enclosures, nest log sizes and hanging angles, substrates, and how to arrange aviaries in a row without the neighbours causing trouble.
• Diet. Pellets against fresh food, calcium, which vegetables and greens, which nuts suit which species and which do not, and when in the day to feed what.
• Mutations, with how each one is inherited and where it came from.
• Legband sizes, species by species.
• The Cockatiel has its own account, as it should.

The photographs come from real aviaries and real nests, taken by the breeders themselves, and each one is credited. There are 716 of them, along with several dozen distribution maps and drawings.

Pages from the book

The book

516 pages · 716 photographs · several dozen distribution maps and drawings · hardback · 2.2 kg · ISBN 978-80-908669-7-3

Ordering with someone else?

Books sent together travel in one parcel and pay one shipping charge. Two copies within Europe ship for 35 € instead of 50 €; all four of our English titles ship for 45 € instead of 100 €.

Cockatoos + Psittaculture · Cockatoos + Macaws · Cockatoos + Amazon Parrots · two or three copies of Cockatoos · the complete set of four.

This is why breeders often order together. If two or three people in your club or at your bird market each want a copy, one order covers you all and you split the shipping between you. If you would like more copies than the sets offer, write to us at sales@psittaculture.eu and we will make you a special price.

See the sets