My cockatiels!!!!!

Question
Hi Chrys, My birds(cockatiels) are a bonded pair and this is their first clutch of eggs. She laid her first clutch of eggs about a month ago and she sits on them. As time passed on then she stoped sitting on them and would not go into the nestbox and then the same day that she stopped sitting on that bunch of eggs the male cockatiel would mate her again, and after he has finished mating her then she would go back into the nest box and then start being broody all over again and then she would lay new eggs and then sit on them and then afetr like a week she would not be broody and come out of the nest box and then he would mate her agian this has actually been repeating for like 3 weeks straight already and not one egg has hatched yet. Now she is like on her 4th clutch o eggs i think abd she has been sitting on them for like a week and a half and she has got 7 eggs ! can u please answer this question ASAP and please could you reply to my email ! thanks that will be great. It's just thati'm really scared that she might get egg bound or die because of lose of calcium or something!

Thnx Frank

Answer
Hi, Frank.  Thanks for posting.

Are you absolutely sure you have a bonded pair (male and female) and not 2 females?  How do you know this for sure?  How old are these birds?

It's not unusual for a pair of birds to mate several/many times, although it only takes 1 mating for a female to lay a full clutch of eggs.  If these eggs aren't hatching, you need to determine why they aren't hatching.  This is why I've asked you if you might have 2 females instead of a male/female pair.  A pair of tiels will stop sitting (incubating) their eggs if they know they aren't going to hatch (they can feel movement inside the egg during incubation, so they know if a viable baby is inside or not).  Then they will usually lay a new clutch and start the process over again.  If babies hatch, then this process takes a bit longer, but once the babies are a certain age, the female will go to nest again.  

Your post was a bit confusing because all these clutches that are being laid and the process involved would take more than just 3 weeks (for 4 clutches of eggs), so I'm a little confused about what's going on exactly.  It takes 18 days of complete incubation for an egg to hatch, if it develops properly and is viable.  There seems to be so much confusion going on based on the information in your post, I'm not sure the pair has completely or properly incubated a clutch for a full 18 days.  This might be what the problem is...are they incubating (female sits at night; male sits during the day) their eggs completely at all?  

If she is laying eggs, she likely won't become egg bound.  Hens become egg bound usually with a first egg in a clutch, but once the first egg passes, it's rare for subsequent eggs to become bound.  You can ensure her calcium levels remain stable by providing a cuttlebone or liquid calcium (ask your pharmacist...they keep liquid calcium behind the counter).  

I need more specific details with dates/number of days, etc., in order to provide you with better specific information about what to do next.  What is the current situation...are they currently incubating a clutch of eggs?  If so, when did incubation begin?  If this is clutch 4, what happened with the eggs from the other 3 clutches (did you remove them, are they still in the nest, did the tiels destroy them/throw them out of the nesting box)?

Chrys