New Budgie Question

Question
Hi Leah,

My beloved budgie passed away a week ago today.  We are left with one budgie who is not that tame at all -- she's a little wild and about 5 years old and in good health.  She got along pretty well with our other budgie who was a male.  The budgie who passed away was very tame.  We are thinking about getting another budgie.  We have two separate cages in the house but we let them fly about during the day.  How do you think the 5 year old budgie will adjust to the new baby budgie?  She is quite an aggressive budgie.  Will I need to keep them separated for a while and should I quarantine the new budgie?  I have heard horror stories about budgies pecking each other to death.  Do you think it would be better to just stick with the one budgie for now?  Also, do you know where I could purchase a hand fed budgie? I live in southern California. Thank you very much.  Laura

Answer
If you're worried about aggression, keep them separate.  Some females are simply aggressive toward other birds.  They'll often get along with males, but with other females, they can become absolutely vicious.  Sometimes they will get along for a while until they get into breeding season, and this is usually when those horror stories that you've heard about happen.  They get so obsessed with keeping themselves and their nest area and future babies safe, that they will sometimes kill their mate or other birds.  But since they seem affectionate around breeding time, most owners are caught off guard when these attacks happen.

If you want another budgie, but are worried about the female, keep them apart.  If you want to try putting them together, you should still keep them apart for a month before putting them together as a quarantine period so that they won't pass germs on to each other and get each other sick.

I live about 2,000 miles away from you, so I don't know of any areas where you could get a hand fed one in your area.  Have you tried craigslist.org?  You can look around on there or place a wanted ad to try to find one.