Mary Allen
Parrot finches are representatives of finches living in exotic places. Some species are also kept and bred in Switzerland. They are distinguished by their basic green plumage and fabulous splashes of red, orange, and blue.
Parrot finches are filigree color wonders. They have green parts in their basic plumage. But that is not how it remains. They have redheads, blue cheeks, chest areas, the green fading into orange and red. The colorful exotics are about the size of a blue tit and have distant places of origin. They mostly come from tropical rainforests, some also from gardens of Indonesian islands, New Guinea, and remote South Sea islands. Tropical birds were scientifically described in the 19th and 20th centuries. The birds that still live with breeders in Switzerland today and are occasionally presented at exhibitions descend from imports from the second half of the 20th century.
A number of the special parrot finches made it to Switzerland, namely to Romuald Burkard (1925 – 2004) in Zurich and later to Baar ZG. The sociologist managed the Sika works and maintained a unique collection of parrots in his well-known, immense Baar aviary. But he also excelled in the keeping and breeding of parrot finches. For example, in 1965 Heinrich Bregulla (1930 – 2013) delivered him bamboo parrot finches that he had caught in the north of the Philippine island of Luzon. Bregulla and Burkard are responsible for the fact that the parrot finches could be established under human care at all. Bregulla tracked down the jewels, Burkard succeeded in breeding a number of species for the first time in this country.
Acclimatization on Site
Electrical engineering company Bregulla set out for the New Hebrides on the passenger-cargo ship Thaitien in 1959, planning to travel and bird watch on his own for eight months. That turned out to be almost 21 years. From 1980 he settled in Vanuatu in the South Seas and from there conducted various research and collecting expeditions to New Caledonia, the Fiji Islands, Tonga, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines. Now a sovereign state, Vanuatu was once part of the Anglo-French Hebrides.
Finally, Bregulla was entrusted with the redesign of the botanical and zoological gardens in New Caledonia. He was the first to bring the colored-headed parrot-madine, the king, manila, and bamboo parrot-madine alive to Europe. The birds from previous, small imports were long dead by then. It was not possible to obtain them through breeding. That was different from the imports of Bregulla because he had already accustomed them to other foods in the South Seas.
Due to their tropical homeland, parrot finches are warmth-loving, but not all species. For example, Bregulla measured a night-time temperature of around 13 degrees at the trapping site for the bamboo parrot finch, so that Romuald Burkard was finally able to report that these birds were not sensitive and flew vigorously in the outdoor aviary even in cool temperatures.