What's in the issue

Breeding is about feeding, and at this time of year fanciers rely on stepped-up nutritional content to give their birds the boost they need - both the adults and youngsters. In a special bumper issue, we focus on a range of breeding-season diets from our regular expert contributors. Dave Brown provides an overview of how the breeding diet fits in to the whole annual cycle, modelling the pattern evolved by wild birds. Then detailed advice on their specialist breeds follows from Tony Edwards (Bengalese finches), David Allen (canaries), Mark Jones (native hardbills), budgies (Sam Wildes), small parrotlike (Les Rance) and mixed collections (David Urmston). Finally Dave Brown summarises his different softfood formats for foreign finches on the one hand and canaries on the other. And on other topics we meet the cute little lesser spotted woodpecker and the larger but still cute rockhopper penguin – all alongside our news and Club News regulars.