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I've been summoned?
Storm is the younger of the two? Odd that he was sold as pied but isn't visibly pied. In the hundreds of birds I've bred that carry pied, they've always expressed it. Which is coincidentally why I hate breeding pied to anything not pied because the chicks always show it in varying amounts. Normal that the pearling fades. That happens in males.
A good cockatiel pair will produce on average four chicks and produce them often. I usually advise pulling to handfeed when the chicks would be on 3x a day. Handfeeding really isn't that hard. Especially with tiels. They
like to eat. And baby tiels begging are so cute when you aren't handfeeding 25+ at a time. Then the little shrill screamy/begging and the tee-tee-tee-tee while they are eating makes you want to live in a library.
Well-bonded pairs that are used to you may allow "co-parenting", by which I mean you can pull chicks from the box to handle them and put them back. Generally speaking they will not be as tame as babies that were hand reared. Additionally, parent-raised tiels are very inexpensive and often (IME) don't always go to the best homes. Someone who's paying $100 for a handfed, tamed baby is
usually going to take better care of it than someone who got it for $20.
You can try this and see how it goes. Some pairs tolerate it and others don't. Do watch for pairs that feed to heavily as you may have to intervene. I had a pair that consistently over-fed which caused crop issues. Some tiels will also pluck/chew the feathers off their chicks for reasons I have never fully understood. Sometimes it's obvious, like a pair carrying Ino and throwing a chick that looks different. Other times it's a lot harder to pinpoint the reason. Usually I pulled chicks before the parents would do that. Some pairs are happy to raise large clutches, and others prefer single chicks and will ignore the younger chicks to feed the oldest.
Always see if you can establish a relationship with a local, mom and pop pet store. Big Box stores (Petco and Petsmart) won't accept privately bred birds from individuals, but in many cases the smaller, privately owned stores, or even franchised ones, like Petland, are happy to meet new breeders and be able to sell more in the store. At my store we also hand-fed the chicks so the breeders were responsible for pulling the chicks and getting them started for a few days before transporting them to us and we finished them out. Obviously the breeder received less money when selling them to us young, but the breeder also wasn't investing the time and energy as well as the expense of handfeeding formula into the chicks.
