John Scammell Scotland

As well as the major award John also won 4 challenge certificates. The only dampener for him was that, as he now lives in a typical modern home with smaller room sizes, he was unable to accept all the trophies due to him for his various wins and had to decline acceptance of them on the day.

In the 2019 show season, John managed to exhibit at 8 shows and ended up with a total of 32 challenge certificates – putting him in to the Top 10 CC winners for 2019 – the only Scot to do so! He was also second in the 2019 Country Wide Seed Breeder of the Year awards for the intermediate section.

John is a hard worker at the shows he attends; always helping out and usually with a ready smile for everyone he meets and talks to. Quiet and unassuming, shift working patterns sometimes prevent him from attending his local club meetings and occasionally shows. He also has quite a sense of humour when the mood takes him! Most of his emails end up with some remark or other with “LOL” at the end! This is his third time in the budgerigar fancy, the first when he was only 13. He freely admits he gave them up when the “ladies” took up his fancy!

Slightly Unusual In Shape

His aviary is slightly unusual in shape as he has had to fit it in to the bottom of his small garden, living as he does in a fairly new housing estate to the south of Edinburgh. The aviary is 8 foot at the left, sloping down to 7 foot at the right, with a double-glazed door in the centre of the end facing his house. The door provides light through its half window as well as additional security from its locks, this adds to the usual burglar alarm. The total length is some 8.5 metres but to the rear it narrows, which can be seen in the photos of the flight where the perches are rather unconventional, running as they are along the length of the flight itself. The aviary has two windows 30 inches by 33 inches, glazed and then with security mesh over them; an airvac plus two vent axia extractor fans, all three on timers, provide ventilation. The floor is laminated. Every time I have visited John I am astounded by the cleanliness of the aviary, as they say, “you could eat your dinner off the floor!”

Cages are traditional 28 inches by 16 inches with wire fronts and he uses square perches; John has 24 of these in four rows of six. Nest boxes are plastic with an inner glass door; he tells me that the hens seldom break an egg against these doors even when the box lid is being opened. He likes the glass door as it allows him to see into the nest box and make sure the sittings hens are alright without pushing them off their eggs. The nest box measures 10.5 inches long, 8 inches high and 7 inches wide and has a wooden concave, to which shavings are added. In the breeding cages he provides plastic chick hides measuring 4 inches by 4 inches by 7.5 inches long.

John’s practice is to strip the vent area quite hard of both the cock and the hen before putting them into the breeding pen. I previously did this as well but not as hard as John and given his excellent breeding results I have adopted this practice. It is one that others may wish to consider, he really does remove a lot of feather, which in his view assists successful mating.

Premium Wild Bird Food

John uses Buxton’s 50/50 seed and Buxton’s Premium wild bird food – the NO MESS blend- in separate dishes in both his flight and cages. In the flight the birds love the wild bird seed and go through as much of that as the regular budgerigar seed mix. He started feeding the wild bird food to his budgerigars after an aviary visit where another fancier did so. He decided to give it a try with his birds and finds that not only is it taken readily by them but it is usually the first feed dish that they go for. These feeds are supplemented with freely given millet sprays, oyster shell grit, mineral and iodine blocks. He doesn’t provide them with cuttlefish.

He restricts his outcrosses to only 2 or 3 cocks a year, keeping to the same bloodlines. A strategy which has paid off for him in 2019, winning as he did most of the barhead and young bird shows at his local club. He relies heavily on keeping his breeding team young, especially the hens and uses mainly current year hens in his pairings. He tries to pair up so that he can use the new rings when they arrive. For John a good breeding season is measured not just in terms of numbers but in quality, but he hopes to breed an average of 100 chicks a year. Perhaps a good way of judging his progress is to look at the birds in his sales cage (which he lets me do every year) and each year I keep remarking “Many of these are too good to sell” and he replies “Well I can’t keep them all…. but just look at what is left in the flight”.

John Scammell offers up a wee tip to fellow exhibitors. In common with many budgerigar fanciers he removes the cage dividers and turns his cages into flight cages after his breeding season is over. He keeps the usual two back to front perches in the cage but adds a third perch at right angles to them. The birds then naturally perch facing him, allowing him to easily judge and compare their frontal head qualities as well as shoulder width. Being a canny Scotsman, the third perch is affixed to the other two with a small lump of bluetack!” – a very cheap fix!

I only hope that John repeats his success on the show bench in future years – time will tell! Maybe his shift work will allow him to show at the Club Show then.