As a practicing aviculturist for over forty years, I've had the opportunity to observe many changes and developments in the keeping and breeding of parrots. Within the last fifteen years, there have been increasing numbers of parrots bred in captivity each year. This increase has generally been the result of vastly improved avicultural techniques that have emerged as a more scientific approach to our avicultural pursuits has developed. Imagine for a moment the difficulty of breeding monomorphic species before the advent of surgical and cytological sexing; imagine the difficulty of treating birds for disease before avian medicine became an established field. Improved understanding of psittacine nutrition and a host of other innovative developments in husbandry have significantly increased the efficiency and successes of our avicultural endeavours.

An area of husbandry that has become increasingly important in the management of many psittacine collections is the use of artificial or surrogate incubation. Until now much of the information utilized in developing these programs has been extrapolated from incubation data on other groups of birds. While general incubation procedures are, indeed, very similar for most species, little, if any, specific information has been available as a result of the actual incubation of significant numbers of parrot eggs representing a broad range of species.

The data presented in Parrot Incubation Procedures (PIP) are the result of artificial incubation of an unprecedented number of parrot eggs. These have included a wide variety of psittacines ranging from common species such as Indian Ringneck Parakeets to such avicultural rarities as Palm Cockatoos and Blue-throated (Canindae) Macaws.

By virtue of his association with the Avicultural Breeding and Research Center in Florida, the author has undoubtedly had the iii occasion to artificially incubate the greatest number of large psittacine eggs ever available to a single individual. The expertise he has gained from this in-depth marathon endeavour has provided much information that is available from no other source. This volume will undoubtedly go a long way in enhancing the artificial incubation of parrot eggs for many years to come.