Lisa,
I am surprised my daughter has not commented on this thread... she has cockatiels, the two girls Rin and Ryner were 'surprise' babies... A major word of caution, while it may not be common or normal, what we experienced could happen to you as well.
Victoria's first cockatiel was Rukia, a female pearl. We fostered kittens for a humane league and during one visit my daughter met a surrendered cockatiel, which was thought to be a normal female. We adopted her as a friend for Rukia.... only problem, 'she' wasn't a normal female, she was a male pearl. We ended up with the two of them getting romantic and Rukia laid two eggs, both of which hatched. Things were fine for about a week, but then Renji decided he wanted to breed again and he started plucking the pin feathers from the babies. Apparently its not unknown for the male cockatiel to kill the current babies so mom will be interested in breeding again, tho not normal, that was what we unfortunately experienced.
We were very lucky that Victoria happened to check on the babies before they were too far gone. But when she opened the lid to the next box, it took a few seconds to realize what we were looking at, there were little spots everywhere... those spots were little dots of blood from the feathers being pulled out. Both babies were laying on the bottom of the nest box, not moving. She pulled them out immediately and thankfully both were still alive, tho barely. The recommendation was to pull them permanently and handraise the babies and pull the nestbox. They were maybe 10 days old.
The reason I share this, while having baby birds may sound wonderful, the outside chance that you are faced with the challenge we experienced can be daunting. Victoria was still on break from college, so she was home and able to cater to the babies, literally 24 hours a day... every couple hours there was preparing formula and feeding babies, cleaning and sterilizing and getting ready to repeat the process, including during the night.
I am not suggesting our experience is what will happen to you, but we never imagined when we gave them the nestbox that things would work out the way they did. And to make the story even worse, Rukia turned out to be a chronic egg layer and even with multiple trips to the vet, we lost her to what may have been a slight cold, tho no one else was sick. She had finally stopped laying eggs, but the vet (wonderful avian vet), said the stress on her body and how depleted her system was, she was not able to survive...
While the girls still see Victoria as mom and are really bonded to her, the whole story and loss of Rukia is not something we would ever want to repeat.
Sorry to sound all negative and pessimistic, I only wanted to share our experience of what happened to us.
Best of luck with your new man and best of luck with whatever decision you make!!
Jen
