October 2024

Dirk is the head admin for SA Vink Auction and Rosestad SA Vinke.

Since Dirk can remember he kept and bred wild birds that he trapped near the rivers and farms in the Free State in the early 1970’s with his late dad Stoffel.

Aside from wild birds, Dirk’s first pair of foreign birds he kept were Grey Zebra finches. Over the years Dirk has kept other finches, but he always found his way back to keeping Zebra finches. Dirk has also bred show budgies and love birds but at the end, the Zebra finches won, and Dirk continues to keep Zebra finches.

Currently some of the birds Dirk keeps are: Zebra finches (in several mutations, e.g. full red, triple black, saddle backs, pure whites, and silvers), diamond firetails, a variety of doves (e.g. green winged doves, lace neck doves, pied diamond doves, silver diamond doves, passirina doves, Pigmy doves, fawn cinnamon doves, and Peruvian doves), and he also has jungle bush quails/singing quails.

Dirks seed mixture consists of white millet, canary mix, japanese millet, red manna, supplemented with grass seed. The soft food mix that he uses is as follows: AVIplus egg food, spinach, carrots, and boiled eggs. His water routine rotates with the following: honey water, red cell, virukill, and B12, with every second day being clean water in between the above. All birds are supplied with pink mineral and charcoal grit as well as coarse salt in small bowls.

In the future Dirk would like to get more Australian birds, such as grass finches and Australian crested doves. Dirk would just like to say that two years ago, he suffered terrible losses with his birds and several people assisted him with getting his birds going again. He can’t recall everybody but would like to mention the following people: Anneline from Bethlehem, CP from Smithfield, Eduan from Worcester, and Oom Lourens from Bloemfontein. Thank you for all your assistance.