Hi Warped,the advise that Paulie & Flip gave is good. If you are starting out breeding exhibition type budgerigars ,join a club get out there & visit as many aviaries as possible & develop your eye for a bird. Do not be in a rush to fork out all your hard earned money buying birds. You have to research the background of the birds you will eventually be interested in buying & also the breeder. By researching the breeder you have to work out a few things > IE: Do they have a few top quality birds in there avairy & does the quality drop off dramatically after those initial few top birds,if that was the case i would exit stage left & move on. That said if you go to an avairy that has birds that you like ,"but are not perfect" ,IE: This breeder may have spent years establishing a stud of birds with fantastic feather direction and awsome faces on his birds ,but by doing this they have allowed the birds to become smaller. You could go to another breeder and they might have an established stud of birds which excell in size & shoulder ,good head roll/back skull etc. Now if you could manage to aquire a few pairs from each of these breeders and combine the qualities of each > who knows you could possibly breed better birds than both of them.Easier said than done i suppose. Buying birds from a well established stud is the most important thing you have to do.