borderglider

I wasn't suggesting that birds don't need to be controlled - we have similar problems here in the UK with wild pigeons and rooks - but they use bird-scaring devices to frighten them off. What I can't quite understand is why they don't trap the excess birds and sell them to parrot-lovers? Here in the UK a single captive-bred Galah costs about £500 and a Sulphur Crested Cockatoo costs about £800. Doesn't it make more sense to trap birds and sell them to reduce numbers rather than poison them in the most inhumane manner? I realise that this is tangential to the issue of why bush-budgies are so hard to obtain - but acccording to the article I quoted above - poisoned bait is left out indiscriminately - so that any species of parrot or parakeet which takes it is poisoned. There has to be another way surely?

Thanks for all of the advice - I guess the concensus is 'don't even think about it'. I have been reading up on John Gould's original collection of wild budgerigars and their import into the UK in the 1840s - along with specimens of dozens of other Autralian psittacines. Interestingly, Gould says that of ALL the species he collected: galahs, cockatoos, loris etc - 'these little grass parakeets are the most intelligent, charming and endearing of all of them. They were bred by the thousands in the UK in the late 1800s but were still considered a very valuable rarity. Apparently in the 1920s people were prepared to pay up to £120 sterling for a blue mutation! That is about £5,000 in today's money. I must admit that I find the near-total ban on export of common parrots - even for aviculture rather than the pet trade - confusing. I found a site here: http://www.ckcbirds.co.uk/cockatoocullinginaustralia.htm which describes the killing of cockatoos, galahs and lorikeets Australia"POISON PLAN FOR FLOCKS" Herald Sun, Thursday March 25, 1999 Thousands of wild galahs, cockatoos and corellas will be poisoned in a chemical cull. Victorian farmers yesterday won new powers to use lethal chemicals to stop birds so often blamed for ravaging their crops and sending them broke. But opponents last night said the Australian wildlife faced agonizing deaths under the plan. They warned that other bird life, including eagles and hawks could be poisoned. It is understood the poison attacks the central nervous systems. Vets said the poison would not be quick and birds would suffer long and painful deaths. Conservation and Land Management Minister Marie Tehan admitted the decision to approve mass poisoning was difficult, but the government had to respond to the plight of Victoria's farmers. "We've had stories of total wipe-out of crops, from 25 to 100 per cent of crop," she said. Mrs. Tehan could not say how many thousands of birds would be killed, but she described the situation as desperate. Farmers will be issued with 60 day poisoning permits if they can prove crop loss or financial hardship. They will be restricted to chemicals allowed under the Agriculture and Vet Chemicals Act, which Mrs. Tehan said were commonly used in farming and horticulture. She said the bird population was booming despite limited shooting, trapping and gassing. But animal rights activists and vets said birds could endure painful deaths from the poison. "They fly off before the poison kills them and they'll either spend a long time in agony before they die, or they'll be very sick and maybe recover, "said RSPCA president Dr Hugh Wirth." Sixty-day permits will be issued once inspecting wildlife officers confirm significant damage to crops. However, wildlife authorities cannot give advice on baits or poisons to be used because there is no information, the poisons previously being banned from such use and no research has been carried out. Accidental kills of non-target species will be excused. Beyond human safety we are particularly concerned about The need; extensive studies by the department itself have strongly recommended against poisoning to control pssiterines. * Non target kills; there will be numerous as primary kills of many species of pssiterines (possibly including threatened species), other grainivorous birds and mammals. As you know many species that do not usually eat grain will do so during winter - when the poisoning is planned. There will also be numerous secondary kills of raptors, corvids and mammals. * To precade the effects on the target species from a conservation and ecological sense the humane aspects; organophosphates are a violent poison. Minimal monitoring of the program is planned; permitees are being asked to record and report all kills to the department, i.e. it might be largely self-policed. The normal process of ethics approval has apparently been bypassed at a political level. Please write to the minister about this alarming issue as a matter of urgency. The Honorable Marie Tehan Minister for Natural Resources and Environment PO Box 500 East Melbourne Victoria 3002 Australia Fax international +61 3 96378999 IS THIS STILL GOING ON???

okay, I have been searching the web in the UK and Europe to find out if there is an equivalent movement to the Aussie 'Bush Budgie'. There is definitely a small group in Holland that is trying to 'breed back to' the style and form of the early natural budgerigars. Similarly - in France there is a major website called 'Perrouches Ondulees' (their name for budgerigars) which seems largely devoted to non-show birds. I noticed that several breeders in Australia specialise in Bush Budgies and sell them as pets or for aviary colonies So my question is this. I know that it is -quite rightly - impossible to export native wild parrots from Australia to Europe; but do they allow the export of 'captive bred' bush-budgies or their eggs? Has anyone ever succeeded in doing this? It would be a lovely thing to try and re-establish a more natural type of budgerigar in the UK. I realise that one could simply visit pet shops and select individuals that looked similar to the original stock - but these would inevitably be the 'cullings' from show-breeder's stocks and they would carry every recessive show-gene under the sun? Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks for all the comments - and glad you all find this worthy of discussion. The issue about 'survival in the wild' is a bit of a red-hrring. What I was trying to point out is that Nature has a thousand ways of enforcing health and fitness in the wild populations of birds, animals, fish - in all of the living world. When mutations do occur - 99.9% of them negatively affect a wild bird's survival chances: albino blackbirds fall to predators in a matter of days; a bird that was too large or slow to escape the hawk would be killed first etc. etc My point was that - when you take Nature and natural selection out of the equation - which is what we do when we domesticate birds and animals - the RESPONSIBILITY for maintaining the health, fertility and basic form of the species lies with the human aviculturalist - who takes over where Nature left-off. So - in the wild - any budgerigar that could not fly really fast would be weeded out of the population very quickly - its genes would die with it. Any bird that had a low fertility rate, or was a poor parent - would be wiped from the slate within a generation Any budgerigar whose feathers were so thick around its eyes that its vision was obscured - woudl be the first to be eaten by a hawk The problems come when human beings start to impose genetic changes on the captive stock by selective breeding - for purely aesthetic or 'fashionable' reasons. A judge decides that he prefers budgies with bigger and bigger heads - and starts to award prizes to them. Breeders respond by selecting birds with more and more feather on the head - or longer and bulkier feathers - and they reinforce these traits by strong in-breeding (the classic technique). This is all done purely for 'show' - and along the way the judges decide that physically bigger birds should be rewarded - and ones with concave backs - and all of this rapid change is brought about regardless of the effect these changes have on the bird's health, its fertility, its ability to mate, it's ability to even 'see' though a helmet of feathers. To recap - Nature ruthlessly weeds out ANY genetic feature that impairs the bird's survival in any way - in terms of speed, form, agility, intelligence, fertility, resistance to disease, parenting ability - and so on. Human fanciers - in direct contrast - choose some random characteristic which they 'like' and then selectively breed to enhance it at all costs: bigger heads, longer tails, heavier bodies - and they do this regardless of the loss of other charactes like fertility, health, disease resistance, parenting ability etc. The result - in Border Canaries - which I had 40 years experience of - was massively oversized birds with appalling loss of fertility, terrible parenting ability and much-reduced longevity. Which is why many canary fanciers in the UK opted to return to the Fife Canary - which is the 'original' Border Canary, unmodified, half the size and 6 times the fertility. Many, many 'big men' in the Border Canary world resorted to taking all their eggs from their Borders and giving them to Fife hens to incubate and rear - but even with this strategy - they still can't get fertile eggs from many pairs of champion Borders. When I started keepign budgerigars with my dad back in the 1950s the birds -as displayed in Vowles paintings above - had already come a long way from the original wild stock - they had after all been selectively bred for colour and shape for at least a hundred years in captivity. However, they were still very healthy, very fertile ( 8 - 12 young in one nest was quite common) and their colours were just brilliant. Having said that, you could have put a green exhibition budgie alongside a wild one in the 1950s and it would not have looked THAT different; it would have flown almost as well in the aviary and its lifespan would have been similar. The same cannot be said of an 'exhibition' budgerigar today. These problems are not confined to aviculture. There has just been a massive blow-up in the dog world after the RSPCA said it would no longer attend the Crufts dog show because almost all the pedigree breeds are now afflicted with so many health problems (deafness, blindness, hip dysplasia, arthritis etc) that the RSPCA can no longer support the dog-breeding industry in the UK until it reforms itself. The crunch came because one particular breed has been bred with a skull that is too small for its brain and the dogs are in pain throughout their lives. Despite this - the breeders continue to select for dogs with smaller and smaller skulls. Another variety can only ever be bord by caesarean section. Dalmations are widely affected by genetic deafness. The factors in common with the bird world are that breed judges decide to start rewarding exaggerated characteristics of a particular breed - and breeders select to enhance that aspect by in-breeding. in the case of budgies - my view is purely selfish - I just love the colours and form of the classic birds and feel that the modern birds are less shapely, less colourful and less agile than their ancestors. And from what I read, the issues of fertility, longevity and health are all at risk.

Apologies again - I posted the pictures here and then tried to reduce the size of the Flickr photos - for some reason this broke the links - probably because the file size changed. Here they are - for the very last time. They can all be seen and downloaded from my Flickr Site at: Flickr Gallery Grey Cock and Grey-Green Hen Skyblue Cock Opaline Blue Hen & Opaline Lt Green Cock Lutino Cock Light Green Cock Violet Cock and Cobalt Hen Apologies for all the chaos.

Sorry about the missing images - my bird website is hosted on a free server at Heart Internet and they disable it every month when my traffic exceeds 100 megabytes - apparently I passed my traffic limit today!. okay, I figured out a way to do it by posting them to my Flickr Photography site. Here they are - apologies for the hitch, Also, if you would like digital copies of these image files - send me a private message with your email and I will email you the image files - or maybe there's a way to add them to this site so that anyone can download them. If you go directly to my Flickr Web Gallery at: Visit My Website you should be able to download them directly. Just go to the Flickr website via the link, click on the image and it will enlarge; then go to the menu heading 'All Sizes; and click on 'Download Original Image' ____________________ Official 'Exhibition Standard' Type of the Budgerigar Society [___________} Skyblue Cock by R.A. Vowles - drawn from life circa 1940 - from Watmough's book. ___________ Opaline Blue Hen & Opaline Light Green Cock [_______________] Lutino Cock - - - - - - - - - Light Green Cock ......................................................................Violet Cock and Cobalt Hen Grey Cock and Grey-Green Hen All images painted by R.A. Vowles and printed in the classic book 'The Cult of the Budgerigar' by Cyril Watmough - readily available on the web as a second hand volume. Worth buying for the prints alone. I hope you enjoy these as much as I do; I made considerable efforts to track down the original artwork for Vowles paintings but his work was apparently 'thrown out' by the Budgerigar Society sometime in the 1960s!!!! My honest recollection is that this is what show budgies actually looked like in the 1960s; the colours WERE that intense and the feathering WAS that perfect. The glory has passed away - but could it be re-born?

Here is an article I wrote for Cagebirds Magazine a few years ago - which focuses on budgerigars and canaries - as both suffering from the impact of selective breeding and inbreeding for size above all other factors. The Resurrection of the Border and the Budgerigar ? Returning to the bird fancy after many years absence I was shocked to discover the loss of type, colour and finesse which Budgerigars and the Border canary have suffered through the 'bigger means better' mentality. My father kept budgerigars in the late '50s and when I was about 6 years old I was taken to visit the bird-room of Lawrence Bibby, a budgerigar champion breeder in St. Helens, Lancashire. The glory of that morning remains etched in my mind; even after 50 years, I will never forget the glowing, colours and classic type of those birds: screaming-greens, foget-me-not blues, iridescent violets and grays as smart as guardsmen. Leaner than greyhounds, with plumage so smooth and tight it looked as if it were painted metal. The 'barring' on their heads was razor-sharp and their black facial-spots were sharp-edged as drill-holes. It is hard to believe these feathered jewels were the same species as the feather-duster 'champions' we see today, with their massive, shaggy heads, ragged face masks and giant 'blotches' in place of the original 'spots'. Those classic birds stood high on the perches – at an angle of about 40 degrees – there was always space between their bodies and the perches. They were tautly alert and seemed to bounce around on springs; they flew through the aviary all the time in a cloud of colours. Today's exhibition birds appear to have lost the shining colours and skin-tight plumage I remember as a child. Obviously, when selectively bred for generations to produce bulk, feathers have become looser and less defined – the depth of colour and sharpness of line has faded. The colours are less intense, lines are blurred, features like eyes and spots are less distinct. Judges and top breeders evidently value size above all else; heads are now so large that the bird's eyes are even hidden. A judge recently wrote that the new UK standard demanded 'a maximum size of head - with no suggestion of a neck'! But birds evolved flexible necks for obvious reasons, and to declare that birds don't need necks is simply absurd; the 'neckless' Danish 'ideal model' illustrated recently in the columns of Cage & Aviary Birds was, in my view, downright ugly. Turning to the Border Canary – a similar decline is evident; it became the favourite breed in the UK because fanciers preserved in it the best qualities of the wild serin finch. Borders are twice the physical size they used to be in the 1960s; the cages actually shake when these birds jump from perch to perch! This 'giantism' has been achieved by selective breeding for bigger and bigger birds with bulky plumage; but the cost has been high. Increased size has been paid for with the loss of type, agility and fertility. Feathers are coarser, tails thick and drooping; smoothly rounded crowns have been replaced by square-heads and beetle-brows. However, the results of forty generations of inbreeding and selection for massive heads and hollow backs has had a terrible effect on the health and longevity of both budgerigars and canaries alike. Today's champions are at least twice as heavy and twice as broad as their ancestors; they squat on their perches like puddings. The sparkling eyes of the original birds have disappeared behind the beetle-browed feather duster heads of the modern birds – and the slender necks are nowhere to be seen. Fertility and longevity have both crashed – and the modern birds are plagued by a host of genetic ailments. The similarity to the pedigree dogs situation at Crufts is striking – both fancies have pursued artificial and exaggerated forms – for fashion and financial greed – for the last 50 years. The result in both cases is looming genetic disaster and the predictable extinction of many 'champion' varieties within a decade or so. The Wild Stock is the Source Any wild bird that deviates from the natural type, even fractionally, is invariably killed. Research on blue **** by the RSPB has shown that any bird that is over-weight by even one-percent is certain to be the first taken by a sparrowhawk. Predators enforce the rule of survival: health, alertness and speed above all else. Consequently, even a tiny change in the wild form takes thousands of years of evolution. Most wild mutations are negative and invariably cause the death of the individual; the genes of such birds are simply wiped from the evolutionary record. But since domestic birds are sheltered from the remorseless pressure of natural selection, fanciers must accept full responsibility for preserving form, health and fertility. All varieties of canary are the same species and share identical genes; they can all interbreed to produce viable offspring. Regional varieties of canary were developed in the UK by selecting for certain aesthetic qualities over many generations: the Norwich was bred for size and bulk, the Yorkshire for length and grace. But the Border was bred to hold the middle ground of balance, poise and symmetry; closer to the type, feather quality and fertility of its wild ancestor. The Lancashire Plainhead, the Parisian Frill and the Scots Fancy are rather exaggerated 'fancies' and could no more survive in the wild than a goldfish could in a wild trout stream. But a green Border or Fife would not look much out of place in an English garden; however, the modern Border would not survive more than a day – while a Fife might survive for a good deal longer. Since all varieties of canary spring from the same gene-pool, we could theoretically re-create any breed by selection from within just one type, given enough generations, effort and time. But the point, surely, is that we should try to keep clear watersheds between the varieties; or else why develop them in the first place? Judges and national associations must bear responsibility for the decline of the Budgerigar and the Border. If they did not award prizes to German-helmeted canaries and dolphin-headed budgies, then the classic types would still exist. This decline is catalogued in Cage and Aviary Birds every week, now often filled with articles on exotic species and British wild birds. We should ask why novices find these exotic species more attractive? And why are they leaving the canary and budgerigar fancies in droves to take up foreign birds? The answer is surely that such wild species have only recently come into captivity and breeders have not yet had time to distort the natural type. Parrots still retain the natural forms and beauty perfected by evolution over millennia; nobody has yet suggested we should breed Amazons with massive heads, or 'no necks'; or thrushes with humped backs and giant bodies. But give breeders 200 years and it is likely that the distortions imposed on our canaries and budgerigars may be visited upon these more recent captives. The Solution ? "All that is needed for evil to prosper is that men of good will should do nothing". If the Border Canary Associations and judges persist in awarding prizes to giant, beetle-browed feather dusters, then there seem to be only three logical options: 1. Do nothing, and allow the decline to continue; 2. Call for a national convention to return to the original ideal and insist that judges throw-out over-sized birds. 3. Finally, if judges and Associations cannot reform themselves, fanciers have the lifeboat-strategy of a break-away association of 'Classic Borders' conforming to the original standard. This option may also appeal to any budgerigar fanciers who can recall those stunningly beautiful birds illustrated by R.A. Vowles in Cyril Watmough's 'Cult of the Budgerigar', sadly eclipsed by the shaggy feather-dusters of today. Borderglider

Hi folks, I just wanted to share with you some amazing paintings of exhibition standard budgerigars that were made by the artist R.A. Vowles in the 1940s, here in the UK. Vowles was the 'official artist' of the Budgerigar Society in those days and was asked to prepare images that set 'the standard' of the day. His paintings were done from life - by using real champion birds as his models. I used to keep budgerigars as a boy in the early 1960s and I remember them as being trim, tight feathered birds with glowing colours. It greatly saddens me to see what 40 years of inbreeding and exhibition fashion has done to this once-lovely bird. I produced a website about canaries some years ago which is still online at: http://www.canaries.org.uk/ Within this there is BIRD ART section where I included paintings by R.A.Vowles of the classic budgerigars of his day - he was commissioned as an artist to portray the best champions of his day - the 1940s and 50s I think. here is the link. http://www.canaries.org.uk/Art/vowles/vowles.html This is what exhibition budgerigars actually LOOKED like! I know because I remember them from my childhood in the 1950s. Their plumage was tighter than a drumskin; their spots were sharp and clearly defined; their head plumage was as smooth as a helmet and they were a million miles away from the giant-headed feather -dusters of today's bird shows, I attach some scans of Vowles paintings which you are welcome to use on your website - they may remind people of the vanished glory and of what the exhibition madness has destroyed. I wonder if anyone is attempting to reproduce the classic type of bird. Let me know what you think of the paintings. If anyone would like copies of the scans I can provide them -maybe they will inspire a resurrection, Light Green Cock - 1930s Violet Cock and Cobalt Hen - 1930s