Dean_NZ

Both parents split for blue Both parents only single factor grey Cock split opaline Edit: As far as dark factors go its possible that both parents have zero or both have one. Or one parent may be zero DF, the other having one.

Dominant pied is not part of the official classification - it is just commonly seen in what pet owners refer to as their 'rainbow' budgie, partly because it helps create a separation of colours so you can say 'oh look its even more colourful'. Officially it is yellow face (any type) blue series (violet, sky, cobalt, mauve) opaline clearwing (actual recessive variety which has normal body colour and zero to faint wing markings ideally). It is a composite variety as I said before

I wont post any pictures but 'rainbow budgies' have been around for a while and I think the craze lies more with 'pet type' owners than it does with show breeders. The WBO defines a rainbow budgie as a combination of yellowface (any type) blue series opaline clearwing (a composite variety, not a specific mutation). Because the craze lies more with pet type breeders, there is often a lot of "is my bird a rainbow budgie??". Typically people with YF2 opaline greywings or YF2 spangle opalines (sometimes with cinnamon) are called rainbows by their owners. You also get dominant pied thrown in the mix too as most people who want a rainbow will gladly call any multi-coloured budgie with little or no wing markings a rainbow :rofl: You should be able to google some pics easily enough.

Duhr. How could I have missed that one. Clear band is on the belly not the chest. Woopsy! Blond moment :angel: Nice pickup guys :angel:

Always fun to have everyone weigh in and share opinions! You get the idea though :angel: Hehehe Good post by the way, Kaz :angel:

Who could compete with the baby lol. Well done! As far as the pet shop saying male... lol, not surprised they got it wrong

Those first downy pins are always white. Too soon to say opaline as its the secondary down that goes grey or white depending on mutation no? Im fairly sure all my chicks start with the primary down as white and then the secondary down goes grey in normals etc and stays white with ino's, opalines etc.

t2 means type two. First is a yellowface type two recessive pied hen. There is also a good chance of opaline as well but the almost complete lack of wing markings makes it difficult to say for sure, but the presence of some body colour is a good indicator that it is there. The other one is a recessive pied spangle grey. Looks like a cock in the first photo and hen in the last few photos so you will need a clearer picture of the cere to be sure.

I meant on the mask Yes she will be heavily flecked but hopefully you will have a very clean capped bird (or line if possible) that you can pair her to, and then pair the best (or cleanest) chicks from that pair back to more clear headed birds and fingers crossed... Cant have it all i guess

Thats a loooot of spots she has. Will be interested to see her after her adult moult. Say... do you think those violet hens could manage a trans-tasman flight? I have bred 10 violet chicks and only 2 females of the lot. Desperate for hens!!!

Here are some pics of the mauve baby if anyone is interested. It feathered up looking quite similar in colour to the violet grey I have posted about earlier. It has deep violet cheek patches and a dark navy blue tail. I know its a mauve, but I havent bred one before so im not confident in being able to say whether its a normal coloured mauve or a violet mauve perhaps?

Are you marking the offspring of this pair (together or with other birds) as possible carriers of FD? Last I checked it was believed to be a recessive gene, so having said that you could easily breed dusters from little runty birds as easily as you could with big gorgeous buff birds. The first dusters were not large birds by any means.. Are you worried about this becoming more widespread in your flock and cropping up more frequently?

Yeah I only made the 'bred by violet parents bird will throw violets' mistake when I first got into the hobby and started buying birds. I've long since learned very few breeders (even champion exhibitors) are able to properly recognise violets or understand the breeding of them. I look forward to buying some 'cobalts' that the breeder doesnt realise are violet sky blues. It might sound sneaky, but in my experience breeders will not sell me their good violets, but they will gladly sell good 'cobalts'... In saying that I totally agree GB. There are some fantastic breeders out there who go out of their way to get you what you want, and be honest and say they cant help you if thats the truth rather than sell you something and TELL you its what you are after. There are some dodgy ones out there too, so its very much buyer beware. I find im TOO honest when selling birds - I tend to say all their faults rather than their good qualities!

Sorry no photos, i didn't buy her. A breeder at a bird expo/show told me she would be fine to breed. He was a member of a budgie club, he should know better. I hear that all too often. I say "I want to breed violets", someone gives me a grey and says "it had a violet parent, it should throw you a violet or two". Why? Because some breeders will tell you what you want to her to sell you what they want to get rid of. I have had this happen to me for the last 2 years and I think its small wonder we are losing so many opportunities to bring in new members or keep them in the hobby. Fortunately I have stayed with it because I love breeding, but im much much more picky these days...

Agree with most everyone. If he is greywing/greywing you will get all greywing/dilutes (visual greywings). If he is greywing/dilute you will get 50% greywing/dilute (visual greywing) and 50% dilute/dilute (dilutes obviously). Dommy is 50:50 as said above. Same for who of the chicks is split blue, 50:50 but you'll never know unless or until you pair them with blues later on. If the dad is split blue you'll get 25% blue (1 in 4 chicks), 50% green/blue and 25% green/green.

Agreed. I cringe when I see that clipping style - I know for a fact the teach that style in veterinary schools as I know some vet students and they asked why I dont clip my birds that way. Lets just say I had some very convincing reasons they hadnt even heard about and their defense was "but it makes the wing look longer, more natural".

I dont know about the sneezing =/ I have 3 babies inside now im taming, never heard them sneeze once even after drinking water. My concern is the fact that your other birds have been sneezing and dying from lung related problems so I can only say it must be connected and it baffles me as to why vets havent found any explanation yet. I dont think going to a vet will do anything but empty out the bank with nothing to show for it =/ Only can hope to wait it out. Fingers crossed!

Dark factor is partial dominant meaning in either blue (white based) or green (yellow base), there is a difference in the colour of a zero dark factor (sky blue, light green), a single dark factor (cobalt, dark green) and a double dark factor (mauve and olive green) bird. This is because a single factor is partially dominant to normal, and double factor is expressed even more (ie more dominant over the normal colour). Violet is also a partial dominant, but it is a colour MODIFYER. The violet gene changes the feather structure so that it reflects light a bit differently - allowing for the 'purple' colour. This is why the effect is more noticable in blues - because you are working from a colour closer to violet/purple anyway, its effect is very easy to see in double factor violet skies or single and double factor cobalts. When you have a dark coloured bird to start with, the violet becomes a lot harder to see on a dark base - thus in green and mauve birds it typically 'darkens' the bird rather than making it look purple. On the flip side, the sky blue is not 'dark enough' to bring out the purple colour with only a single violet gene - you end up with a bird that looks like a very nicely coloured cobalt that is only distinguishable by its primary tail feathers (they remain teal/aqua colour associated with only sky blues tails as opposed to the navy blue of cobalts/mauves). The grey gene is a colour adding gene (if memory serves). IT IS A COMPLETE DOMINANT gene. Therefore single factor and double factor greys are visually indistinguishable from eachother. Im not sure if I agree with GB about the cheek patches as all my greys have had the typical grey/slateblue cheek patches except for my one violet grey boy who had a purple cheek patch. Cheek patches could have no bearing on whether a grey bird throws more or less greys/blues in a nest of chicks. It is simply 50/50 from a single factor grey, and 100% from a double factor grey. As with any 50/50 gene, you could have a grey cock and a blue hen and a nest full of greys one round, then a nest full of blues the next. If he never throws anything but greys he must be double factor. I have noted however that some breeders believe there has been a sort of crossover from breeding greys to blues and some of their greys have blue cheek patches. If I was to take a guess, I would suspect this is because they have some violet floating around in their greys or blues they have not picked up on because even today many many breeders are terrible at recognising violets with the exception of those blatantly purple violet cobalts (violet greens, violet greys and violet sky blues go unnoticed largely). So going back to your question. What is the difference between grey and mauve? Simple and yet not so simple lol. Mauve is a double dose of dark factor that darkens the blue to a husky 'midnight blue', a slatey blue that you might say 'looks grey'. However a mauve will have a violet cheek patch and a navy blue tail. A grey will (or at least should) never have a blue tail - they typically have grey cheek patches and ALWAYS have BLACK primary tail feathers no matter the dark or violet factor. Can you have a mauve grey? Yes. But differentiating light/normal/dark greys can be difficult as each variety varies in its colour intensity. We all have outstandingly coloured cobalts, and some cobalts that are pale and dull looking and might be mistaken for sky blues with deep colour, so it is with dark factor greys. Hard to tell apart as you cant use the primary tail feathers to distinguish dark factors. Can you have a violet grey? Yes I have a thread about just that - and at first everyone told me he was a mauve. But then we slowly figured out that with a violet cobalt cock and a light grey hen you cant get any mauves. Plus he had a violet cheek patch and a black tail, so it soon became obvious he was a violet grey (which looked for all intents and purposes like a mauve). Can you have a violet mauve? Yes. I think I may have one in the nest now, its an amazing colour and I havent yet bred a mauve so I dont have any memories to compare it to. Its parents are BOTH single factor violet cobalt yellowface type ones so lookout for future pictures...

Jim Marshall - Canada (BC) Jim Marshall - Ideal Aviary

Nah quarantine is already broken so dont worry about it now

To be honest I think we've gone way overboard on the feathering. Because of the huge emphasis on size and feathering at the expense of all else (mainly colour and markings) birds of all sorts of mutations are paired together because of their size or other desirable features. It is small wonder we now have dull coloured opalines (cinnamon crossover effect), multiple varieties with opalescence including normals with opaline markings, head flecking up the doodah and all that too name but a few. Well hoorah guys, we have monstrously feathered obese birds that dont hold a candle to their earlier counterparts colourwise. Now where? In my opinion we need to take a step back.

This is part of the pecking order and in some ways can be minimised or avoided through quarantine. You are new to budgies so dont worry too much, but in future it is good practice to keep new birds seperate for 30-90 days (generally people do 30) to allow any hidden illnesses to show up in the new bird before you introduce it to your existing bird/s. Ideally this is done in completely seperate rooms but sometimes people can only manage seperate cages in the same room. Whether one has them in the same room in different cages, or finishes quarantine and then places the new budgie in a seperate cage you can then place the cages together so that the birds can become familiar with eachother by sight and sound without fighting. When you decide to introduce them into the same cage, start by re-arranging all the toys and seed/water dishes + perches so it looks like a cage neither budgie is familiar with or dominant in. Because the cage will be strange to them both it reduces territorial behaviours such as biting/pecking/bickering over food and space, favourite perch spots etc. You did very well to add additional seed feeders, this is an excellent move. Even now is not too late to rearrange the cage, add new perches or move them so that both budgies have to readjust and hopefully this will allow them to both feel at home. Some pecking and fighting is normal in the first few days to a week as they need to establish a pecking order Good on you for rescuing a budgie

Look at the way the flights are trimmed. It is better to trim the primary flights just in front of the major coverts so that when the wings are at rest you dont have feather barbs or half cut / angled cut flights sticking out. These can be a bother to the bird and dont look natural/attractive. When I clip wings I make sure the wings still look natural and there are no sharp feathers jutting out which can irritate the budgie.

that doesnt sound good. This is not the original post I heard the illness mentioned. I first read of it in the aviary of a top british or UK breeder, one who was in a partnership and they unfortunately found that in both aviaries the illness became established. Because some birds proved resistant to it (although periodically becoming ill), they determined to just try help the birds feel better and continued breeding with them as it was probably too incomprehensible to cull their stud (and it was a stud - closely bred and top quality birds that would cost thousands to replace). If i remember they are utilising some sort of vaporiser to dispense a medication or respiratory soother in the air to help their birds (not cure). And that is the best they could do... If this rings bells with anyone please try and provide a link as I am continuing to source this original story. Here is an account of an illness that seems to be one and the same: Source: Budgerigar society