JamesBond007

Hi all, well this morning we (**Liv** and I ) decided to move our quarantine birds from their breeding room location to a new quarantine home. Our early wedding anniversary gift to each other was a new cage for the hot birds. So we raced down to the local bird shop and convinced the guy to give up his display cage so we didn't have to wait until the 13th of the month - we wanted one now - and he relinquished (money does that). So we went home and emptied the trailer and I raced down to the shop again in 35 degrees and bought it - stacked it up on the trailer in the heat regretting the time in the heat that it took me to tie it up. I went home slowly so that I didn't destroy the birds new home (120km hour will do that) We unpacked it and assembled it no time flat and then Liv got stuck into wiping it down with vinegar to destroy the zinc build up, and I was tasked to **find** some wooden perches - off I went. I'm a good finder of perches and was back in no time at all with the freshly cut wood screaming that I had dismembered it from the trees...(I'm deaf to the pain of dismembered trees fortunately) we had to wait for the vinegar to do it's thing for two hours so it was a grueling time, but eventually the birds (23 of em) were loaded into the bird box we transported from WA compliments of KAZ had given us and they were chirping expectantly... We moved them in to their new home just before the sun set and they were very happy - here are some photos of the happy birds.... Relocated happy birds. I translated their cries into a budgie translation device and found that they were very happy :laughter: More birds. I translated the screams of the dismembered limbs of gum trees and found out that they were not very happy - but that's life :yes: Budgies fighting the screams of dismembered gum trees - and looking very content... Happy caged / relocated show budgies out of the heat and slowly dying gum tree limbs giving in to their new life

Great photos - I often spend time in Ottawa in the peak of winter (jan/feb) at -20 - 30 and really enjoy the sub sub minus temps while australia is roasting in +42. Post some more skadoo photos :-)

MB, what about using what you are / going to / use as your ring name? That way it doesn't matter what you call it / where you are - most people are interested in your birds and how to get hold of them, not what you call yourself, so in my humble view that is more important for the buyer... Stone Mason Budgerigars... chiselled in show quality (yes now I'm being silly) MB budgies, each one sold with a secret handshake.. Grand Poobar budgies???? what's in a name>>>>>

Okay, We've (***Liv*** and I) just got a new small 6x4x6 Avery for the quarantined birds (they were lonely in their hot breeding room) and during a visit to a local well known Australian champion show breeder he commented about his tiered perches being a tad close, and at times it causes his birds to pull the feathers out of the birds above them. He made a comment that they should have been wider / more spaced out - but I didn't ask him what they were in his pen, for all I know his measurements were wrong. If you haven't pictured the tired approach, imagine a set of steps with each row being lower and further out than the one above... well I've decided to build one - so does anyone have a set of specs on the angle and the distance of each perch from the previous so that I get it right? Any informative posts and help appreciated.

Apple - BSD UNIX, costs a fortune. HP or SUN UNIX now open source, (FREE) but requires specialised hardware as does Apple. (That's BAD) Windows - hardware is cheap, but uses a LOT of memory, and gets a lot of viruses and COST for each bit of software and because of that you need to use good anti-virus software plus use a lot of expensive programs like microsoft office. Use Linux: RED HAT, Fedora 10, OpenSUSE 11, CENTOS 4.5, Ubuntu (yuk). All the software is FREE, FREE Open OFFICE3.1, FREE Everything. Use VMS and run windows in a virtual machine or VMWARE or VirtualBox and do the same. Get Linux off the web and do an install which dual boots your PC so you can run them both if you are worried about losing your windows thing. Linux uses a lower level hardware, less memory and does not get viruses, it can't because users run in the user space and not the kernel space, unlike windows so there is no way to have your machines OS getting taken over. Then again your windows budgie software won't run unless you use WINE or para-virtualization. Still there are soooooooooooo many benefits. (it looks nicer too)

Ha Ha... NOPE!! Liv helped ALL day, she helped empty the shed, stacked boxes, sprayed (and hunted out) spiders ... and took photos, she then starting removing the pavers from the floor and stacking them up in groups of five in the shed and then put a group of five in each hand and went off and built a pile outside... me I could barely manage just four and I dawdled off behind her feeling very un-manlike... (thinking about demoting myself to 003 after that) She is very eager to get the bird room done by March and is more than pulling her wieght and then some (thinking about joining a gym)

Let me start by saying that I only learnt that I was losing my shed when we flew to WA to meet KAZ. It wasn't really anything other than a... You don't want that dusty old shed of yours do you, blink blink of the eyes, sweet smile... Um, no... It's... ummm... yours I said with a smile back (thinking what have I done - where is my shed????) But seriously, it's only a shed and it is a perfect size for a breeding room and now we have ideas about adding all sorts of things next to it, flight pens, cull pens, retirement pens. budgie condos.... Anything to make her happy! Life's too short for anything else.

Maesie, I would have missed you if I knew you, but being so new, I know hardly anyone... very welll Actually, for the apple - go straight to Linux, it's an updated Apple OS and works far better on your old Windows machines. subliminal message: get rid of windows... install Linux!!!!!!!

Wow!!! Great looking rustic Avery setting. My wife was born in Gippsland - she too is developing those rustic edges to her, so for me it put it all into perspective . Got to be proud of that! Makes mine look like the Tin Man from the wizard of Oz - go and congratulate him (and then ask for another one to be built along side it)

The prize is having a look at some fantastic Exhibition Budgerigars. I think that Stephen is / and is going to remain a force to be reckoned with. I found him to be meticulous with his record keeping, and his information. Out of a flock of 60 - 100 he could name each one and announce its pedigree without any hesitations. (not only that he was very genuine and easy to talk to. I'd recommend a visit to anyone in the area if they get the chance - just call first.)

Good birds?? Umm not good - %$#@!**&^ awesome!! He (Stephen) looked at them all and says, mmm... I need to focus on longer masks... and I looked at them and thought really?? I wish that was ALL I had to focus on. Yes, if Stephen says so, his birds needed longer masks, but from where I stood they looked just oh so fine as it was. I suppose that the nature of breeding, no matter how good our birds are, there is something that acn be imporved to make them even better.I for one would be happy for birds of such quality (David kicks himself that he is not the 10,000th web hit... )Pearce and Hills - how can you both fight over being the 10, 000th site visitor????come on one of you didnt get it - own up - who is it? (remembering that I met Stephen and his birds in the flesh today???)

Wow, We went to visit a local SA breeder, Stephen Elliot today and have a look at his birds, and how his set up is. Imagine a large half open shed with a cull pen, 48 breeding pens, a pen for the young uns and another for breeding stock - all very clean set up in the north of Adelaide amongst quiet hills. We visited for a quick half hour that quickly became 3 hours of chatting and listening to insightful information gathered from years of breeding, and his birds, did I mention them? Wow, all Exhibition Types, large fat, big colourful, latinos, albinos, greys, cinamonns, blues, pied, you name it he has it, oh, and expensive and excellent quality - fantastic breeder and so they should be - they were awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Steve's a very accommodating Gentleman breeder and made us very very welcome. Check out his site and drool like we did - the only thing we could do when we came back was to go and sit in our quaranteen room and say :we're going to breed some guduns next year. We are! and maybeeeeeee we will be blessed enough to get hold of two or three of Stephen's birds next year too???? What more can a bugdie person hope for... Go I dare you, have a look at his site, and fill in your details on his guestbook!! Suppoort the breed! http://www.stephenelliott.com.au Stephen Elliot Breeder

yep - now to find out how to create a sky blue hen mmm genotype blue mutant 1 or 2?

Okay, all those that have it, or at least have used Bird Tracker: I am trying to create a YF Grey - the Grey is easy, its listed under Dominant, but I'm not sure about YF. Gulp (here my lack of knowledge coming out) - under Multiple Alleles... (a) do I list it as a x/x Parblue 2 (Goldenface) or ( do I list it as x/x Parblue 1(Yel Mut 2) or do I create it as something else? Obviously I couldn't see YF in any of the options, hence the question. Thanks

Actually no they are not a mutation sex linked for colour. The opaline gene is pigment distribution mutation. It alters the distribution of the pigment without creating any new pigments. It causes the underwing stripe in a budgie to become visable above the wing, which in budgies is known as a wing mirror. The normal grey down is replaced with white down. It reduces the spread of grey family pigments whilst enhancing the spread of yellow family pigments. Apologies - I should have said Aren't opalines, birds that are sex linked (which impacts on their colour). I think the point I was questioning was that given they are a recessive gene, wouldn't it be possible that any "mutations" would be the dominant genes taking control. Anyway I think I have effectively hijacked my own Mendel thread

Given the link from Budgerigar to the Archaeopteryx who have been known to have evolved from small meat-eating dinosaurs, it isn't too long a string to be pulled on the evolutionary bow that is the King of all Dinosaur's the Tyrannosaurus rex. Interesting articles in Science Daily: ScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2008) — Putting more meat on the theory that dinosaurs' closest living relatives are modern-day birds, molecular analysis of a shred of 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex protein -- along with that of 21 modern species -- confirms that dinosaurs share common ancestry with chickens, ostriches, and to a lesser extent, alligators. The work, published in the journal Science, represents the first use of molecular data to place a non-avian dinosaur in a phylogenetic tree that traces the evolution of species. The scientists also report that similar analysis of 160,000- to 600,000-year-old collagen protein sequences derived from mastodon bone establishes a close phylogenetic relationship between that extinct species and modern elephants. "These results match predictions made from skeletal anatomy, providing the first molecular evidence for the evolutionary relationships of a non-avian dinosaur," says co-author Chris Organ, a postdoctoral researcher in organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University. "Even though we only had six peptides -- just 89 amino acids -- from T. rex, we were able to establish these relationships with a relatively high degree of support. With more data, we'd likely see the T. rex branch on the phylogenetic tree between alligators and chickens and ostriches, though we can't resolve this position with currently available data." The current paper builds on work reported in Science last year. In that paper, a team headed by John M. Asara and Lewis C. Cantley, both of Beth Israel Deaconess Medi-cal Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS), first captured and sequenced tiny pieces of collagen protein from T. rex. For the current work, Organ and Asara and their colleagues used sophisticated algorithms to compare collagen protein from several dozen species. The goal: placing T. rex on the animal kingdom's family tree using molecu-lar evidence. "Most of the collagen sequence was obtained from protein and genome databases but we also needed to sequence some critical organisms, including modern alligator and modern ostrich, by mass spectrometry," says Asara, director of the mass spectrometry core facility at BIDMC and instructor in pathology at HMS. "We determined that T. rex, in fact, grouped with birds -- ostrich and chicken -- better than any other organism that we studied. We also show that it groups better with birds than modern reptiles, such as alligators and green anole lizards." While scientists have long suspected that birds, and not more basal reptiles, are dinosaurs' closest living relatives, for years that hypothesis rested largely on morphological similarities in bird and dinosaur skeletons. The scraps of dinosaur protein were wrested from a fossil femur discovered in 2003 by John Horner of the Museum of the Rockies in a barren fossil-rich stretch of land that spans Wyoming and Montana. Mary H. Schweitzer of North Carolina State Univer-sity (NCSU) and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences discovered soft-tissue preservation in the T. rex bone in 2005; Asara became involved in analysis of the collagen protein because of his expertise in mass spectrometry techniques capable of sequencing minute amounts of protein from human tumors. While it appears impossible to salvage DNA from the bone, Asara was able to extract precious slivers of protein. The current work by Organ and Asara suggests that the extracted protein from the fossilized dinosaur tissue is authentic, rather than contamination from a living spe-cies. "These results support the endogenous origin of the preserved collagen molecules," the researchers write. Organ, Asara, Schweitzer, and Cantley's co-authors on the Science paper are Wenxia Zheng of NCSU and Lisa M. Freimark of BIDMC. Their research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Paul F. Glenn Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. And another link : Dinosaur smelling skiils open new angle on bird evolution

DrNat, I have to disagree in part with your view on Mendel's observations not being Laws, and I support Sailorwolf's views - I think that they are generally accepted and taught as Laws, but yes, they are not infallible. Mendel was one of our founding fathers of genetics, and I think that we should give him credit there and allow the use of the word Law. From: Rich Deem, "Famous Scientists Who Believed in God", last modified 19 May 2005, on "Evidence for God from Science" website (http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/sciencefaith.html; viewed 5 October 2005): Mendel was the first to lay the mathematical foundations of genetics, in what came to be called "Mendelianism". He began his research in 1856 (three years before Darwin published his Origin of Species) in the garden of the Monastery in which he was a monk. Mendel was elected Abbot of his Monastery in 1868. His work remained comparatively unknown until the turn of the century, when a new generation of botanists began finding similar results and "rediscovered" him (though their ideas were not identical to his). An interesting point is that the 1860's was the formation of the X-Club, dedicated to lessening religious influences and propagating an image of "conflict" between science and religion. One sympathizer was Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, whose scientific interest was in genetics (a proponent of eugenics - selective breeding among humans to "improve" the stock). He was writing how the "priestly mind" was not conducive to science whilst, at around the same time, an Austrian monk was making the breakthrough in genetics. The rediscovery of the work of Mendel came too late to affect Galton's contribution. I completely agree with you about DNA and RNA mutations. Mutations and reversions occur all the time. I think what was interesting with the Perdue experiment is the fact that while they could no evidence of the grandfather genes in the DNA of the plants without the bad gene in it, there was a complete reversion and that the mechanism for recovering the normal DNA in the plants might be lurking in the plant's RNA. Slightly off topic, but you touched on it yourself - To quote from http://www.niazi.com/Neurons/Gregor%20Mendel.htm Somewhere in our mRNA there is a copy of our genetic code that is flawless; if only this could be triggered when body figures that something wrong, something that is stressing the body systems like a cancerous cell, a hyper immune response producing diabetes, multiple sclerosis etc. It will then be possible for the body to instantly trigger a correction, fixing the genetic defect and as a result the disease. I wondered what anecdotal evidence there is to support Purdue, and maybe my question should have been what is the percentage of reversion / throwbacks observed that mimic all the characteristics of the grandparent by his offspring after F2 and prior to the re-introduction of the grandfather? Aren't opalines, birds that are sex linked for colour? Would they follow the more traditional Mendelianism methodology, or is there a few more subtle complexities involved with a predominantly recessive gene to begin with? I'm not sure, but wouldn't there be a lot more potential reversion / mutation with opalines because they are recessive to start with - probably a different topic here?

I noticed a couple of posts about one of my favourite laws, Mendal's Law - a very good one by Daz, and another by Neat - and what was interesting in a contradictory way is the Purdue experiment, where scientists found that Mendel's Law may be flawed, and that there could be some self-correction going on in the RNA that acts in contradition to the laws set down in the DNA strands. Even though offspring should inherently adopt certain "genetic flaws" the RNA goes against the blueprint and almost becomes self-correcting. I was wondering if anyone has any anecdotal evidence that highlights the purdue experiment in regards to line breeding of budgies? Article can be found at: Mendel's Law may be Flawed (and yes I know it's only talking about watercress, but Mendel was talking about peas)

I would prefix all conversation about hemp with "industrial hemp", otherwise the topic could get "interesting" Hemp is full of good nutritional stuff for humans, but: Hemp contains delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is the psychoactive ingredient found in hashish and marijuana. While THC is present in all Cannabis plant varieties to some extent, industrial hemp does not contain an amount to produce any intoxicating effect, even in significant quantities. In varieties grown for use as a drug, where males are removed in order to prevent fertilization, THC levels can reach as high as 24% in the unfertilized females which are given ample room to flower. In hemp varieties grown for seed or fibre use, the plants are grown very closely together and a very dense biomass product is obtained, rich in oil from the seeds and fibre from the stalks and low in THC content. EU and Canadian regulations limit THC content to 0.3% in industrial hemp. source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp From my understanding Hemp seed is controlled in Oz because of the issue of it being hard to determine industrial with non (more drug focussed) hemp.

Concrete doe NOT give off harmful fumes - but getting wet concrete on a bird would not be good. Keep the birds away from the concrete while it is being put down, after that it will be fine.

Hi Birdluv: thanks for the welcome. In answer to your question, I think that it is just a thing. I will continue to obediently do as I am told - its the safest way Gee l don't know if that is a bad thing or a good thing :laughter: Daz, Thanks for the welcome too - gosh you guys are just so helpful. David - who is after a big fat show hen...

Actually no...umm, I'm trying to ask her and see if I can borrow it. If I can find myself a good blue hen, I wouldn't mind pairing them both up.That's actually where my research is starting - looking at the colour issue and what properties the hen will have and not to have.I'll send him your way after that for some secret men's business - you can take him down the pub and shout him a beer. Hey Splat - hope you don't mind me thinking you have an interesting name - it conjures up all sorts of odd images.The clincher for me was being in WA and going to a bird shop and seeing the Grey Spangled Show budgie. I noticed his bent tail immediately, but then Liv ignored him - I realised that if she wasn't going to buy him then I was going to...Fortunately she used her money to buy him - so I got out of it quite cheap.KAZ's place is awesome, and it was in part her setup that encouraged me ;;.(i've juzt put a semi colan and a full stop and spelld just inkorectkly because I know that Liv can't help but editing my posts - she's adorably reliable that way )

Damn, looks like the NEW bird room is going to have to be even bigger ... Ah, no, I've found a way out - I'll make it a wedding anniversary present instead, BUT I'll wrap it up in paper with nice budgie pictures on it.

KAZ, Makes for a good guard dog, well... guard bird - moult and all. You should have seen the EyEs of the poor little guy who landed on it ;(

I went out the check on my little pets recently and was shocked , with what appears to be a bad case of moult. I'm new, so I might have it wrong, It might just be normal in a budgie house, but any help is appreciated. Warning image may distress some viewers