nubbly5

Coz she is spangle AND opaline spangle at that, any black (or brown) wing markings are reduced to very fine lines on the outside edge of each feather. With opaline spangles sometimes the black (or brown) wing markings are reduced to such a point as they are just about gone completely but if you look at the flight feathers you will see the faint darker lines edgeing the tips of the feather. Now IF this marking is brown - she is cinnamon, IF it is black she is not. With both cinnamon and opaline being sex linked recessive genes a cock can be split for cinnamon or opaline (or both) but a he is either visual or she is normal - she can't ever be split for a sex linked mutation. What GB said actually...........

Very normal unfortunately. It was 34 degrees here at 7pm sheesh. Then at 9pm it was 25 so the lights and the cooler went off. It was actually pretty nice in the breeding room but the birds in the aviary went ot ground and stayed there until evening. No losses and chickies hatching with no problems thankfully. I was having trouble keeping the cooler filled as the hose poked in thingo was a good idea but running pump & bore means that i couldn't get the tap to run slow enough as to overfill the thing without it stopping all together. Sooooo we had to replace the d troughs in the dog runs so we pillaged the little float system out of one of the old ones and installed it into the water cooler. Bingo - power on water on and the thing stays half full indefinitely. Nipple drinker system is working a treat and it seems that, even though the lines might be at 40-whatever degrees it is, the little drips hanging off the nipple fittings have a great Coolgardie Safe effect. Hopefully all goes smoothly today whilst we are both out for work.

Looks cinnamon to me GB - but then you know what MY monitor is like

Birds can be pretty viscious to each other sometimes. It may have been a demarkation dispute that ended up with some damage inflicted. Strange that there was no blood though.

Also check carefully for red mite. These guys can suck the life out of the babies. Check for little black brown spots around cracks and crevases as they live off the bird and come out at night.

Fairy Wren................?

Well this is actually more like nubbly-no-friends......

GB what Renee said is really true too. Seeing as you are in the phase of collecting a few birds (as you must to get your stud going anyway), you will be collecting different bacteria, virus' etc along with them. Eventually you will have a group of birds that have been exposed to everything that you have brought in and things will settle down. You WILL have the odd bird loss and sometimes it's better to be rid of that birds that somehow never quite looks right or the family that seem more susceptable to megabac or whatever and your overall studs health should stabilize out. This bird breeding caper calls for some intestinal fortitude sometimes, hey?

Sorry macka I REALLY disagree with you here. GB's birds started DYING!!!!!!!!! She was not overmedicating at the time - in fact quite the opposite - and only started treatment on recommendation from a vet to make sure no more birds DIED!!!!!!! I believe that they did stop dying. I think you are out of line telling her to stop trying to resolve an outbreak of disease. Sure, without a proper diagnosis she might be treating the wrong thing but all things being equal AND with some of the symptoms the birds had AND with several of them DYING at once I think she did exactly the right thing. She might need to be reassessing the situation based on the birds reaction to doxy treatment but to leave it go and lose more birds for the sake of not medicating? I don't think so. As she gets sorted with facilities and routine with her show birds I am sure GB will return to a situation of non medicating as is her well stated desire but at the moment she needed to do something.

A pottery lid? A dirty pottery lid looking at the little greeny bits stuck to it!!!!! :rofl:

Have you had a positive diagnosis of quill mite? Or are you just going on the feather damage as seen in the picture?

hmmmm, interesting point!

I really like how one of them is "orange wings and, where I accedientally spilled some bleach, bits of orange body".

yeah I did think blood supply too but discounted it as being - 1 random 1 here or there I can get but 3 in same nest didn't really add up. I'm trying to think of what specific thing could have occurred in that nest and just with 3 babies (but from different pairings). I guess it's just end up as one of those mysterious things that just can't be easily answered....

Adelaide Nats - I saw the budgies myself and had to deal (via ANBC committee) with the repremands dealt out and the changing of show rules so that no tampering like this ever happened again. It was admitted by the person concerned to be the use of bleach to try and remove flecking. The birds heads ended up having a strange orange colour - hmmmmm JUST like the orange wing colour.

Nutrition? ... it seems a bit weird for a new genetic mutation In the egg? These were brand new babies - day of hatching. I don't think it had anything to do with mutations as the chick in question has 2 perfectly normal claws on toe of it's toes (the ones that didn't come off when I examined them). I was thinking maybe the heat somehow - I think my mind was linking burnt with heat.......... and why were other chicks in same nest okay and why nothing else like this before or since - no major changes in feeding went on. Anyone?

This "grizzled" appearance is normal for recessive pieds. TO ME - remembering that my monitor seems to see cinnamon - he looks like a cinnamon but then in your sig he looks like a normal.........

Gee sorry Daniela. This sounds like a job for a very good avian vet. Good luck getting a good diagnosis. But for wieght loss I have been recommended to use lettuce seeds for my birds (by a very experience show breeder). I haven't tried this on them yet (or on me either for that matter) but migh be worth a try for your girl.

Hi All I recently had 3 baby budgies in one nest that, when they hatched looked like the ends of their toenails were singed (burnt). They wer black on the tips. Now not all these babies were from the same pair but a couple had been fostered as eggs. Also the same pair had had a pervious round with nothing like this showing up. The first baby to present like this, I examined closely and rubbed the toe ends only to have the toenails completely drop off! Since then this chick has grown on very well and is close to fledging but has no toenails on any toe bar the 2 that didn't rub off when I looked at them. The other chicks presented with exactly the same burnt looking toenails just after hatching but I didn't go anywhere near the toes fearing that the toenails would again drop off. Both of these chicks have toenails but showed a black end to the toenail as the baby grew. Now at about 2 weeks you can't tell, There were 2 other chicks from this nest too but these 2 were normal. Any ideas??????

I went and had a scrounge around last night! What a treat I had to laugh at some of the answers (and shook my head in amazement at some others) - wow how do you get away with spouting so much rubbish! I couldn't handle being on there for long. You'd better watch out there Macka they are all so incredibiliy intelligent!

I have in the past lost birds due to blood loss caused by injury/accident but never since using white pepper to stop the bleeding. I wonder what is more painful for the bird pepper or DYING - I wonder what PETA would say about that. God that person is as stupid as they come!

Look people all have different ideas and different agendas. People with agendas that benefit only themselves will step on everyone and everything around them to get to the position/belief/following that they think is right. Take PETA for example - now no disrespct here it anyone is a member or anything BUT the core PETA founders believed that NO-ONE has the right to exploit animals in ANY WAY. That is even to the point of having pets, eating meat, nothing. We should all be vegans and never step on an ant sort of stuff and they believe that this is how everyone should be. The animal rights debate is always an interesting one and drawing the line between what is acceptable and what is not isn't all that easy sometimes AND not everyone will agree where it is. Now where exactly IS that line in the sand that distinguishes a bird mill from not a bird mill. I don't think it's really been identified in a legal way. Is breeding 24 cabinets for 6 months animal abuse or cruelty and how does ANYONE rationally make that assessment? Having said that though, most of our birds want for nothing and generally live reasonably long healthy lives. They get fruit and vege, soft food, fresh branches etc etc etc. Does that make up for keeping them in semi confinded areas? I personally don't really know where that line in the sand is but I just can't believe that 200 birds kept in a clean, fresh and health environment with room to fly and a good healthy diet can be considered a bird mill (and not just because this is how I keep birds). I do consider pairs of birds in the same too small and dirty enclosure their whole lives, always breeding or expected to breed, always fed the minimum to keep them alive, with little or no other respect and care shown, seems much more of a bird mill than the way most show breeders care for their birds. But Kaz if this person has a personal agenda then bird mill or no bird mill is just a smoke screen. They are not worth the bother and who cares what they say about this forum, people who read that will come and have a look and will be able to decide for themselves if it's **** poor or not. Best option is to ignore the bullshit and get on with it. Ooooh look **** is auto consored but bullshit isn't - how nice!

Geeze, all us show breeders are bird mills then. I have more birds than a lot of breeders on here and less than some. I use antibiotics to treat sickness, I ensure my birds don't suffer the heat with special shutters, water coolers and the like. I scrape poo, sweep and vacuum my aviary regularly - just like you Kaz. But I guess if someone has it out for you they can say whatever they want......... it might be totally ridiculous and vindictive but I suppose there are people out there JUST like that. I wonder what the RSPCA would have to say - probably that they wish there were more bird keepers around like you.

Thanks Clearwing! That's all I could do really - judge on appearance - as the bird did fit the greywing standard reasonably well. Had it been then only greywing benched with nothing else to compare it too I probably wouldn't have questioned it as much either. It would be nice wouldn't it if you could breed this very beautiful variety for it's variety not for meeting the current size and feather standard. It's one of the varieties that suffers so badly when you try and up the size, then the features that attracted people in the first place - namely the strong body colour contrasted with the beautiful clear wings - are lost...... seems somewhat backwards to me.

okay seeing as there has been some discussion around heavily marked clearwings v's poorly marked greywings I thought it might be useful for others to see the variation that can occur just amoungst clearwings - as I don't breed greywings I can't put up a comparison but it's probably still interesting to see the variation just in clearwings. Now the Australian standard for clearwings goes like this: Mask: The mask is to be clear, wide and deep, (not cleft) extending beyond two large cheek patches. General Body Colour: Back, rump, breast, flanks and underparts to be a solid even shade throughout. Markings: Clear ground colour is optimum. Faint markings are found on cheeks, back of head and neck. Wings are to be of pure ground colour. Eyes: Black with a white iris ring. Primary Flights: Approaching ground colour. Body Colour: Approaching full intensity. Feet & Legs: Blue/Grey Colour Cheek Patch Tail Quill Tail Feather Light Green Violet Neutral Neutral with ground or body colour suffusion Dark Green " " " Olive " " " Grey Green Grey " " Sky Blue Violet " " Cobalt " " " Mauve " " " Violet " " " Grey Grey " " Now in reality lets have a look at some of the clearwings floating around my aviary........ These guys are pretty close in standard to the colours of tail, wings etc as required by the standard. You can see here the neutral (white-ish colour) of the tail quill. Remember too that this is an olive so the double dark factor will also add more colour to the tail. Considering this, this fellow is a good example of a clearwing in variety but like so many birds like this he is reasonably small. Still managed an 11th at the 2008 Nats. Again with this little guy. He also managed an 11th at the Nats but this year. He also shows a nice neutral tail quill but his wings are a touch more marked than the fellow above. okay so what about this girl. Looking at her wings, there is no way you could mistake her for a greywing but oh-oh her tail quill is grey................ Now this fellow is your classic badly marked clearwing. One of those ones that at some shows you might be told he's a greywing and some shows you might be told he's a clearwing - oh sooooo confusing. He has a strong grey tail, and heavy grey wing markings. But when you truely compare him to a proper greywing, his markings are less defined, more fuzzy and not as grey. BUT he is HUGE. Outcrossing clearwings to normals to get size tends to alter the wing modifiers and you get more heavily marked birds. This guy too. Again he has a darker tail that standard and the tail quill is grey, but he is from a clearwinged clearwing to a normal split giving you the heavy markings again. He too shows the hazy wing marking compared to a greywing. So now lets look at cheek patches. Yes there is a standard but you MUST remember that there is natural variation in every animal, plant and human - same with budgies. Also remember that the dark and violet factors will make the cheek patch look different. Dark Green. Light Green. Violet (no defined iris ring here - full clearwing to clearwing breeding, no recessives in the line, 18 months old but no defined iris ring - it's there just very dark). Violet (you can see the throat spots too are not super well defined). One other thing too. At a show I judged recently there were 3 greywings benched. 2 had clearly defined lovely strong mid grey markings and the 3rd looked much like my heavily marked violet above. The 3rd one was probably a badly marked clearwing but when you look at the standard it fitted the greywing standard reasonably well. So how to deal with this situation as a judge. Knowing that it "probably" was a clearwing but not being 100% sure, I was compelled to judge it in the class it was entered. I could do nothing more than place it 3rd as compared to the other 2 birds but here in lies the complication. When I approached the exhibitor, they had previously benched the bird as a clearwing and had been told it was a greywing. Not until you had a good comparison against a couple of nicely marked greywings could you make a good assessment of the bird........... I understand how confusing it must be for people trying to get into this tricky variety.