Finnie

I think you have a greywing or dilute light green male, and he looks like me might be opaline, but the photo is kind of far away/small to tell. And the female is either a greywing or a clearwing cobalt. They look very nice!

L__J, thank you for helping with the photos. Budgie_Mad, have you tried to do this? If you can get the links to post, then there is no reason why you can't get the actual photos to post. Your chicks are coming along nicely. They get their yellow face gene from their dad, the creamino, because creamino means yellowface albino.

I agree with Jimmy. Spangle tends to make the cheek patches pied out, giving them a silvery color, but it can be kind of random, so having blue cheek patches doesn't rule the spangle out.

Hi Birdlove, I will check his brother, and see if he has any nibbled back feathers. I don't have those parents any more, but maybe I can write to the other chick buyers and see if their birds have it. One thing, though. If it were a mite problem, it wouldn't limit itself to the same feathers after each molt. It would spread all over, and probably make him very itchy, and you would notice, after all this time. (And I doubt there would be mites on perches in the store, so don't beat yourself up over that. )

Both boys. Owen, you should have started this as a topic of your own. I can split if off, in necessary, if it takes on a life of its own.

You contradict yourself. If pets were important to you, you wouldn't just trade yours in for a different color. Apparently choosing the right one didn't matter when you picked out your current bird. (Which, in my opinion, you hit the jackpot.) Keep it and love it. If you really need a green bird, then when you find one, keep them both and love them both. As for breeding your own and selling off the excess wastage produced, you can't breed a green baby without starting with a green parent, so there's your green bird, and no need to breed more unwanted ones. Sheesh.

Hi, Welcome to the forum. Great job rescuing the down trodden! Do you remember to quarantine when you bring the new ones home?

I think she looks like a yellow face mutant one albino. If you pair her with an albino male, you will get 100% ino offspring. Half will be YF1 split to blue, and half will be blue. (A blue albino being a white bird.) Remember, the ino gene is the sex-linked part, but the color is on a different chromosome and passes on the same way it would in non-albino birds. It's not risky. Budgies mix and match mates very easily, unlike some other bird species. It's only the rare occasion that you will put up a pair that fights with each other. So it's still a good idea to keep watch when you introduce them, but generally you can expect them to get along.

This is a really good point. He could be either DF spangle, DEC or both. You will probably have to wait until he molts, and find out if he gets a blue cere or iris rings.

Yes, this is exactly what I do, too. (Probably why Robyn said Finnie instead of Nadene. ) On a different bird forum, someone scoffed at this idea, because they said it would breed bacteria. But I have never found that to be a problem. They will soak up moisture, and then turn a little bit like granola. I don't usually clean them out until after all the eggs are hatched. Then I scrape them all out and replace them with new ones, and like Nadene said, a couple of handfuls of seeds. For anyone going with the wood shavings, make sure you don't use cedar. I think that puts off an odor, or fumes, that aren't a good idea. Pine shavings are good. And so is "Carefresh" bedding, which is made from recycled paper. But I am partial to the edible bedding so that chicks come out of the box already partially weaned, knowing how to husk their own seed.

Send a PM to Kaz. If you know much about computers and such, they might need more staff! By the way, in Photobucket, click on the button for "direct link", it should say "copied" when you do that. Then on here in your post, click on the icon for inserting an image. (That's the tiny square with a picture of a tree that you need a huge magnifying lens to tell that it's a tree.) Then right click in the window to paste the direct link, hit the okay (or is it "Add photo"?), and your picture should appear in your post.

I'm sorry you lost him.

Cool! When do we get to see pictures?

I agree that more angles of the top bird would help. It's hard to see whether it's grey or cobalt. I don't think the lower one is greywing.... It does look like dominant pied, though.

Very nice, Budgie Mad. One tip- you can remove the empty egg shells. Sometimes the mother will eat them for calcium, but if she doesn't, you don't want to take a chance that a loose egg shell will wrap around one of the other eggs and suffocate the chick inside. (I don't know if that's very likely. Nobody removes them from birds in the wild. But if my hens don't eat them, I remove mine just in case.)

If you're going to get wormer from the avian vet, then it would be a good idea to find out what his/her opinion is about the symptoms. There is a disease called Megabacteria that causes similar symptoms, in which a bird appears to be eating constantly, but is actually chewing food and spitting it back out. You may want to make sure that your bird doesn't have that, before trying all kinds of other remedies.

My breeding unit is on weels. That gives a gap below the lowest cage of around 4 or 5 inches I think. It is enough to get a broom or vacuum underneath. My budgies seem to be fine with breeding down that low.

Hi Budgie Mad! Sorry I didn't see this sooner. I've been pretty busy with my own chicks lately, and haven't gotten on the forum as much as usual. So did I read it right that Mixie is the dad, and is a creamino, with red eyes? So then all the female chicks will have red eyes as well. Twice a day is a good number of times to check on the chicks. That gives you a chance to make sure they fed and cleaned properly, without over stressing the parents. Budgie mothers get very used to us removing their chicks for a good look-over, and then putting them back in the nest. If for some reason she is a messy feeder, and leaves dried on food over their face, then it is important to get that off before it hardens and misshapes the beak. It's also important to make sure the vent does not get dried waste stuck on it, which could prevent the next waste from coming out. Those things aren't too common, but as long as you know the chicks are A-okay twice a day, then you will catch anything that does occur in time. I can't wait to see pics of them as they hatch and grow!

Sorry, Prince Charming, this is completely untrue as relates to budgies. Other bird species, yes, but with budgies, we handle the chicks and check the nests from day one. Budgies take it well. By The Way, this thread is almost a year old.

Fixed that for ya- the typo, not the broken arm, lol. You're on your own there! Welcome to the forum.

Well, it sounds unanimous about the photos! Welcome to the forum.

Fingers crossed. Maybe it will have a better chance, now that it won't have to compete with the other one.

I'm no expert on scaley face, because none of my birds have ever had it. I've just seen photos that other people posted. But your birds don't really look like they have scaley face to me. Maybe someone else will be able to give a better opinion. The white one does seem to be a little off, in the photo. It's possible that whatever is ailing her gets exagerated when she is in the aviary, so yeah, I wouldn't put her back in there, unless she gets better, and proves it over a matter of months. Is there anywhere in your house that you can make off limits to cats? I know with my cats, I would not trust them unsupervised in a room with a bird cage. Oh, and yes, all hens.

Does the breeder house her birds indoors, or outdoors? If outdoors, then a drop of Ivermectin would be a good preventative. If indoors, then I would only do that if it looked like there was a reason to suspect that the bird had worms.

I think either way would be fine. If you leave them in the breeding cage, I would remove the nest box for a little while, so she doesn't just keep laying infertile eggs and waste her resources sitting on them. If she goes back into breeding condition after a few weeks or so, then give her the box back. That may give them time to get to bond more and perfect their mating. It's possible that she may have gone straight into the box to lay, without bothering to mate with the cock first, so having no box for a while prevents that. But if your breeding cage is on the small side, then it wouldn't be good to leave them in there for too many weeks. In that case, the excercise they get in the aviary is better. It's your call.