Finnie

Very pretty! You definitely have a dark factor in the parents somewhere.

I don't think noise will be the problem, budgies LOVE noise! I like Jenny's idea to check for quill stubs. Self plucking/chewing is a definite possibility, with all he has gone through, and three months at your place might not be quite enough for him to feel settled in all the way yet. Another idea could be that after his bout with the poodle, and some time healing, he could be experiencing a molt, and the sensation of the new feathers coming in could really be irritating him, causing him to chew at himself a lot. Maybe reminding him of how he felt during his recovery. Your idea to put a budgie friend in with him might make him feel better. A nice, gentle friend, though, and not a crabby hen. And that might take his mind off his own feathers. I had a hen with a very, very similar problem, and I can tell you what I did to cure her, but it might not be pertinant to this bird's situation, so I will wait to see whether your bird gets better on his own or not.

Hee hee, yes I can see that you picked right up on the finch mutations! Your are right about Pete's colors. I have four Gouldians, and he is my prettiest. Are you on the Finchforum? I am Finnie on there, too.

To answer your last question first, yes, you can definitely get all three in one clutch. If you breed two full body color greywings together, you will get 25% greywings, 50% full body greywings, and 25% clearwings. You hit the nail on the head. I was looking at one of the chicks which looks a LOT like its dad when he was a little boy...so I am assuming there might be some Full Body Greywings. This one here, for example, dark stripes and bright body colour. I agree with you on him, full body color, and wings way too dark to be a clearwing. But then have a look at this Skyblue...such pale markings and a bright body colour. I'm leaning towards a Clearwing Sky. I don't know about this one. You may have to wait until after she molts. RIPbudgies has said before that you can tell a clearwing by whether its grey markings are clearly defined, or more fuzzy, blurry looking. This photo is a little out of focus, so it's hard to tell. I also think that things darken up some at the first molt, so she could end up with darker cheek patches, darker body, and darker wings. She could still be a regular greywing or a full body color. Willow actually looks kind of like a "he" to me in that photo. Can't make my mind up about this Mauve yet...but has dark stripes as well. Yeah, Ushio's wing markings rule out clearwing, but you'll have to wait until the body and cheek patches feather in before telling whether he's greywing or full body. But then the oldest chick....isn't she a Greywing? Looks like greywing to me, but again, if the cheek patches and body darken up at the first molt, it could be full body color. because she looks a lot like my other Greywing Skyblue (or Cobalt) hen here. She looks cobalt to me. She's a nice one, because she leaves no room for doubt. Her body is washed out properly for a greywing, and her wings are dark enough not to be confused for a clearwing. And she wouldn't be mistaken for a dilute, either. That's the problem I've been running into when working with the different dilution genes. What with all the modifiers they can have, the different types can overlap in appearance, so it is real easy to mislabel them. But I don't think this hen below would be mistaken for anything other than a regular greywing. Here's the 2nd chick, which I think is a Clearwing...side by the Greywing one. You mean the yellow face cobalt male? You could be right,his wings look lighter, and less defined in markings, but his cheek patches and body color look reduced, to me, so I'm leaning towards regular greywing. If he were clearwing, he would need bright cheek patches, and bright body color. And those can darken up when he molts, so it's still possible. So to me it seems like I have Greywings, Full Body Greywings and Clearwings in the same clutch...but that's not possible, right? Well, we know for sure that you have at least one full body color greywing in this clutch. The ones that you think are regular greywings and regular clearwings could still change, but whether they do or not, just having the one FBC tells you that your hen is not a dilute. Clover's genetic makeup is greywing split to clearwing, and that tells you that he had to get one of those from his mother. So she could be any combination of the dilution genes except for homozygous dilute.

Not at all.

Thank you, birdluv.

Hi MiniandBudgie, welcome to the forum! You might not have noticed, but this thread is over a year old, so I sure hope those budgies already have names by now.

As Hilly said, this is only half true, meaning that an albino male with a non albino hen will have albino daughters. But it doesn't work the other way around. An albino hen with a non albino male will only make normal sons who are split to albino. (Unless the father is split to albino.) In order for any sex-linked mutation to appear in any offspring, the father MUST be carrying the sex-linked gene, either visually, or in split form. A father can make visual sex-linked mutations in his daughters, but in order for a son to be visual, it must get the gene from BOTH parents.

Hi Rashu, they are some lovely chicks! You have a similar situation as I did, when I was breeding my hen Finnie. I was never sure if Finnie was a clearwing, or a full body greywing, so I would try to pair her up with what I hoped was a dilute male, in the hopes of having chicks who were either regular greywing/dilute or plain clearwing/dilute. But it was always hard for me to tell the difference. And one of her mates was questionable, as to whether he was dilute or greywing, so that messed up my results even further. So the thing is, if your hen is a cinnamon dilute, the cinnamon will wash out the grey color of the wing markings,and it will also wash out her body color. And that can make a regular greywing hen look like a dilute hen. Cinnamon together with greywing makes it hard to determine which kind of greywing you have. Anyway, what all that means is that some of your "clearwing" chicks, might actually be full body greywing chicks. The one in the photo marked "Ocean" definitely seems to have brighter body color. I would watch that one when it molts to see what it's final coloring ends up looking like.

Hi Zebra, I do remember that cool signature! The forum changed,and we used to be able to see what date a person joined the forum, but now we can't see that anymore. I used to always look there to tell if someone was new, or had been around a while. It's too bad we lost that feature. If I remember correctly, I think you've been a member since before me. (March 2009) Kids definitely do grow up fast- enjoy the "little" years while you can! I love seeing my kids growing into adults, but I really miss the days when they were my constant companions.

Well, technically, he would be split to both ino and cinnamon. But when both of those genes are located on the same X chromosome, we call it "lacewing". In his case, they probably are both on the same X chromosome, since he has produced two lacewing chicks. The other possibility is that one of his X chromosomes has the ino gene on it, and his other X chromosome has the cinnamon gene on it, and it just so happened twice that when he made sperm to fertilize those two eggs, a crossover ocurred, which then moved the cinnamon and ino together onto one X. They say the crossover rate for those two genes is only around 3 to 4 %, so it would seem more likely that your cock already has them together on the same X.

Hi Speckles, welcome to the forum! I see that you have also asked this same question randomly in an old thread of someone elses. I deleted that one, because you have this nice new thread of your own, which will work better for getting your answers. Hopefully an Australian will come on here to answer your question. Being in the U.S., I'm not quite sure what the timing is like for you over there. I do know that some breeders avoid the hot summer months, but others don't.

No problem, it's always good to do your school homework!

Thanks, PJI! It's good to have dialogue with other breeders who have different strategies to learn from. Once in the past I did have a hen who laid infertile eggs, and I did foster chicks to her at about the time hers should have hatched. She raised the foster chicks real well. I think doing that spurred her on to have her own second round, which were all fertile. It had not ocurred to me, though, to use other hens' fertile eggs to do the same thing. Most of my hens (when they are cooperating) will lay around 9 eggs per clutch. So if I have three pairs going, and they each have 9 good eggs, I don't need to move any around. But I like your idea of "storing" eggs to use when I need them. I wish I had known about it sooner, because this hen of mine doesn't have any eggs at all right now. I had been throwing each one away as it was laid. If I had been saving them, she could have a whole clutch by now. So if I were to introduce a new cock to her, she would probably just go into the box and start laying, because she wouldn't have anything to clear out. (Although she is due to lay her next egg tonight, and I am inclined to leave her on her own at this point.)

He's really cute! I love google image searches for budgies. My own photos come up! Sure, they throw in a lot of birds that don't match your search, but if you are looking for say, cinnamon spangle violets, you can find a lot of nice ones. Try this link. The only one of mine that came up this time is at the very bottom. It's a baby sitting on my hand, although it's not a recessive pied... http://images.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGHP_enUS424US424&q=recessive+pied+budgies&biw=1680&bih=825&sei=R1PoUN3uNJOyqAG6ooGIAQ&tbm=isch

I'm pretty sure that when birds molt, they don't lose enough feathers at one time to lose their ability to fly. Any bird who molted in such a way would be easy pickings for predators. So I think there must be something else going on here. It could be that another bird or birds is picking on him. They sometimes pick on the old or the weak. Which would explain Nadene's bird, too.

I think your original bird looks like it could be either/or. But I would venture to say that if it were a hen, and you have had it for four years, you would have been able to notice it going in and out of breeding condition, and that would confirm it was a hen. So by process of elimination, it must be a male. It's just as well to house him separately anyway, since your aim is to breed your new pair, and he would just be in their way. Welcome to the forum! I hope you enjoy it here, there is a lot of helpful information.

I would think that would be fine. Some of us bake up foods for our birds that contain whole grain items, and I'm pretty sure that's what Wheet-bix has in it, doesn't it?

It almost sounds like he means French Molt, but that's not genetic...

Wow, now I am even more confused. These new photos really look like a hen to me. Perhaps you have a hen who has some sort of hormonal issue that has arrested her in a stage of her cycle, so that she never goes through all the normal cere phases. Or perhaps it is a male with hormone issues that makes him look female. One of our members, Robyn, had a male with a brown hen cere, and he needed iodine supplements, and after that, he went on to father chicks. If you are not a breeder, then it probably doesn't really matter whether you have a hen or cock, unless you run into issues with three birds living in one cage, and only one of them being a hen. If your two new boys grow up to fight over your old bird, then you might want to separate that one out, or get a fourth bird, and hope you end up with two hens and two males. If you still ended up with fights, you could just house them two by two,and then it shouldn't matter what their genders are.

Avian vets can be hard to find. I sometimes suspect that the one near me is no good either. The one guy they have in their office does all their "exotic" animals, and the rest are just regular vets. So I've always been a little suspicious about whether he is truly an avian vet, or just "specializes" in all the non cat and dog pets. In fact, I've never even gone in to see him, because whenever I call with a question, the staff puts me off, or says they will find the answer to my question, and then never calls me back. The exotic vet himself called me back one time, and he was really personable, and I appreciated him spending about half an hour with me on the phone. But the final jist of the conversation still ended up with him advising me that all I could do was to bring in a dead body for tests (it was about young chicks dying), and that the tests would be expensive and likely inconclusive. So it was like he was telling me not to bother. But at least he gave me some insight into what was likely the cause, and he was very nice. And working from his advice about husbandry, since then I feel like I was able to resolve the issue. I'd still go there if I needed to, but the staff of the place are going to lose the guy business. Oh, about the fatty deposits. I'm not sure if they are curable once they develop. I think they are prone to coming back. But from what I hear, if you improve the bird's diet and excercise, the bird will lose weight, and that in turn will reduce the deposit, too. If it is fatty liver disease, then I am told giving Milk Thistle supplement can improve the condition. Don't know if that's true, or a wive's tale. With the fatty liver disease, you have to watch out for overgown beak and toenails. Maybe this is why nobody came on here to say their breeding birds get this too. It apparently has nothing to do with egg laying.

He is very pretty indeed. I'm curious, though, since budgie mutations are my favorite subject. Do you have photos of the parents and siblings? You mention that a sibling is a violet, and you said both parents are sky blue. To get a violet, you need a dark factor in there, so I was curious about what you actually do have. (No real reason other than being nosey and also that I like seeing photos of people's birds, lol. )

Thanks

No problem, hope you had a great Christmas!

Thanks BJ, I appreciate the information about quarantine for folks who might have thought I meant an actual newly purchased bird. Yeah, we don't want anyone to think they should skip quarantine. I also appreciate the heads up about hens not always accepting a new cock into the cage they have already been nesting in. I never have any trouble pairing up my birds randomly together. But then, I usually am putting the hen and the cock into an unfamilar breeding cage at the same time. Only once so far have I switched mates on a hen, and that went off without a hitch, so I think this is a good reminder for me to keep an eye on newly matched up pairs. With this hen, I was planning to put her back into my hen flight cage, and let her just lay her next couple of eggs off the perch, hoping she would just quit laying after that. But then I got to thinking that she and her mate had been paired up in that breeding cage for several months without any nest box, and they have seemed to really bond in that time. If they had been doing any mating, I think there might be a chance that some of these eggs could be fertile, and it would be my last chance ever to get a chick from the dead cock. That's the only reason for me to pursue this. So it kind of sounds like I could throw then hen completely off if I introduce a new male now. Maybe my best bet would be to give her a box and see if she will lay her next few eggs in it. If I'm lucky enough that she sits on them and they are indeed fertile, then maybe by then one of my other pairs that I'm going to set up will be sitting on eggs, and then I could foster these over to them. And if not, then maybe the hen will be able to raise her clutch alone. Last time she laid in the box, she had 9 eggs. They were infertile, but she sat on them diligently. The reason I took her box away (besides to rest her) was to force her out into the cage so she could bond with the cock and hopefully begin mating with him.