Finnie

Ooo, split to ino and split to cinnamon! That means that when his sperm is produced, there is a small chance (I think it's around 3% or so) that a crossover will occur, and make a lacewing gene, which is where the ino and the cinnamon are on the same X chromosome. (Right now you have proof that his ino gene is on one of his Xs and his cinnamon gene is on the other, because they showed up on two separate chicks, not the same chick.) If you were interested in breeding lacewings, then putting him with a cinnamon hen or an ino hen would increase the chances of combining the two genes someday. Something else just ocurred to me as I was typing this. If one of his Xs has the ino, and the other has the cinnamon, then all his hen chicks would be one or the other (barring the slight chance of crossover). So do you think that all of the remaining chicks out of the 18 are all boys?

I have also found that when they are deciding whether to trust your finger as a possible stepping place, they will often nibble to test the safeness of your finger. This is like exploratory mouthing. If some day your bird is very comfortable with you, and decides to test out actual biting, the last thing you want to do is pull your hand away. They learn very quickly that they can manipulate you, and then the biting will become worse. As was mentioned before, do your best not to react at all. If biting gets no reaction, they will give up on it. As for your questions about learning their moods, I guess it just comes with observation. Like you have already figured out when she is excited to see you when you get home. She sounds like a fun bird.

I agree with BJ on waiting until they fledge. At that age they are still very young and you still have plenty of time to teach them. The handling you are giving them now should give them a really nice head start on their taming. It will work even better if you teach them to eat millet from your hand, or some other treat they learn to love. I have had hand tame baby birds learn to take their first bath when I was washing my hands, and they were fascinated by the stream of water coming out of the faucet.

Sorry I didn't see this sooner. My condolences on the loss of your special guy.

I would say they are both cobalt greywings, and the white one (the male) is a dominant pied. How confident are you that they are not brother and sister?

Well, people vote with their dollars, and if you buy anything at all from a store like XXXX, then you are encouraging them to keep up their poor habits.

I think it's quite interesting that out of 18 chicks, you only got one ino. It just goes to show that even though we talk about percentages, the numbers will be off when we just look at one or two clutches. If you only had the second round of 9 chicks, with no inos among them, most people would feel pretty comfortable assuming that the cock wasn't split to ino. Or for an example, I have a cock who had 10 chicks with a recessive pied hen, and none of them came out recessive pied. So I feel that the cock must not be split to it. But of course, it doesn't prove it, and if they had had 18 chicks, maybe one would have popped out. You're pretty lucky, in that at least now you know for sure your cock is split to ino.

It sounds to me like you've got it covered, between the bleach, the ACV, and the sun. For my cages, I'm usually pretty comfortable with a thorough wetting with bleach solution that I let soak for 10 or 20 minutes. Let it dry in the sun, and it's good to go.

I think it's neat that even though she's not tame, when she found herself in a strange room, she recognized you and knew you were the safe place to go to.

Since I just learned from your other thread that you have their genders backwards, it is the female that you would have to work on re-taming, and then maybe the male will copy her. That could work to your advantage.

You have their genders backwards. The blue one is female, and the white one is male. I don't see anything obviously wrong with the blue one's cere, but the photo is blurry. What did they think was the problem?

Well, it is a lot harder to tame two budgies who have bonded to each other, than it is to tame an individual one. Harder, but not impossible. BUT, since they have the freedom of the whole room, I don't see that they really have any motivation to want to play with you. If it's important to you, you may need to curb their freedom for a while in order to do it. That would mean making them get used to living inside the cage until they were tame, and also clipping their wings, at least one time. After they molt in new flight feathers, if they were tame enough for your liking, you could then let them remain fully flighted. It's normal for a bird who is used to an aviary or large cage, or in your case, a whole room, to freak out a bit when they are re-homed into a smaller cage. They will go through all sorts of twisting contortions as they try to find a way to squeeze out of the cage. But after a day of two of that, they normally settle down. If your male was tame as a youngster, there is a possiblity that if you work with him again, he will remember, and make better progress. And they are great copiers, so if the female sees that the male learns to like you, and gets rewarded with millet treats, she might just get interested enough to learn to take millet from your hand as well. But at the ages they are, and the amount of time that they have enjoyed being free and "wild", getting them to take millet from your hand may be the best you can hope for. I don't think they will ever really "bond" with you, just learn to tolerate you.

Definitely beautiful and colorful!

Have you looked over the taming section of the forum yet? There are some good articles written by member Bird Junky, who is an experieced bird trainer. http://forums.budgiebreeders.asn.au/index.php?showforum=49

If you do a search of the forum, I'm sure you will find topics where other people have suggested what seeds they prefer in a mix. I ditched the parakeet mixes a couple of years ago, based on discussions we were having where people told what seeds they liked best. And based on some suggestions by Generic Blue, I found that my local seed company's "Finch Mix" and "Canary Mix" had more types of seeds and less junk than their "Parakeet" mix. I would like to tweak my seed mix even further, and if I had a source to get seeds individually, I would really like that. Perhaps since your birds are doing well on the Trill mix, you could read the label of it, and try to duplicate what they use. Since your main concern seems to be the freshness of the seed, not neccessarily that the Trill blend is incorrect. Or you also have the option of keeping the seeds separate, and feeding them in individual cups, which might give you an idea of which ones the birds prefer, and which ones they waste. You can "balance" your seed mix all you want, but it won't really help once the birds "unbalance" it, by only picking and eating their favorites.

Hmm. Do you know for sure whether this hen is a dominant pied or a clearflight pied? Sometimes it can be tricky to tell the two pieds apart. From her back I'd say dominant, but I don't know what her front looks like. With her, you will get 50% pied chicks (whichever kind of pied she is). That could mess up the results of your test breeding, because you won't be able to rule out whether the chicks could have gotten it from the father OR the mother. So if the father turns out to be a dark eyed clear, he will give the clearflight pied gene to half of the chicks. (Plus they will all be split to recessive pied.) So for the outcomes, you would expect 25% of the chicks to get a pied gene from the father and no pied gene from the mother. 25% will get the mother's pied gene, but not the father's one. 25% will get pied genes from BOTH parents, which would be either DF clearflight pied or a clearflight, dom pied combo. And then the last 25% would get no pied gene from either parent. So I'm just saying that if you are trying to figure out the pied genes of the father, it can get pretty muddy if you use a hen who also throws some pied into the mix. By the way, I just looked back, and you've never said what color cere the cock has. I'm guessing it's pink, to go along with the lack of iris rings.

It is so nice to hear a lost budgie story with a happy ending. By the way, did the owner tell you whether it was a male or female? Just curious.

But it does say you can post photos, and I would like to see him. Where you have said "Here are pictures" doesn't seem to have worked. Try again?

Well here's something to consider. If he really is a DF spangle that is masking recessive pied, and you breed him to a normal that is not split to recessive pied, then all the chicks will be split to recessive pied, but you won't be able to see that. (They will also all be spangles, and any spots on the backs of the heads could be a spangle thing, not neccessarily a "split to rec pied" thing.) But if you are able to use a normal hen that you know to be split to recessive pied, then you could expect half the chicks to come out as recessive pied spangles. That won't exactly PROVE that he's masking recessive pied, just that he's at least split to it. But it might at least give you another piece of evidence. If you do this, and he turns out to actually be a dark eyed clear, you should be able to tell, because there shouldn't be any spangles. (Unless he's masking single factor spangle.) But you would be able to get clearflight pieds who are split to recessive pied, and also more dark eyed clears. And maybe even normals that are split to recessive pied, and plain old visual recessive pieds, too.

That happened to me once. It's fun to get surprises!

You could save yourself some steps if you are able to find birds that already have some of these mutations combined. It should be pretty common in pet types. Not so sure about show types, because I think breeders like to keep their varieties pure.

The flash is lightening up his cere, but looking back at the first photo of chick E, he's a male spangle budgie, either mauve or grey. To tell between mauve and grey, look at the cheek patches. I can't see the color too well in the photos. If they are grey, he's grey, if they are a dark blue, he's mauve.

I agree with Kaz, and whatever you do, DON'T be tempted to go back and buy it to save its life. That just teaches the store that sick budgies sell better than healthy ones.

I think Rainbow consists of yf2, opaline, dominant pied and clearwing on a sky blue budgie. I'm not positive about the clearwing part, because it seems to me that if you google Rainbow Budgie, you come up with some that have black wings. BUT, you also come up with a lot of people's interpretation of what makes a Rainbow, and they all seem to disagree with each other. But I do think there is an actual set combination that is the "real" Rainbow budgie. I think maybe I'll Google it now. Maybe I'll come up with a link for you Oh, and yeah, that chick doesn't have its feathers all the way in yet. Did you get it to hand feed? ...okay, a lot of links came up. But the gist of it is that Rainbow consists of yellowface + opaline + clearwing. Not blackwing after all, and not dominant pied or spangle, either. So to tell if your chick is a clearwing, you will have to see whether it develops bright body color and pale wings. It would also have bright cheek patches. Since we can already see that it is dominant pied, then it's not strictly a rainbow. But it might stll be a rainbow plus dominant pied.

Very nice. Did you know the dad was split to ino? He must be split to blue as well.