Finnie

I think he looks Okay. I think it's just cuz he's wet. Did you ever give him a name yet?

That's an interesting point, Macka. In the photo, there are 17 standard cages, and 7 smaller ones that look like RazzleDazzle's cage. I wonder why there are so many of the smaller ones?

Sounds like quite a day!

Just working back through this thread to see the fireworks and came across this. Sorry RATEMYMATE aren't we talking about your YF (or golden face) baby here. A number of people pointed out that it might be a YF, right? That gives you a yellow bird from 2 blue series birds (one of them must be a yf though (or a df yellow face). Or are you talking about a different bird now. I'm all confused! If this: Is the father of this: Then there shouldn't be any confusion about where the yellow comes from. People should stop thinking of their yellow face birds as being blue series. This chick is not a green series, and the father above it is not a blue series. They are both in the yellow/golden face series (if you want to insist on using the word "series"), which in order of dominance, lies in between the green and the blue. But I must say, it was very hard for me to sift through all the "off topic" information in this thread, so maybe I have picked out the wrong father for this chick.

How exciting to see your first batch of chicks growing up. Their first moult! It gets even more exciting when they are old enough to breed, and you get to start a second generation.

That cock looks like he's plenty old. But with the hens, I would wait until you have owned them for (at least) 10 months, then you won't have to have any doubts.

Hi Wendymoon, Maybe you would get a better response if you start a new thread for your questions. (I personally don't have any experience with this for you, sorry.)

This is just a suggestion, but at three weeks old, couldn't you try to teach him to eat from a syringe or spoon? If you've managed to get a couple of meals into his crop already, that should tide him over while he's learning to eat in other ways. If I have an "orphaned" 3 week old, I offer the spoon, and if it's rejected at first, by the next time, the chick is hungry enough to eat better. Also, by that age I've introduced seed as bedding, and they can manage to eat enough to tide them over. Offer millet, too. (Sorry if this isn't helpful. Maybe you've already tried these things. )

When I read your first post, it made me think that perhaps the reason she ate that first egg after you put it in the nest was because she didn't know it was hers, and she wanted to clear the nest out for her own use. I have had hens who laid their first egg in the cage, and then I moved the egg to the nest, and they threw the egg out and then proceeded to lay the rest of their eggs in the nest. (But they didn't eat the 1st egg.) Maybe your hen just chose eating over throwing as her method of cleaning out the box.

WOW. wow. This article really knocked my socks off! Maybe it's because I've always been interested in the greywing varieties, but I had lumped them all into the "too hard" basket, and only recently gotten them back out and tried to sort through them better. So I think what I should be taking home from this article is that instead of looking for the elusive "clearwing gene", I should breed what greywings I have, and select for the specimens with the brightest body color and the clearest wings. (Mind you I'm only talking pet types. If I had show types, there would be a lot of other things to select for as well.) The whole article is great food for thought as well. Thanks, Kaz, for getting these on here for us.

R.I.P Cricket. Passed away in her sleep between breakfast and mid morning aged 11 yrs. Best ratter and mouser in the business Oh, I am so sad for both of you. The old dogs are the best.

AND

Hee, hee, if her being greywing bothers you, I'll glady take her off your hands...

Hey Splat, hope you have a great birthday! -Finnie

Sorry that my answers are incomplete. For the ones with no markings on their heads, it's hard to tell whether they have moulted their markings out, or whether they just never had any. And for the varieties that never get iris rings, (recessive pieds and dark eyed clears) you won't be able to judge their age by their eyes. Maybe someone else will be able to help you more than me. Anyway, welcome to the forum! P.S. Editing your topic to fix spelling of "Budgies" P.S. again. Just noticed you have made two threads exactly the same. So I have deleted the other one. Folks can just respond all together in this one. Thanks for understanding about our no-double posting rule.

Well, then, he sounds like he's doing just perfectly! You don't need to worry about water while you are feeding him hand formula. That has enough moisture in it. You can give him a regular water drinker when he's old enough to climb and fly up to the cage bars.

Just want to reassure you, the spray of millet in the nest for mom is a good idea, and NOT the cause of the chick's death. And as the chicks grow older, the spray of millet will help teach them to eat seed. You can also add a couple of handfuls of regular seed to the nest box, when the chicks get a little older. Don't stress out over the possibility of them eating poop. It would be impossible for you to keep all poop away, and it will get nibbled on, no matter what.

Hi ericsonfe, I'm no expert, but I can help you out with a few of your questions, and I'm sure other people will follow with more advice. At that age, I think your feeding schedule you have written is good. He shouldn't need to eat during the night. Ideally, you would want his crop to be full after he eats. Here is a photo of a chick with a full crop. I circled the crop, to show you where it is located. In your photos, that area of your chick appears to be flat. Does it bulge out after he eats? If not, he may not be eating enough. You may need to get a crop needle, which you put down his throat to squeeze the food directly into the crop. One thing I would suggest is to put seeds into his box, because he is at an age when he can practice nibbling on things, and he can learn to crack seed if it is available. A spray of millet would be good, too. I don't think you need to have that shredded paper in his box. The seed will fall to the bottom, and the paper shreds may block him from finding it. Oats make a good bedding, and he can pick around in them to find the seeds, and also, he can eat the oats, too. Do you have some way to keep him warm? He seems a little young to be in a cool temperature. I think sleeping a lot is normal at this age. As to the flaky stuff that falls off, that is normal too. His feathers are coming in, and they start out coated by a sheath. He grooms himself and picks the sheath off, so that his feathers can fluff out. Until all of his feathers are in and fully fluffed out, he will drop those flakes continually. To me it always looks like my hands have been sprinkled with some pepper after I play with my chicks. You could also try feeding him his formula from a small measuring spoon. Sometimes they just prefer to eat from that than from a syringe, especially as they get older. I'm sure I've left a lot out. And there are lots of ways of doing things, so I'm sure other people will have more to add. Welcome to the forum, and good luck with him.

That is a very good point, Nerwen. In some of the anecdotal discussions I have read, some said they called their vet, who didn't know anything about it, and some had taken their bird in to the vet to have its vision checked, and it was fine. (Of course.) But there is nowhere that tells owners of albino birds that they need to do anything special with it. Thank you KM and GB. I knew both of you had a lot of experience with albinos, so you would know whether they were cropping up with vision issues.

My chick buyer sent me this link, which is where she got the idea to worry about the chick's eyesight http://www3.sympatico.ca/davehansen/time.html It seems like a reputable source of information, but what do the rest of you think?

Okay, here is where I admit that I was wrong about chick 2 being totally male, because now it is looking like a hen after all. To throw a normal chick (chick 5), Mystery must be only split to greywing, which means that he must then be cinnamon. Which means that if this is a hen, then she must be cinnamon, in addition to her greywing. No one ever answered my question about whether a cinnamon chick can be born with back eyes. The oldest they could be when I first find them is 12 hours old, as I check the nests at 8:30 am and 8:30 pm. Perhaps it was plum, and it changed to black more quickly than usual? I always write down their eye color, even if I expect all black eyes in a nest. All 6 of these chicks had black eyes. So I tried to get some sunshine pictures of Chick 2, like GB suggested. So here's a bunch. Sorry this one is blurry, but I didn't want to use flash. This is the only photo that looks cinnamon, to me, but it could just be a trick of the lighting. The sunshine doesn't seem very bright in those photos, but they were taken right next to my sliding door. That's about as bright as I could get them. With flash: Without flash:

So I have someone who's planning to buy my albino chick, and she says she has found out that albinos have poor eyesight, and also she's worried that it might have too much sensitivity to bright sunlight. I wrote back to her that I have never heard of this, but that I will check into it. A little bit of Googling turned up some (other) forum discussions, which was really just people giving their own experience on whether their albinos could see well or poorly. There was some mention of how albinism in humans definitely causes vision and eye problems, but it wasn't known if birds would follow the same model. So then I tried a few different keywords, to try to find something scientific about it, and I did come across a study done on leghorn chickens. It appeared that the albino chicken chicks did have some differences in their eyes and their vision. They were slightly more myopic than their normal counterparts. But it didn't sound like the differences were debilitating. (But that wasn't the point of the study, which was to see if studying avian albinism could be useful in studying human albinism.) Elsewhere, I found articles that talked about albinism causing lack of pigment in the rods, which causes the human vision problems, but they stated that bird vision relies more heavily on the cones than the rods, so the lack of pigment might not be a problem for birds. What I'm wondering is whether anybody knows of any scientific information about avian vison and albinism, especially if it pertains to budgies. I've already found lots of anecdotal stories from people who say their albino budgies can see just fine. That's not what I'm after here. (And of course, I've also already come across the silly myths that albino budgies are blind, inbred, sick, you name it. I'm not worried about trying to disprove those, we know they are just untrue wives tales.)

That hen is very nice, GB! All your self bred birds look nice, and they should, because I know you are very particular about who you pair together. That's a really good drawing of the cobalt cock.

Try this, too: since you said they will stretch out their necks to eat the millet from your hand, hold it at a distance from their perch, so that if they really want it, they have no choice but to step onto your hand to reach it. (Or at least far enough for them to have to put one foot on you, to start, and then two feet.)

I thought I'd bump this, since I was looking around for info on the Dusk mutation, as a possible explanation for why I got "Olive" chicks out of a pairing of my green cock and sky blue hen. Does anybody know whether this Dusk mutation may have appeared in the U.S.? Normally I wouldn't assume that something new or rare would just show up in a pet store bird. But if they can be mistaken for dark factor birds, maybe they are more widespread than we have thought. Maybe there are colony breeders and commercial breeders who aren't paying attention to what they've got, and haven't been noticing that their no-dark factor birds have started throwing dark factors.