Finnie

Well, I'm sure Bailey was only one or the other, not both, so what was Storm?

Me too!

KM, you know I've been watching this bird grow up, and I think these latest pictures of her are the best you've gotten so far. I think I can finally see the opaline in her. I wouldn't be surprised if she was just a single factor dom pied who has very little markings, even though she looks more like a double factor dom pied. And since that's not possible, given that her parents are one dom and one clearflight, I wouldn't be surprised if she is actually one of those combos that has dominant AND clearflight pieds. Splat has a good point about the dilute or the suffused. Gabriel (The dad of this chick) always was really pale, so he is probably dilute, and then the mother must be split for dilute. I think around here, suffused would be very rare, but maybe not out of the realm of possibility. I was under the impression that the suffused gene was only in show bred budgies, but I guess it could sneak its way into the pets. I don't think your theory of clearwing fits though, because then she would have brighter body color showing up, at least in the spots where she's not pied.

I don't see pied on Bailey's boy there, only spangle. I think you're right, with only two chicks, your chances of getting a pied were smaller.

Here you go, GB. I found this on Budgie-Info.com, just to reference the source. Budgie Internal Organs {}Here we have an image of a parrot with its insides out! It is a not actually a budgie but the details are the same so we can use it to explore the budgie internal organs, and get a better understanding of our budgies and how they function. Here is a brief description of budgie internal organs and their uses: cloaca - the organ used to excrete waste and to transfer semen during mating. coracoid - an important bone, part of a structure vital to flight. crop - a simple sack that holds the food your budgie has swallowed until it is passed slowly down to be digested. duodenum - the first part of the small intestine, helps digest food. ear - yes, it an ear... for hearing with... gizzard - a tough walled, muscular sack that fills with small stones/insoluble grit. Once the food reaches here it is crushed and rolled around with with grit until it is broken down enough to be passed into the intestines for absorption. The gizzard does the same job for your budgie that your teeth do for you. heart - pumps the blood around, just like yours does. kidney - carries out many vital functions including removing waste and toxins to be excreted as uric acid. liver - a vital organ that has many functions including producing hormones, and bile for digestion. lung - transfers oxygen from the air into the blood stream. oesophagus - the tube that carries the food from the budgies mouth to its crop. pectoral muscles - the large chest muscles used to flap the wings. proventriculus - a glandular part of the stomach that mixes digestive enzymes with the food before it enters the gizzard. ribs - surround the birds chest to protect the important organs such as the heart and lungs. small intestine - continues the digestion of food and absorbs most of the nutrients from the food. testis - produces sperm. tongue - used for tasting and manipulating food... and toys! trachea - the tube that carries air to and from the lungs whilst breathing. ureter - carries uric acid from the kidneys to the cloaca. vas deferens - a tube for transporting semen from the testes to the cloaca during mating. vent - external parts ofthe cloaca, effectively the same organ.

Well, GB, I'm still sticking with the advice you gave me back in the fall, to give them carrots, greens and orange every day. And no random, unexpected things to throw them off when they are breeding. It's been very consistent since then, so I'm hoping I will have good results. I'll let you know next time they have chicks, if it makes things better.

I hope Jake doesn't get anywhere near that snake!

Well, Hello, there, K&M Breeding! It's good to see you finally on here!! Hi I thought since you spoke so highly of the board, I'd come check it out =) Oh good, I hope you like it here!

Well that would explain a bird I once had. He looked like a normal with a recessive pied spot, but he had one clear flight feather. I thought he was a poorly marked dom pied, but maybe he was a poorly marked clearflight pied, instead. I put him with a dom pied hen, and the chicks came out mostly looking like clearflight pieds, so I wondered where that came from.

Toothless is dominant pied. Well, then no pink cere for him!

Well, Hello, there, K&M Breeding! It's good to see you finally on here!!

Yes, thank you, Neville. That was the same one I found, which was the only one I could find. From reading that, I get the impression that having one dom pied factor from one parent and one clearflight pied from the other parent makes it look similar to a DF dom pied. I was kind of hoping that I could stir up more people who knew they had a bird like that, and that maybe they could put up pictures. I hate to assume how a gene works based on just one example. There obviously seems to be a lot of variation of how dom pieds and clearflight pieds look, some of them being poorly marked ones. I guess there is probably also a lot of variation on how the combination of the two would look. I'm beginning to think that it's just not something that can be discerned visually, you would have to know the ancestry to figure it out.

Unfortunately, it's been learned that windows block out the UV rays that the birds need to get from the sun in order to produce the vitamin D they need, so skylights would defeat the purpose. Skylights do brighten up the interior, though, so it is an option. But other members on here have found that they then need to have some sort of cover to put over the skylights, in order to minimize the heat during the summer.

By the time you read this, you will probaly have done your morning check. I hope it all went well. I hate snakes, too. I feel very bad for you. Good luck. (Insert hug emoticon here- wish it was working!)

I was looking on your other thread, and Toothless appears to be pied. If he's recessive pied, his cere will stay pink for life. Do you have any back and/ or full body shots of him?

So really, it's not that the pictures are conclusive, I'm just going by the fact that you said they don't look this white in real life. (Please don't think I'm any expert. I just know I'm the only one in the same time zone as you right now, so I'm trying to help. ) There's bound to be more input overnight.

This is fascinating, GB. I'm looking forward to the next installment.

I think they're all boys, since you are saying the photos make them look whiter than they are in real life. If they looked this white in real life, then I'd be questioning it. By the way, welcome to the forum!

I tried to do a search on what these two genes would look like if they were combined, but mostly all I could come up with is when they are combined with recessive pied. There is a lot of information about Dark Eyed Clears, which is the Clearflight Pied combined with Recessive Pied, and there is Neville's really nice thread about the Dominant Pied combined with Recessive Pied. But I could only find one topic that mentions a bird whose parents were probably a dom pied and a clearflight pied. The bird in question looked kind of like a DF dom pied, but it was decided it couldn't be. In my search (on here, but also on Google), I did find a lot of different descriptions of the difference between Dominant Pied and Clearflight Pied, and it appears that a lot of people are confused as to which is which. It also seems that since people can't tell them apart, they are breeding them together on a regular basis, without knowing it. So it would follow, that there are a lof of chicks out there that have a single factor of Dom Pied, and also a single factor of Clearflight Pied. So, does anybody know for sure what this would look like? Got any pictures?

Aww, go ahead and fall in love with it!

You really do have a beautiful flock, Kaz!

They are very nice, Nubbly. I think this one is my favorite:

Your first pinkies!! How exciting for you! I agree with Kaz and GB, this journal is an excellent idea! Can't wait to see how it unfolds. I think I read in one of your other posts that you plan to leave all the eggs, just in case they hatch? I think that's a good idea, since you don't want to chance throwing away a good one on accident. That one with the hole in it, was that yellow yolk inside? So I guess that one was infertile, anyway, so that's all good.

I think you've got some toughies here. On first glance, it looks like chick number one is the only boy. But I've had chicks that I thought were hens early on, then they started to look like yours, with a deep purple blue on the lower half of their cere. Some of them have gone on to develop that purple blue all over the whole cere (boys), and some have not. Instead, the whitish area around the nostrils grew to pervade the whole cere. (girls) As long as the white is only around the nostrils, the chick has a good chance of still being a boy. But chick 4 looks like the white might spread further down the cere. So my guess at this point is boy, boy, boy and can't tell. But I could change that opinion if I saw different photos under different lighting conditions. Let's see what the others have to say.

I don't disagree with all of you. I think that a bird that originated in Australia is Australian, period. Not English or American. But I can tell you, that after two years of trying to get involved in budgies here, we are NEVER going to change the minds of the Americans and how they term their budgies. (Please note, if you don't know me, I'm American, and I live in Indiana.) I go to the bird fairs and look for budgies. You can find American types and English types. You can't find ANYONE who sells Pet types or Show types. I search on line to find breeders, and budgies for sale. You can find American types, and English types, and even half-English, which I guess must refer to the in between sizes and the hybrid bred ones. But you can't find ANY pet or show types. It is just the accepted terminology here. I've come to accept that. People look at you funny, as though you are trying to be high-brow when you try to use the pet and show terms. I've been fortunate to find a few local breeders around here. It took me a long time. There just aren't that many. But all of the breeders I've met use the terms English and American. You're lucky if you can even get people to use the term budgie instead of parakeet. (Except at the bird fairs, where if you say parakeet, they say "what kind of parakeet?" There you HAVE to say budgie.) So I've learned not to use the terms American or English here on the forum, because I'll catch flack. But I've learned that I better use those terms with the people I meet in real life, because that is the ACCEPTED TERMINOLOGY here. It's not fair to jump all over the case of newcomers to the forum who use the terminology that they have learned. It's like telling them to go back to their English Budgie breeder and tell him he's ignorant for calling himself that. (They are lucky they even found a budgie breeder at all.) I think we should just let the Americans use their familiar terms. After all, there are a LOT of words we use here in the U.S. that you Aussies have different words for. If we look at it that way, it doesn't seem so bad.