21feet

When you purchase/adopt from the humane society here you sign a contract agreeing not to breed the birds. I'm not a breeder, just a fancier, and all my birds are rescues of unknown origins. I have avoided accidental breedings for the last 12 years simply by not having nesting places in their environments, and I know what to do should an egg ever be laid. Thanks for your concern though! It's very valid. The humane society has a habit of pairing the birds male/female for adoption, possibly because they believe it will be more likely they will get along? They may not know that same sex pairs can do very well in the budgie world and would perhaps avoid accidental breeding of adopted birds more often. Anyway, should I get my larger enclosure and this pair, they'd be kept baby-free like all my others

okay now I'm looking at larger flight cages to make room lol. I really do like the pair. They're not like anything I've ever had before or seen commonly around here. We'll see, I have to also have the housemates' go on a bigger cage.

okay, I have a new picture. I was only able to use my cell phone camera so it isn't great, but the colours are fairly true. Having seen him in person I believe he is an olive green and not a grey green. Here is what I was able to get. His flights are pale yellow, as is his tail. No black or any other colour on his tail. As for getting him. I am very tempted however he is only for adoption with the female who is also very pretty, but I do not really have room for two more, only one. I may have to pass on him, as interesting as he is. If he were a single male I would have taken him with me on the spot.

If I have the time this sunday I will make a trip down to the shelter to see what I can see. But unless I adopt him I will only have access to him from behind glass as the budgies are in a glass windowed room inside separate cages that may be near the front where I can see him, or at the back. So more photos may be difficult. I will bring my camera and take them if the shelter allows. If I adopt him, there will for sure be more pictures. I'm enjoying the guesses! Thanks for yours Paulie, very in depth explanation.

It was very easy to make. And it wasn't just for socialization. When I lived in that house I had an entire room off the living room with vinyl flooring. They had the entire room to themselves so the only one who was caged on a regular basis was Roxy. Everyone else was loose all day and at night they would cuddle up inside a tiny 16x16 cage and I'd shut the door and they'd roost there all night long, and then I'd open the door in the morning and they'd all have run of the room again. What you see in that photo is just a tiny section of their jungle gyms. It's made with plywood base covered in left over vinyl flooring which is very easy to clean. Then I screwed a dowel in, drilled holes in the dowel, and screwed the perches in. If a perch got worn or dirty, I unscrewed it and replaced it with a new one. I put hooks on the ends of the perches to hang toys from, and the dishes for food and water had their hangers screwed into the dowel as well. That's what that black ring near the back is, the food dish sat in there. I had to leave the gyms behind in the dumpster when I moved, but will make them again in the future when I have another house with a dedicated bird room.

Hi KiwiBudige, I've been reading quite a few of your posts about your new little bird Cado over the last few days. Sounds like you want the very best for him. It's okay to want to make sure he's 100% happy 100% of the time, but take a deep breath and relax a little! Budgies are pretty happy easy to please little birds and I can tell yours will have a great life with you, just don't worry about the little stuff so much. Now, as for your toy in particular, I have mixed feelings about it. The cotton is good for preening and picking and shredding as long as it is not swallowed. Most birds don't have a problem with swallowing foreign or inedible objects (a condition we sometimes call pica in people or other mammals) but on the odd occassion a bird may swallow the threads off a cotton toy and that can result in medical complications. Personally, I've never had that happen, and I like to let my birds have rope perches to vary the texture under their feet and to give them something to pick at and explore. A slightly bigger risk of the particular toy you have posted is that Cado's toe nails may get caught in the fluffy fibers and that could result in a broken toe or leg. You can reduce this risk by making sure you keep his little toenails nicely clipped. However, this risk, more so than the possibility of him swallowing bits is what would make me personally not purchase this toy for my own budgies. I prefer this type, and when it gets frayed I either snip the frayed bits off or I replace the toy. http://thumbs1.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/mMQWFVtPNlPb-UTY1Iq__pQ.jpg That way I compromise, my birds get their favourite sleeping spot in the rope ring, and I worry less about caught up toes. As for the toy making him less active or removing it making him sad. The answer is no to both questions. The toy wasn't making him less active, he was just choosing to interact with that toy over the others, and it will not depress him to take it away, Many Budgie owners rotate toys weekly to give their budgies lots of variety so they never get bored.

Thank you for that explanation Nadene. I had considered yellowface, but wasn't sure so it is good to learn that. So he may in fact be all of the above then.

Oh now I see what you mean Robyn. Yes, I'm sorry, that is a shadow. I was shooting through the bars so it's actually a very out of focus bar in the shot. I can see why that would make it look like she's pied I will take some better photos of her some day. Thanks everyone for the welcomes. It's nice to talk budgies. As you may be able to tell by my long list of rescues, they are a very under appreciated pet where I live.

okay, did some reading on the suggestions and here is what I’ve come up with. If you have another idea I’m happy to entertain it, but please tell me what you’re seeing that makes you think he’s what you’re saying he is. Colour: He is either grey-green or olive green. The photo does not clearly show the colour of the cheek patches. If they are violet when I go see him, we’ll have our answer that he is olive, if they are grey or blue then we can say he’s grey-green. Either way safe to say he has two dark factors I think? Now for the mutation: Spangle: No. Eliminated based on cheek patches Opaline: Possible. His body colour is very strong in his wings. (also what appear to be large areas of yellow on the primary flight feathers?) (or maybe not! see edit below) But my question there is, what about the very strong dilution of the black markings? Would opaline allow for such a dark body colour and such a strongly diluted wing marking? Or there another diluting mutation mixed in. Can you have more than one diluting mutation in a single bird? This is where I’m getting lost. I can’t figure out why he seems to have no black or grey colouring where his striping or throat spots should be? ETA: After further digging on here I'm starting to lean more towards the greywing? Because if he were opaline he would not have the yellow on his wings according to this pinned post in this section "they differ in wing markings. Where Normals have black and yellow markings on their wings in the Greens and black and white in the Blues, the Opalines have black, but instead of either yellow or white, they have a diluted body colour" He clearly has yellow on his wings Martine might be right. Greywing greygreen olive? Or greywing olive?

I haven't adopted him yet or seen him in person. I'm looking for a single male and he appears to be a pair. I will likely go to the animal shelter to have a peek at him on the weekend though as I'm curious. I was thinking Grey-Green, but that was as far as I got. What is confusing me is that he seems to not have any black markings on him anyway, like that green colour has replaced the black throughout his whole body? Will read up on your suggestions.

Nope, she's a lutino. I was very careful in my 'diagnosis' haha. That`s not a great photo but she has no other colour on her and her eyes are unmistakably red. She also wasn`t in breeding condition when I got her so I had to observe her behaviour to guess at her sex because there isn`t anything by way of pigment in her cere (or her feet which is neat when next to the other birds) Here is one of my many references. I thought she was ino but spent several days researching and making sure. http://cutelittlebirdiesaviary.weebly.com/lutino-budgies.html

Now that I've properly introduced myself here is the question I joined up to ask. What colour is this boy? I stumbled on him while searching for a new rescue to adopt, and perhaps they're common elsewhere but I have never seen a budgie like him before. His cage mate is interesting too. Thanks for your input.

Hi everyone, I've been reading this forum on and off for a little while now. Usually I end up here when I type a question into the search engine and the answer is somewhere on these pages. Today I have a question that I can't search for, or rather I tried, but still couldn't find anything that helped, so I have made an account so I can ask. But before I do, I thought it would be polite to introduce myself first. I have been keeping budgies for 11 years now. My first was a little green male named Bosco that I bought young from a petstore. He was very people oriented and within two months he was already talking with a vocabulary of about half a dozen words. Sadly he died suddenly before I'd had him a full six months so I never got to see how far he could take that vocabulary. I purchased a second budgies from the same store, this time a female named Murphy and she was the exact opposite. She was not fond of people, and was very lonely. She sat in the corner of her cage and didn't move or make a sound for nearly six weeks despite my efforts to tame and entice her to play with her toys. She just curled up in a miserably ball next to the nearest reflective surface and never made a peep. I decided it was sad to see such a social animal by herself and so clearly miserable, and my attempts to have her bond to people were not working, so I made the decision to get her some more birds instead. Whatever I could to make her happy. So I adopted Jasper and Missy, a male and female pair that had been dumped at the pet store when their previous owners didn't want them. They were dropped on the counter and just left. Jasper and Missy became the first of many rescues. Murphy perked up immediately on their introduction and became a feisty active little girl. I knew at that point I was stuck. I would never again own a singleton budgie, and I would probably be rescuing them for the rest of my life. After Jasper and Missy came Bucky (going on 14 this year) and Comet. They were given up because their owner's child developed severe allergies. I still keep in touch with them. Then came Roxy and Ben, neglected children's pets housed in a cage that was only 7"x11" big. Ben was plucked bald by Roxy and Roxy was very aggressive with all the other birds, so she got to live with them, but had to be separated physically in her own cage. Peter was a stray found eating at someone's bird feeder. Nick was left on someone's doorstep right before Christmas (middle of winter here) so I took him in out of the snow. Lily and Ada were unwanted kindergarten classroom pets who had learned to bite. Pele was too loud for the new baby in his house, and my most recent addition, Melody, was another stray caught at someone's bird feeder just before last year's frost hit, she waited in an animal shelter for several months before I picked her up on Boxing Day last year. I have had as many as 8 at once, space permitting, and am currently down to 3. Bucky (Male, 13 years), Pele (male, 6 years), and Melody (female, unknown) I am looking at adding another male, as Lily died this past summer at age 9. But I am waiting to find a single male because I don't like splitting up bonded pairs when I rescues. It's either everyone or no one for me. Since I rescue all my budgies, I don't breed, but I have always been interested in the genetics of it as well as the show budgies aspect even though show budgies are pretty unheard of here. Anyway, that's my budgie life story in a nut shell. Thank you for allowing me to join your forum. From left to right: Ada. Roxy (allowed out for supervised socialization, she could be very nasty), Bucky, Ben, Lilly. The current group: Bucky (green), Pele (blue), Melody (lutino)