We have been fortunate in being given a series of upcoming articles by Don Burke of Burke's Backyard and rare budgerigar breeder. Don has offered us some articles he has written and I am about to post three.

 

 

There are two mutations that I have discovered that affect clearwing wing colour.

 

First Mutation:

One affects the general wing markings reducing them to a spangle-like appearance (this is not spangle at all, but produces similar crescent shaped markings. You can identify it from spangle by the lack of body colour suffusion on the head and lack of the yellow body colour feathers on the rump above the tail feathers.) This gene I have called type B wing markings. Type A, the wild type that almost all budgies carry produces an overall greyish wing colour like a greywing. That is:

Type A is an overall grey feather with a white or yellow crescent at the tip.

Type B is an overall white or yellow feather with a grey crescent marking in the middle of the visible part of the feather (see diagrams).

 

In my experience, only Type B is capable of producing the really clear wing. The Type B mutation seems to be missing in Europe, hence they can’t produce really clear clearwings. Type A is dominant to Type B.

 

Second Mutation:

The second mutation only affects the colour of clearwing tail and flight feathers. Most budgies carry a gene that produces dark flights and tails. A recessive mutation clears up the flight and tail feather colour in clearwings and dilutes – this opens the door to produce, in combination with Type B above, the perfectly clear wing.

 

These same two mutations (Type B and clear flights and tail) do not affect each other nor do they affect body colour. They are pivotal mutations to include in blackeyed selfs. Needless to say, in both blackeyed selfs and clearwings, the perfectly clear wing colour is finally produced by dogged selection for clarity.

 

What Should The Standard Say?

In Australia, as you correctly pointed out, we are required to have as light a coloured tail (& flights) as possible. The standard is poorly worded and rather confused, but the judges have always gone for very light colours in the long feathers of tail and flights.

 

Personally, I couldn’t care less about tail colour, although I feel that the lighter coloured flights finish the bird off well. For me, a perfectly clear wing contrasted to a really intensely coloured body is a sublime appearance. The colour of the tail and the cheek patch for that matter, don’t really concern me one way or the other.

 

I suppose that it is rather silly that judges worry about tail colour and cheek patch colour in clearwings (not to mention wing clarity), yet completely overlook massive colour problems in normals and most other varieties. In normals for instance, judges overlook huge amounts of body colour suffusion on the wings and they also ignore the fact that the wing markings are an untidy mess of grey and black. Years ago the markings were jet black with no grey. If judges were consistent, in penalising all varieties equally for colour failings, then I would have no problems. But somehow judges just drift away from the standard. This does huge damage to varieties such as clearwings, rendering them uncompetitive against normals, cinnamonwings, etc.

 

The cop-out line from judges is that clearwings (& blackeyes for that matter) are “colour varieties”. This is again quite silly. All budgerigar varieties are colour varieties. Judges need to balance colour against size, feather and type in all varieties. The balance at the moment is way out of whack.

 

Curiously, the major effort on the part of the judges at the moment is to produce blind budgies. In awarding highest marks to birds with buffalo horn directional feather, the modern showbird is being forced down the same blind alley that Old English Sheepdogs live in. This will inevitably lead to action by animal cruelty bodies &/or government bodies as is happening with purebred dogs in the UK at the moment. The world won’t tolerate flying birds that can’t see forward.

 

To make this point quite clear, we stand to lose control over our ability to run our budgerigar clubs independently. The way things are going, standards of perfection in the future will most likely have to be approved by a government animal cruelty committee. What an awful day would that be!

 

….And we just sit around and quibble over the tail colour of clearwings. The world has gone mad. If anyone agrees with this, I am quite happy to prepare an article on “Finessing the Exhibition Budgerigar”. I strongly believe that the future of our showbirds lies in refining the modern showbird to a better coloured, tidier bird that flies well. Gary Gazzard is leading the way down this track and I support him. Retain modern, big heads, mask and spots, but re-introduce vibrant colour, velvety and smooth feathers, good wing markings and athleticism.

 

 

 

7/10/10

 

 

http://www.bestofbreeds.net/wbo/article11.htm

Edited May 15, 201114 yr by **KAZ**

bump

I didn't really want to comment on this thread Kaz, because the judges might jump in and attack,

But Greg has always said to me that a normal is the hardest to breed because they can have so much wrong with them, just like Don has said, the black is mostly grey now on the wings, the wings are smudgie, I think as long as the bird has that buffalo directional feather over the eyes and of course the bird needs to be of good size with shoulder, chest width and back skull they are put up.

They are putting down the flecked birds now and soon they will need to focus on the variety of the bird. I think the directional feather is going to far that the poor birds can not see, last year we had to trim the feathers in front of one of my birds so he could see his mate, it made a huge difference, he started flirting straight away.

This is an excellent series of articles. Thank you KAZ for posting them.

 

I was particularly interested to read the last 3 paragraphs in this article because I have often wondered if some of the modern show type birds would be able to fly or if they would be able to see where they were going if they did fly. "Athleticism" is a good word