He is so cute! You are a great photographer!

Thx!

I kinda cheat though. It's a digital camera and I take loads of pics. Most of them get deleted.

If you really want to be sure about the sex you can get them DNA'd. It's not expensive - here's a lab in Europe that will do it, and there may be others. I stopped looking after I found this one: http://www.sexadodeaves.com/en/974/ The biggest problem is collecting the sample. You need a little bit of blood (usually collected by clipping a toenail a little too short) or some freshly plucked feathers from the chest. Molted feathers won't do. Plucking the feathers doesn't actually bother the bird but the human usually feels pretty squeamish about it lol.

If dad is a lutino then all his daughters will be lutino too. This makes it very easy to sex the babies - if it's not a lutino, it's a boy. A lutino mother is required to get a lutino son. Mutation genetics is a very complicated subject, and the inheritance rules for sex-linked mutations make everybody's head spin in the beginning. If you'd like to dive into it, I've got an article about it here: http://www.littlefeatheredbuddies.com/i ... inked.html

Here are a couple of websites with nice mutation guides for budgies. You can look at them to try and get a better idea of what's in your flock:

http://www.cutelittlebirdiesaviary.com/ ... guide.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20140419054 ... guide.html

Well, here he is:

I'll make sure to read the article you put up, but I'm not saying when I'll do it... Tending to birds and reading about them is something different than study genetics
Maybe that's a job for winter, when the cleaning of all cages and nestboxes has been taken care of... I'll be sure to bookmark those websites on mutations and genetics!
thank you Tielfan!

That's dad? Woah. Hmm... okay then I may be wrong on the lutino chick.

Yeah, this is the dad... I understand why they sold him as a 'she' now that I see your reaction

And he must be a male since I never see him go in the nestbox. He does stand guard on top of it though. And both mom and dad show eachother much affection

But as Tielfan said, (not that it makes any sense to me yet, I still have to read up on genetics) if this is the dad, all non lutino's are male.

He sure looks like a lutino to me. I don't know what color mom is, but she's obviously NOT a lutino because all the babies would be lutino if she was. Hens can't be split to sex-linked mutations (that's one of those complicated genetic rules) so we know she doesn't have the lutino gene at all. All your girl chicks will be lutino, and all of your boy chicks will be something else. Sexing made easy lol. All your boy chicks will be split to lutino since they definitely got the gene from dad, so they can have lutino babies when they reach breeding age.

Your girl chicks could have other mutations in addition to lutino, but most of the time you won't be able to see it since the lutino mutation masks everything else. For example your lutino girl might actually be lutino pied. You can't see it on her, but you might see it on her babies when she reaches breeding age.

But there's one exciting exception: you can get albino girls from this pair. "Albino" is kind of a misnomer since it actually takes two mutations to produce this coloring in parrots: blue (which removes the yellow coloring, and is called whiteface in cockatiels) and lutino (which removes all the other colors). You have a blue chick, so both parents obviously have the gene for the blue mutation and the girls can inherit it as easily as the boys can. All the girls will be lutino, but when you get a girl that also has the blue mutation she will be all white instead of all yellow. Technically they'd be a blue lutino, but we use the word albino instead because the bird doesn't look blue. In cockatiels an all-white bird is usually called a whiteface lutino.

We know that your daddy bird is only split to blue. If he was visual for the blue mutation he would be white instead of yellow.

Beautiful birds Id say 2 male 1 hen...
I'm useless on genetics... for any bird....
I just look and know if I like a bird or not...
I don't breed birds mine are pets....

Mom actually looks a lot like the green pied male chick.



So you're saying all future chicks from this pair are easy to sex... lutino's (including albino) will be female and anything else wil be male! Good to know! And that is sexing made easy! GO GENETICS



To get lutino chicks out of them, would it matter what colour the hen is? (Just to inform anybody who is interested in buying them and asks about this kind of stuff)


Supose I do pair her up with the olive green (Mr. Green, I've put up a picture elsewhere) when she 'becomes of age' - what colours or mutations should I be expecting?


Why that is exciting... I can go for an all white budgy! I've seen pictures of them before, but never one in real life... Will the eyes be red then? Or have I heard wrong? And why do the eyes become red anyway?

-I'm full of questions!! I'm like interrogating you answer me darnit! LOL I'm sorry if I'm asking to many questions. I'm excited is all...-

@Jan: thank you for liking my birds and for making a guess at gender I still have a fulltime job with a very messy schedule. Nights, days, and no method to them in mostly 12 hour shifts (and work is an hour driving). So I'm home a lot, but away for longer periods too. I don't want my wife to pay for my choice in keeping a bird indoors as a pet. I mean, a pet bird does like some regularity in it's life.
So I keep mine in an aviary, devided into sections, and spend most of my free time in there. They don't need me so much for company since they have eachother but after a year I'm suprised how tolerant they have become of me.
The 3 little ones in earlier pictures had to be taken out 3 times to clean up. Mom didn't do much housekeeping after they made a mess in the nestbox and most of the droppings stuck to the feathers and feet. So they are even more tolerant towards me, even though I was under the impression they didn't like the bath I gave 'em that much

@TielFan: I've been reading up on your article - yes I know, I said maybe in wintertime... But it's raining outside!! - and am going to attempt to predict this myself here... I might get it wrong, but one does not learn to walk without falling ...

Here goes:

- - - - - -

First we've got Little Lemon who I believe to be a female who has the visual mutation (lutino).

Then we've got the male (Mr. Green) who is not visual, so is either split or has no mutations at all. (I could already be wrong here since somebody pointed him out as olive - meaning he would have two 'dark green' factors in his genes)

Now that the base is put down I'll start building up, so if I was wrong above, feel free to stop reading, since all that follows will be

- - - - - -
I'm going to asume (seeing he does look rather dark green) that Mr. Green is X1DarkGreen X2DarkGreen (meaning - as far as I've read about genetic coding - he has no mutations.)
Hence the males will be split lutino's, and thus a lighter shade of green.
The females will all be olive green.

Do I need to go Or am I catching on?
- - - - - -

Don't spoil it for me if I got it wrong, just push me in the right direction !!