It's not more difficult to breed with Recessives than any other variety.
The most important thing if you are going to breed is that you pair your Recessivs to splits or normals..
My opinion is that if you pair two Recessives together you will lose size very fast.
That's why I try to put at least two pairs every year where one of the birds is a pure normal.
I favour normals, light greens or skyblues to be put with my Recessives. In some cases I use Opalines but never cinnamons.
When I put in outcrosses to my line, I always try to get birds that are either light greens or skyblues, if not possible I
will use greys or grey greens, never cobolts ,dark green, mauves or olives.
The reason for this is that almost every
Recessive you see is of a dark factor. In my way of thinking I cant understand why you have to do things even more difficult.
What I mean is that it's very hard to get quality in the Recessives if you compare to the normals so why bring in the dark
factors that is also much harder to get in real quality. The thing why so many Recessive breeders are using the dark factor
birds is because you will get the best showbirds in that way.
The outcrosses have to be really good birds from a very good
line of birds. The best is if you are able to breed your own outcrosses so that you don't have to buy every year.
The outcrosses also have to be semi-related to your birds to really work. It's also important that you can be able to buy
in birds over a couple of years from the same line. When I breed I use three different pairings, there is Recessive X Split,
Split X Split, and Recessive X Normal.
As I said before, I never pair two Recessives together. One thing to think about is that never sell your Recessives too early
because they are slow in developing. The best is to wait at least until the bird has moulted twice.
Difficulties
There is not that many problems with Recessivs. One that I can think of is if you are pairing two splits together.
The outcome will be 25% birds that is either Recessives or splits but they will loke like splits. The only thing that can
help you sort out this problem is that the splits have a white or yellow spot on the neck. Sometimes the splits don't have
this spot, it could be that the bird is an opalin or badly marked. When you pair splits you must be very observant when
the youngsters are from 2 until 4 weeks old because they always posses the spot when they are very young but can lose it
when they become older. I have had some problems with feather dusters over the years. I have now learned how to pair my
paird to avoid them, but I still gets them from time to time.
History
The first Recessive pieds were breed in Denmark and developed by C. af Enehjelm at the Helsinki Zoo.
The first mutation came from a colony breeding system and itīs therefor impossible to be sure of the parents.
These birds called Finnish pieds found there way back to Denmark and there they were established.
The name were soon changed to Danish pieds, a name that still works. Another name for them are Harlequins,
a name that still are in use in some countries. The first Danish pieds in England were seen in 1948.
The Recessives were spread all over the world after the second world war. During the years the Recessives
has developed very slow. It's not until the last ten years that the Recessives has doing some really
progres as a showbird.
Other pied varietys are the Australian Dominant pied and the Clearflighted pied or Dutch pied as its also is called.
Colour & Markings
The body colour of the Recessives are yellow or white with irregular patches of green or blue. The wings are patched with black. The areas of the different colours is very variable on the Recessives.
The eyes are black with no iris ring. The cere is pinkish, as the lutino and albino. You almost never see a full set of spots on the Recessives.
Its impossible to breed pieds with exactly the same markings.
My Stud
My stud is build on three sisters, all splits which were breed with three Recessive cocks.
The cocks were all related in some ways. I have then kept my family very close and just brought in one bird.
I have now realised that I have to bring in more outcrosses to develop my stud even further. I will therefore get some
related hens and cocks from a succesfull breeder to mix with my stud. Its a big step for me to mix up my stud because
of the quality that I posses, but I have realised that it is the only way, my birds are now to much related.
I dont have a big line of Recessives. There is some 50 Recessives and splits at the time.
My birdroom also posses a small line of Lutinos that I hope will develop into something very good. Another thing that
I have is a couple of German Fallows. These birds are very rare and my intension is to bring up the quality as much
as possible, but it is very hard.
As a total my birdhouse posses somewhere around 100 budgies.