~Genetics~

Table of Contents:	Feather Types,	Line Breeding,	More Coming Soon

Buff -this is a wide feather, the bird appears fluffy, especially under the tail and on the head. Because of the wide feathers, spots are often large and round but mask can be short. Buff feathers often seem less intense for color as the feather softness lessens the reflection of light.

Double Buff - These birds can look positively sloppy. Lots of wide long feathers. They are very hard to condition for show and hard to breed. Color often appears very light or even faded due to the diffusion on light hitting the soft feathers. They are also prone to feather cysts. Breeders will pay a fortune for them if they are good. They appear very large due to all the feathers. If a feather is plucked out, it has a heavy down at the base of the feather. Many of these birds never grow tails (tailless wonders).

Yellow -has nothing to do with color. It is a canary term for hard feather birds. Somehow budgies picked it up. This is the feather texture usually seen in pet (American) birds. Color is shiny and brilliant. Feathers are narrow and short. Due to small feathers, spots are also small. Show breeders often overlook these birds in the exhibition type, then wish they had them when fertility and condition disappear from their stock.

Ideally all aviaries use all three feather types, carefully combining feather types to produce the ideal "intermediate" feather bird. The perfect budgie would be double buff on head, neck and shoulders, buff on back and wings and chest and spot area and yellow on rump, tail, flights and under tail. RIGHT!!!! OK, so I've never even seen one like that.

Anyway, I've read theories on what is dominant etc but I think that so many features are present that it is very hard to have any real genetic control of the feather type unless one was aiming strictly for yellow feather birds. If you go buff to buff for long you end up in big trouble. So you have to mix em up and then you lose genetic purity. It's a balancing act.

Canary breeders have studied feather types and texture for 400 years and they still go by the breed a buff to a yellow every time and you won't go far wrong, theory. They never breed buff to buff and they will occasionally breed yellow to yellow if there is buff background. Apparently the buff is recessive. Probably is in budgies too.

The preceding is the property of Rose Lee Begley, please do reproduce without the author's permission.

Just finished reading Helen's reply to you. Oddly enough my experience has been the opposite. I have a super cock. Dark Green and he is a registered Champion show bird with many best of varieties and many top bench placings. This bird would have been a best in show winner except that his spots are too small. This bird is linebred from a very carefully nurtured family. The result is that he is dominant for those small spots. Even when mated to big spotted opaline hens, the spots are never as big as the hens. Surprisingly, they are sometimes bigger than his and smaller than hers.

You often find discussions on this subject of what is most influence by the hen and what by the cock. Other than Flecking, which I do believe is clearly sex linked, I am just not sure about the other. I told you that they say that size is carried by the hen and style by the cock. I am not really sure that is true.

Show animals of every kind are produced by linebreeding and inbreeding. The purpose of this is to attempt to "fix" through genetic purity, certain characteristics. Therefore, in budgies, if one wanted to increase size and have it as a fixed quality in an aviary, the process would be to linebreed to a very large bird and always sell the smaller ones, never retaining them for breeding. After a time, all of the birds in the aviary would be from generations of large birds and could be expected to be large themselves. Now when one of these large birds was mated to a small bird, it would still probably produce large birds because of it's genetic purity. Even after generations, the large line could produce a small bird because the small genes could be lurking in the background. But, that small bird, when mated to a large bird from the same bloodline (and she would be carrying the large size in her background) could still produce very large young. This is how novices without a lot of money to buy top stock, should look for birds. The lesser quality birds from a successful linebreeding stud can produce great young and can be bought for far less money. But you have to know where to go from there. The large young from the small bird and the large bird, will still have that small gene so you will have to guard against using another small bird in that family for a long time. Otherwise, you begin to fix that small gene. It is very easy for a fault to get a hold on a line and it can take forever (literally) to eliminate it. Therefore, to breed show birds, in my opinion, one needs to line breed and be sure to study carefully for flaws that may be showing up in more than an occasional bird. Then do all breedings to compensate for that flaw or sell all the birds showing it. It is an endless balancing act. Some years you feel like you are progressing, some times you feel like you are going backwards. I have been doing a lot of thinking about this sort of thing lately as I am practically starting from scratch with my birds. However all of the birds that I have are linebred and 90% are from the same line. It does give me a lot to work with. For now my attention is on producing the wide, straight to the top of the head, neck that I want and I have noticed a tendency to some short masks here and there so I need to watch the mask length on what I put up.

If it was as easy as saying the hen carries one feature, spots, and the cock carries another, size, then all it would take to breed a show bird would be to combine the two and start collecting the trophies. But each bird is a conglomerate of all of his ancestors. So, I do not believe that sex is really an important factor in determining characteristics other than color and flecking. One may have a hen that consistently passes on huge spots but it is more likely, in my humble judgement, that she is dominant for those spots because that trait has been fixed in her genetically. She has no small spot gene to pass on.

When one is breeding from pet birds or birds without a known background, you really have no way of knowing what a bird will consistently produce until you take a careful look at the babies. In my opinion, the most important factor in breeding show stock is to use linebred or good inbred birds from a successful aviary. I would rather work with a poor quality bird from an outstanding linebred stud, than work with a great bird from a randomly bred family. In fact that is how I started out, as I could not afford the big money birds.