Now for Daniel and Maude's clutch, which will all be greywings of one kind or another.
That's it for today. Hopefully I will have some more photos soon, because these are a few days old, and already the chicks have changed.
Now for Daniel and Maude's clutch, which will all be greywings of one kind or another. That's it for today. Hopefully I will have some more photos soon, because these are a few days old, and already the chicks have changed.
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Collin and Astrid's last egg has hatched. None of the chicks have red eyes, so it is a safe guess that Collin is not split to ino. Statistically, 8 chicks isn't enough to prove that. If it turns out that there are not very many females in this group, then there could still be the chance that he is split to ino and it just didn't show up in this round of breeding. Whether I let them do a second round or not will depend on how many of these chicks are females. Seaweed and Tiffany have one egg left to hatch. They have only gotten one red eyed chick so far out of seven. Percentagewise, with Seaweed being split to ino, we could expect two out of eight chicks to be inos. So this clutch still has the potential to be a text book case. Now for some individual photos, since some of the chicks are getting old enough to notice details. CA2 has dark pigment, which indicates black wing markings. The down is white, which indicates that it will be an opaline. Opaline is a sex-linked gene and since both of these parents carry it, the chick could be either male or female. In clutches where only the father carries it, then only the daughters could be opaline. This is Daniel and Maude's oldest chick. It will be a green bird, because it has yellow pin feathers. Even though its pigment LOOKS dark, it is actually lighter than the two chicks above. Both Daniel and Maude are greywings, so all of their chicks will be some variety of greywing. The goal of this breeding is to produce clearwings, which have very pale wing markings. This chick is already obviously not a clearwing. I mentioned above that white down indicates opaline. That is true for black winged budgies. But in mutations where pigment is reduced, such as greywing, cinnamon and inos, even the non-opaline chicks will have white down. So with Daniel and Maude's chicks, I expect all of them to have white down, but only the girls will be opalines, and the males will not be. (Since Daniel is opaline and Maude is not.)
Because we can't use white down as an indicator, we have to wait until we see visual opaline markings on the chicks. Then we will know which are boys and which are girls, even if their ceres look ambiguous. (Seaweed and Tiffany, by the way, are both opaline, so every one of their chicks will also be opaline.) Almost all of the eggs have hatched by now. There are only one or two left in each nest. The chicks are getting bigger, and the pile of babies in each box is quite large. We are putting leg rings on chicks left and right now. Down feathers are coming in, and some of the older ones are also getting pin feathers. We can see pigment showing up on their skin, as well, and soon we will be able to make some guess as to what colors and mutations the chicks will be.
Guessing the genders is always tricky. I usually write down what I think they look like early on, and those almost always prove to be wrong later. Fortunately, there are very few cases where I can't tell by the time the chicks are ready to go to homes. With Seaweed and Tiffany's chicks, I will have to modify the code, because last time I bred Seaweed, I used Thumper as his mate. So that clutch was already called the ST clutch, and this one will have to be called the STi clutch.
Two new chicks hatched yesterday. Collin and Astrid got another black eyed chick, and Daniel and Maude finally got their third chick. Seaweed and Thumper have gotten their fourth chick, and it is a red eyed ino daughter. Chances are that she will be a creamino, which is a yellow-face version of albino. But both parents are split to blue, so there is the possibility that this hen will be an albino, without any yellow on her at all. Maude has missed two chick hatchings in a row. I candled her eggs, and only one of them looks non-viable, so I am hoping that the chick I expected yesterday will have hatched overnight. Otherwise it looks like there will be a fairly large age gap between the oldest two chicks and any others that hatch in that clutch.
Collin and Astrid's fourth chick hatched, and we finally got one with plum colored eyes. That means it will be cinnamon. We should be expecting about half of these chicks to be cinnamons, and they can be either gender, since Astrid is cinnamon and Collin is split to it. You can also see that a Bourke's parakeet hatches with a fuzzy coating of white down. The one on the right has so much on its head, that it looks like a Mohawk!
Last night when I checked boxes, I found this Bourke's parakeet chick had hatched: It belongs to Inga. She is the hen who has had three previous clutches of chicks. But she never fed any of them, and in spite of my efforts to hand feed them or foster them to another mother who was feeding her chicks, all 9 of the previous chicks died.
I was encouraged by some other Bourke's breeders to give her one more chance, because it is not uncommon for a young Bourke's hen to need several tries before she learns how to raise chicks properly. So I am desperately hoping that Inga will keep this chick alive. It was hard to tell last night whether the chick had been fed or not. The photo above shows that the crop is swollen up a little bit, but it looked like it could have had air or just water in it. When I checked the box this morning, in addition to seeing a tiny bit of food in its crop, I also found a second chick in the nest! The second one has a tiny bit of food in its crop as well. (I did not take pictures this morning.) With the previous clutches, Inga had never fed any of the chicks at all. And they were smaller and weaker looking than these two current chicks. The size of these two chicks is giving me a lot of hope. But I am ready to step in again with hand rearing formula, and foster hens, if that becomes necessary. The best possible scenario though, would be for Inga to learn how to do it all properly on her own. Below is a photo of the only budgie chick to hatch yesterday. Now Tiffany has three chicks. The other mothers should both get new chicks some time today. I was right to expect several more hatchlings yesterday. In the first two boxes, the chicks must have hatched at close intervals. I'm not able to tell which chick is the older one. But in the third box, which is Maude's, I can see that her older chick has had time to grow bigger than the younger one. It doesn't really matter if I get the oldest two chicks mixed up. Whichever one gets big enough to wear a leg ring first will be assumed to be the oldest. And even if I put them backwards in my records, the hatch date would only be off by one day. The only thing to keep track of at this stage would be eye color. So far all of the chicks have normal black eyes. That doesn't indicate anything about their genetics. But plum colored or red eyes would, so those I will want to keep track of. Red eyes stay red for life, but plum colored eyes turn to black around 10 days old. Fortunately, I can usually get the numbered leg ring onto a chick while the eyes are still plum, so I then have a permanent record of what color eyes each chick was born with. The reason that could be important is because hatching with plum eyes indicates either cinnamon, double factor spangle, or recessive pied. But on some chicks the cinnamon can be hard to distinguish. (Greywing will mask it.) So knowing the chick was born with plum eyes lets me know that it carries one or more of those mutations, regardless of what it ends up looking like. I am expecting cinnamon in Collin and Astrid's clutch and recessive pied in Seaweed and Tiffany's clutch. Daniel and Maude might have the potential to produce recessive pied as well, if Maude inherited it from her mother, Finnie. (And just to confuse matters further, of the many recessive pied chicks I have produced, not a single one of them hatched with plum colored eyes, so I am beginning to believe that plum eyes and recessive pied are not necessarily connected.) I am also hoping for red eyes from two of the pairs, which indicates the "ino" mutation. (Ino means lutino, albino or creamino.) I know that Seaweed is split to ino, since he produced creamino daughters last time I bred him. And Collin is Seaweed's son, so there is a 50% chance that Collin inherited the ino gene from him. If Collin did inherit it, then he can produce red-eyed daughters as well. With this many eggs, I'm sure we will get some red and plum eyed chicks sooner or later. Tiffany was the last to begin laying eggs, so her first chick will come a little later. It's common for the mother to wait until she has two or three eggs before she starts incubating. So what will often happen in that case is that two or three chicks will hatch in the same nest within a day of each other, and then the rest follow the every other day pattern that the eggs were laid in.
Based on my records of when these hens began laying, I think that I will find several more chicks later today when I check them. All three budgie hens have continued laying eggs. Maude stopped laying at seven, but Astrid and Tiffany each have eight. I expected Astrid's ninth egg today, but it wasn't there, so she might be done laying. In any case, the chicks are due to start hatching soon, and I have not yet had a hen lay an additional egg once she has a chick. (I didn't bother Maude to get a photo of her box.)
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Budgiedin BudgerigarsThis year we are going to try something new. Our Hatching and Growing page is going to be in the format of a blog. Archives
August 2014
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