Ron Payne's Budgerigars - Any Skeletons in the Cupboard?
I guess the hardest problem most budgerigar fanciers will face is the time-honoured one
"Why is it so hard to get what you hope for from a pairing?". This has been possibly the most vexing and confusing problem since the budgie fancy kicked off. We all visually look at our birds and make the various pairings and hope that our "eye" is correct and our judgement sound but far too often we get what we do not expect from the offspring.
Now, I am not writing about hidden colours etc. coming out in the siblings but the overall quality of the babies which may not come up to expectations or may even exceed what was expected. I have had several cases of unexpected chicks turn up, most notably was a lutino chick from a pair of normals. I attempted to trace the pedigree of the "offending" chick, after a few letters and phone calls we discovered that a certain cock, eleven generations back was in fact split for red-eye, although no red-eyed chicks were reported to have appeared in that time!
There are times when certain pairings, indeed bloodlines, will produce, on a regular basis, all very good cocks and mediocre hens or vice-versa. Whilst this can be frustrating, you should count your blessings (and the good birds!) and disregard anything that does not come up to your perceived quality. I often find that sex-linkage plays an important factor in this, opaline hens from a certain pairing may be the quality chicks (or this could be cinnamon etc.) and you would do well to make a note of this when working out your pairings for subsequent breeding seasons.
As has often been written in the past, it is always wise to use the best possible bloodlines available. I have proved this several times in my 30-odd years in the fancy. I have developed several families in the past which for various reasons have not gone on and "done the business"! As a beginner I was fortunate to purchase an opaline cock from a Mr.Coley, his birds were advertised as being Norman Horn blood. This cock produced several decent opaline hens, but the cocks were mediocre. I never really got the family going as I didn't realise how best to use the hens. My biggest "crime" with this family was not to obtain a normal cock or two from the same fancier - indeed I was offered a normal that was a brother to the original opaline, who knows where the family would have gone on to.
My second family, with which I had much more success, was based on bloodlines originally developed from the Faulkner and Read stud. A friend had purchased from this family and bred eight useful cocks. I had the bottom three of the eight (all blue cocks and brothers) and with a little more knowledge that I now possessed was able, over a period of time, to produce cc winners and two registered champion birds. What happened to this family was perhaps the biggest crime of all, it ran out of fertility! Neither of the champion birds (a grey-green and a grey) fertilized an egg and the quality of the family started to go down. In desperation I introduced a number of outcrosses, fertility shot up, quality disappeared!
When birds from the late Jim Moffatt's stud became available I purchased three pairs and have subsequently worked with the offspring of these with a reasonable amount of success. Although I have only kept the best each year my stud now consists of about 80% from this family. Indeed, of my 25 breeding cages, 20 had pairs going back to the original pairs purchased.
I feel that it is always best to have a well-bred bird as an outcross rather than a visually excellent bird that has been produced from mediocre stock. I believe you will always have a chance of breeding a stormer from a good stock bird rather than an odd good bird thrown up from mediocre stock.
This naturally leads on to the question of bloodlines and this, of course, is the reason we do not always produce youngsters from a certain pair that we anticipate should have produced better. As can be seen from this article I do use related pairings, but not too heavily inbred. At this point I believe you must be fully conversant with the abilities of the various bloodlines over a long period, and you can use a related pairing to great advantage. It is indeed always surprising how consistently certain birds will be produced from putting together an identical pairing based on certain bloodlines.
Inbreeding is not something I would recommend to the novice, and even less to the beginner unless that person has a sound knowledge of genetics and is a born stockman. If you have an excellent foundation stock bird then you may be tempted to inbreed but I believe that the chances of success are much less than the chances of failure. It would not take many generations to lose the visual appearance of that good bird. You will always remember the good points but not always the bad points, and it is the throwing up of the bad points from time to time which produce those poor youngsters from visually superior parents.
Far better, although sometimes hard, is to progress slowly each year with steady improvement in the overall stock than produce the one excellent bird. This will give you a good foundation for improvement season upon season, whereas the excellent bird produced might well not produce the goods for you in subsequent seasons. Remember, a budgerigar is the product of its parents and subsequent breeding seasons will show the parentage of the birds concerned. Logically, if you took this to the bitter end, you will see that your pride and joy do have in their ancestry, many generations ago, the wild Aussie budgie on both sides of its pedigree. It will be possible to eliminate this fact only by careful and selective breeding and a good and truthful appraisal of the birds. You will require excellent records that will assist you in all matters in this wonderful hobby of ours. If you don't, you will surely see those skeletons marching out of the cupboard door!