Tielfan, that's a little far from my location. I don't think I would have time to go down there especially since I'm going to be starting classes at the University of Arizona, soon. Luckily, I'll be a part time student, so I still have time for my animals.

CrazyConure, I'm glad to hear I chose from the right person. She seemed to have raised them all well, from the looks of it. The cockatiels weren't too crowded, and they were all calm.

Sorry, Diane, you must have posted while I was writing my last reply. Your birds are very cute.

Jojo's mom, yes things are going well with Lucy. She's so shy but she's such a sweetie. Being female, she's not much of a vocalizer, but I do hear soft little chirps from her every once in a while. I guess she has some good and bad days though, since she didn't want to eat from my palm today, when she did yesterday. I'll take as long as it takes to trust me though. I don't want to rush her, so I'm just taking it as slow as she feels comfortable taking it.

Also thanks to Bluekeet and Bjornlefevre for the welcomes. I hope to see you guys more often.

I just found out how to give "happy chirps". lol that's a cute little feature! Nice touch

It usually takes a couple of months for a cockatiel to really start feeling comfortable in a new home, but it sounds like things are going well with Lucy. She's vocalizing and eating from your hand at least part of the time and that's a good start.

There might be some kind of group at the university that you could play in. I'm not a student so I don't know what all they have going on.

The woman next to me at the bird mart had handfed babies too and they seemed nice and tame from what I could see. She had a LOT more of them than I did, and some were rare mutations. I thought her prices were quite reasonable too. So my first thought at the start of the day was "I'm screwed" lol, but in the end we both sold about half the birds we brought.

I remember that lady. She had a lot of whitefaced, and I think I saw pearls there too. Was she the one where some of them were missing tails? I can't remember.

There are a couple of orchestras. I'm going to try and audition for one of them. The exerpts I have to play are annoyingly difficult though. Other than that, I might go out and street perform myself. I need to get used to playing in front of people by myself, and usually people walking by and listening doesn't feel as judgmental as playing for auditions.

Lucy is adjusting better than any cockatiel I've ever seen before. She started eating merely hours after we put her in her new cage. She still seems to prefer her spot in the top corner with her tree-branch looking perch, but I've gotten her to eat from my hand on a lower perch before. The missing feathers on her head are beginning to grow back as well, and the bald spot is beginning to disappear. She's started to play with one of the toys in there, and she's beginning to become a little more curious. She's still not wanting me to pet her at all, though I'd expect the asking for head scratches to come much later.

Also, I was wondering if you have any baby pictures of her? I'd be interested to see the process of how she grew, if you have any pictures of her when she was younger. I'd also like to see a few pictures of her parents, Shodu and Buster, if you don't mind.

I hope she doesn't take after Shodu too much, chances are you'll get bitten in the neck !! lol

I haven't put up the pictures of this year's chicks yet (or last year's either - I'm kinda lazy). I'll try to get to that soon. In the meantime this link has pictures from Buster and Shodu's first breeding year. It's got pictures of the parents, and there were three cinnamon chicks in the second clutch (two normal and one whiteface). http://home.comcast.net/~ch_zonie/2008babies.html

Your neck is probably safe lol. I kept four of Shodu's babies (two male and two female) and none of them have their mother's flesh-eating tendencies. I guess they don't share her desire to be a cosmetic surgeon.

I didn't realize Lucy was from Carolyn too! Coyote is indeed from another of her breeding pairs and I feel so fortunate to have him. He's my first cockatiel and it's been a wonderful experience. I'm looking forward to reading more about Lucy and seeing more pics.

Oh that's so cool! Where did you meet Carolyn to get Coyote? Was it one of the bird shows like the one I went to?

Carolyn, it sure seems that those two have a fine mix of genes. Gray, lutino, cinnamon whitefaced... I like that albino one in the second clutch (Albino, or white-faced lutino? Looks albino to me because of the red eyes). Were all the birds you were selling this year from Shodu and Buster?

Oh gosh, a neck eater? From what I've heard so far, Shodu sounds like quite a character. A foot user and a neck eater. Does Buster dad have any unique behaviors I might have to look for in Lucy?

Shodu is the crazy one and Buster doesn't do anything that's too dramatically weird. The mutations that you saw in the first two clutches are their entire repertoire - grey, cinnamon, lutino, and/or whiteface. Almost all their girls are cinnamon or lutino but it's possible to once in a while get a girl who's cinnamon lutino or grey. I did get a cinnamon lutino once, and it's possible that I've had a grey girl without knowing it. All the boys are grey, and it's 98.5% certain that a grey chick is a boy.

Whiteface lutino and albino are different names for the same thing. With birds it takes two mutations to get an all-white individual with red eyes, called blue and lutino in parrots that are normally green, but called whiteface and lutino in cockatiels. Whiteface is actually the same as the blue mutation - it's the same gene and has the same effect, removing all the yellow and red coloring. But since cockatiels aren't green to start out with, you don't get a blue bird when you subtract the yellow.

The WFL chick in that clutch is Snowy - I kept her, and she helped to raise Lucy. I think I've had three other WFL girls since then, and Cloudy would like for me to have another one so she can be paired up with Coyote lol.

The pied chicks that I had at the bird mart are the children of Pip and Ladybug, and Coyote is their son. I had a second round of chicks this year from both those pairs plus a new pair, Teela and Azazel. They gave me two grey boys split pied and a girl who was whiteface cinnamon pearl. She's my first pearl chick ever which was pretty exciting. Those chicks just fledged recently and will be weaned around the end of August.

Oh wow. I always thought albino cockatiels were the same result of what makes mammals albino: the absence of pigments in skin hair/feathers(or so I thought), and eyes. There seems to be even more complexity to color mutation than I thought.

Have all the white-faced lutinos you've had, females? Is it one of those cases where if the mother has the trait, the chick with the trait will be female? I don't think I could pair Lucy up with one if you somehow ended up with a male whitefaced lutino, because if it came from Buster and Shodu, or if it came from Snowy, it would be incest.

I just went through several species of small parrots and their color mutations just to figure out that Dweezil is a natural colored Princess of Wales parrot. I almost felt like pretending to be the stupid one and say "What kind of Cockatiel is Dweezil? I never knew they could be bred without the crest", making a joke about how your signature says "Carolyn and her cockatiels". Somehow, I found a picture of a Princess of Wales parrot when looking through grass parakeet pictures, seeing if I could find "the right color mutation". He's very pretty though. Does he get along with your cockatiels?

All of my lutino babies to date have been girls, whether they're whiteface or regular yellow lutinos. Lutino is a sex-linked recessive mutation, with complicated inheritance rules. I have an article explaining it here: http://www.littlefeatheredbuddies.com/i ... inked.html This stuff makes everybody's head spin the first time they read it lol. But the short version of the story is that girls only need to get the gene from their father in order to be visual for a sex-linked mutation, but the mother must be visual for the mutation in order to get a boy who is visual. Shodu is not lutino so there's no way she can produce a lutino son, and any lutino chicks that she has automatically have to be girls. Cinnamon and pearl are sex-linked mutations too, and that's how I knew that Lucy was a girl. Her mother is not cinnamon so it's not possible for her to have cinnamon boys. Her father Buster is split to lutino and cinnamon so he can have daughters in those colors no matter what his mate looks like.

Whiteface is an ordinary (autosomal) recessive mutation and the ordinary rules apply - the baby has to get the gene from both parents to be visual. Shodu is whiteface so all the babies will get the gene from her. Buster is split to it, so any babies who get the whiteface gene from him will be visual whiteface. The ones who don't get the gene from him will be split to whiteface, having gotten the gene from their mother. Lucy is split to whiteface, and if you put her with a male who also had the gene she could have whiteface babies.

With the Teela-Azazel pair, I do have a lutino mother. So if Azazel is split to lutino I'll be able to get lutino chicks of both sexes. He's cinnamon and Teela isn't, so all their daughters will be cinnamon and all their sons will not be cinnamon. Sexing made easy. He obviously has the pearl gene too but Teela isn't pearl, so I'll get pearl girls but not pearl boys from them.