The quaker parrot in the video is adorable! They're known for being nippy though, and I've heard them described as 'a mean green biting machine'.
Amazon parrots are worse. They love drama and some of them think it's funny to bite people and watch the people scream and jump back. Some of them have figured out that if they act very sweet and cuddly, unsuspecting people will put their hands within biting range and the parrot can nail them.
Budgie genetics is complicated and you might be sorry you asked this question lol. You can have more than one mutation in the same bird. In fact Piper has two mutations - she's both blue and pied. The question is what kind of pied, because there are several different types in budgies. There's a nice guide to budgie mutations at
http://cutelittlebirdiesaviary.weebly.c ... guide.html and based on the pictures there I think she's recessive pied. If you have any questions about the terminology on the website, let me know and I'll try to explain.
Some genetic basics. There are three main types of color inheritance in birds: dominant, recessive, and sex-linked recessive. There are some less common types too but there's no need to get into those. With a dominant mutation, a bird needs only one copy of the gene to be visual for the mutation. With a recessive gene, a bird needs two copies of the gene (one from each parent) to be visual, and if it has only one copy of the gene it is said to be split to that mutation. A bird who is split to a mutation will not be visual for that mutation, but can have babies with that mutation if the mate also has the gene.
Sex-linked mutations are where it gets messy, and if you want to get into the whys and hows we have an article about it here:
http://www.littlefeatheredbuddies.com/i ... inked.html I'll just stick with the practical results for now. Lutino is a sex-linked recessive mutation, and the daughters of a lutino male will all be visual lutino (in addition to any other mutations that they might have). A lutino male will NOT have visual lutino sons unless mom is also a visual lutino, so you won't get any lutino boys from this pair. But the boys will be split lutino since they will all get the gene from dad. You'll know the sex of the babies as soon as they hatch. The girls will be lutino and will have the red eyes to prove it, and the boys will not be lutino and will have dark eyes.
Getting back to basics again, there are three sources of color in budgies: melanin which is a black pigment; psittacin which is a yellow pigment and also produces orange/red/pink color in some species; and structural color, which is a special structure in some feathers that makes the light reflect in a way that makes melanin look like green or blue to our eyes. The feather structure does not affect the appearance of the yellow pigment, just the melanin.
The lutino gene removes the melanin, and that's why yellow is the only color you see on Amarillo (white is the absence of any pigment at all in the feather).
The blue gene removes the yellow pigment. This may sound odd at first, but green is a combination of blue and yellow, and when you remove the yellow from a green bird you're left with blue.
The pied gene removes the melanin from some feathers but not from all. Piper has no yellow coloring so she looks blue in areas that still have melanin in the feathers and white in areas where there's no melanin in the feathers.
Blue and pied are ordinary recessive mutations, so to get babies in these colors both parents have to have the genes. Amarillo could actually be recessive pied in addition to being lutino, or he might be split to it. The pied gene tries to take out some of the melanin but the lutino gene takes out all of it, so in effect the lutino masks the pied. We know he doesn't have the blue mutation because the yellow color wouldn't be there if he did; but he could be split to blue. Both birds could be split to other things as well. You won't know for sure until you see what colors you get in the nestbox. When we know what kind of babies you're getting we can figure out what hidden splits the parents must have.
It would be really cool if Amarillo was split to blue, because then you could get blue lutino girls. This combination gives you the color that most people call albino - an all-white bird with red eyes. The lutino gene takes out all the melanin and the blue gene takes out all the psittacin, so you're left with no color pigment at all.
There's a budgie genetic calculator that can help you figure out what results you can get from different combinations of parent genes:
http://www.gencalc.com/gen/eng_genc.php?sp=0Budg It's not for the faint-hearted though. The terminology that they use and the way they display the results is a lot more complicated than it needs to be. Personally I would stay away from it if I didn't need to use it.
