I always hear about males "losing" their pearls over time. I wonder if they ever keep their pearl markings at all? Or do they all eventually lose them over time? The new cockatiel baby seems to both have a pearl pattern, and pink eyes. So if he really is male, does that mean he'll look like a regular whitefaced lutino over time?

Speaking of which, here are some pictures.



I tried to get one of his back here. He still has his bald spots from when the parents plucked him.

This baby is not a lutino, there's far too much brown/grey coloring on the wings. The eyes don't look red enough for a baby lutino either. It's definitely whiteface and pearl. Do you know what color the parents are? If the mother is NOT pearl, the baby has to be a girl. If the mother IS pearl, the baby could be either sex.

The grey coloring is a bit of a mystery though. The eyes look very red for a cinnamon (here's a picture of YinYin for comparison; she's whiteface cinnamon pearl). But there's some variation in cinnamon eye coloring and that's probably what this chick is. Two other red-eyed pale-grey mutations that you could look into are fallow and recessive silver. But the eyes don't look bright enough red for fallow either. I don't know much about the eye color of recessive silver chicks, but I do know that there are some recessive silver babies being born in Tucson.

To answer your actual question, pearl pied males will often keep their pearl markings for several years. All others lose them at maturity. The pied mutation interferes with development of the usual sexual dimorphism and slows down the color change.

I don't see any indication that this baby is pied, but I don't have a good view of some relevant parts of the body. Look to see if he has any flight feathers or tailfeathers that are all white with no grey whatsoever. If the feather has a dark quill it is a pearl feather not a pied feather.

Oh, and he's a cutie by the way.

Beautiful little bird... so pretty

Nice looking bird, wonder what he'll look like when older!

Do the eyes look ok to you guys? They look kinda irritated to me, with the redness around them.

I texted the breeder asking for the mutations, but she's yet to respond. I wonder if it really is male, like she says.

Now I'm really curious about the mutation. I'm thinking recessive silver, though not sure.

So she finally answered. She has a weird way of explaining things, but from what it sounds like, the mom is a white faced Lutino, and the dad might be a whitefaced cinnamon or recessive silver. Either way, that means the baby is female, right? So I have two females.

She's about just as much of a troublemaker as Lucy is, too, though much more interested in what I'm doing, and prefers to be on me, rather than just near me. When Lucy recovers, that's gonna be double the "excitement".

I'm posting a quote from a different thread in this one to make it easier to talk about the mutations.

You're probably going to have to wait and see what sex this baby turns out to be, or get a DNA test if you don't want to wait. There are too many "what ifs" here to be sure of anything. It would be really helpful if the breeder could provide pictures of the parents, because we might be able to figure something out from looking at them.

If the mother is not pearl, the baby has to be a girl. But we don't have enough information to know whether mom is pearl or not. Whiteface lutino covers up most other mutations. If mom is pearl too, the only way to see the markings would be to shine a blacklight on her, and even that doesn't work a lot of the time.

If it was actually the father who was whiteface lutino, we would know for sure that this chick is a boy. If dad is lutino and mom is not, all the daughters will be lutino and all the sons will be something else.

Then there's the enigma of the grey/brown coloring. If it's cinnamon, then mom would also have to be cinnamon in addition to everything else in order to get a cinnamon pearl boy. But you can usually tell when an adult bird is cinnamon whiteface lutino. The cinnamon causes a faint brownish wash on the wing and tail feathers, which looks sort of like the feathers are dirty. If we had a picture of mom we could look for the color wash.

Recessive silver is a rare mutation and both parents have to have the gene in order to get a chick who is visual for it. So the odds are fairly high against it being RS. Most people who work with RS know exactly what they're dealing with. But it's becoming more common and people are starting to get birds who are visual or split RS without knowing what they have. So it's possible. Ditto for fallow. With both these mutations, the inheritance rules are the same for girls and boys, so we can't guess the sex based on parent coloring. Cinnamon on the other hand is VERY widespread, so it's most likely cinnamon. If we had a picture of dad we could look at his eye color and feather color to see what mutation he looks like.

There are some other what-ifs too. The breeder wasn't aware that the birds were breeding until several babies had hatched. So she wouldn't know whether mom had a fling with a different male, or some other hen laid an egg in the wrong nest. It's possible that she knows her pairs well enough to know exactly who could have produced a baby with this coloring. But it doesn't sound like her mutation knowledge and general awareness of what's happening in the aviary is all that strong.