Oh! Yeah, she's whiteface Pearl fallow. That was kinda why I was half-joking about
breeding her with Carolyn's newest bird, Ernie, since he's split fallow.
I was surprised too. I thought that first she was a cinnamon and that the eyes would darken over time. I didn't expect to end up with a rare mutation. I was almost hoping she was male so I'd get split babies (especially since she would've been split Lutino and possibly split cinnamon as well and if she were male, and Lucy is split whiteface; whiteface Lutinos and cinnamons all around!).
Her mother was also whiteface Lutino and father, I think is a whitefaced cinnamon. Conviently I guess they both were split fallow too.
Figuring out her sex at young was tricky, because with Pearl Lutinos, the pearls show up as yellow feathers, and since the whiteface mutation gets rid of any yellow coloring, a pearl mutation would be virtually invisible on a whiteface Lutino.
It's quite possible that the mom does have a pearl mutation, and Alex just so conveniently (or inconveniently) ended up female anyways.
I guess it's safe to say: bird vision is weird.
Alex was never really graceful to begin with. When I first got her, we put her in a small cage (which ended up becoming Georgie's cage) with a heatpad. We put a little cup with bird seed in there so she could practice trying to eat the stuff. In less than five minutes, she had tipped the cup over, spilled all of the seed onto the floor of the cage, and began to play with the cup.
So if that wasn't an omen for things to come with her...
Then when she got into a bigger cage with Lucy, it took her quite a while to figure out how to properly climb the cage bars, and would flap her wings while climbing upwards. Luckily she's figured it out by now.
The small cage was for quarentine, although funny enough I had to end up quarantining both birds for a short while anyways, because I got Alex as a gift from my parents when
we thought Lucy had been gone forever, and then Lucy was
found the next day.Luckily both of them had ended up being healthy (aside from Lucy being really underweight and lethargic when I got her back, but that was nothing but some good food and an electrolyte solution couldn't fix.), and now they're a ragtag team of troublemakers.
Lucy's quite tolerant of Alex's quirks it seems, despite both being stubborn as all heck and both like to try and get all of my attention to themselves.
In fact, Lucy is rather pretty good with other birds in general. She was very tolerant when I had been trying to gain Joey's trust, and she appears to be getting used to Georgie more quickly than Alex is, and was more willing to share millet with him, whereas Alex was too scared to go near the millet when Georgie started eating for a good few minutes (I'm going to elaborate on this in Georgie's thread). Granted, she's probably seen and ate with weirder looking species during her little "adventure" outdoors. But overall, she's done well with all of the other birds in the house except for our pionus Dudley (but that's just because Dudley doesn't really get along with anyone).
Back on the topic of Alex though, I have a feeling she wasn't even aware of being a bird when I first got her. At the breeder's house, she was in a cage by herself with only an Indian ringneck on the other side of the room, and I doubt they interacted a lot with each other. Then when the breeder brought in a couple of older babies she had handfed that were in an outside cage, Alex had the most confused look on her face upon seeing them, almost as if she had never seen another cockatiel before (or at least, she doesn't remember seeing cockatiels when she was a chick). Then when we got her, she was much more interested in the humans in the house than the birds. Even flew to my dad. And when she and Lucy first met, while Lucy did see her as a flock member and stuck closely, Alex had no concern whatsoever where Lucy was and what she was doing.
I think Lucy did end up teaching her how to be a bird to some extant. Alex acts much more birdlike, and she appears to care to some extent about Lucy's wearabouts. Although she cares more about whether or not I'm in her line of sight, vs. if Lucy is within her line of sight. She'll eat when Lucy eats, bathes when Lucy bathes, etc... In fact, I'm pretty sure Lucy taught her to bathe. She didn't seem to quite get it at first until she saw Lucy bathing (before she'd just kinda stand in the water). I'm pretty sure she learned to climb properly by watching Lucy as well since she didn't figure it out until being moved into a cage together.
It's quite possible that Alex thinks to some extent that she's a person to some extant. Maybe she believes herself to be something in between.
Either way, if there's any bird-like thing she'll learn, it'll likely be from Lucy. Heck given she's starting to figure out a little bit about how to use her tail, I'm wondering if she's learning that from watching Lucy. They're like sisters almost, Lucy being the calm older one, mentoring the excitable young one. Of course, that does not only mean useful skills, but that also means how to (try to) get away with doing things they shouldn't.
