African Love Birds Mutation

There are three shades of green - the normal, jade and olive. The olive was first bred in Australia. This was the beginning of everything in this bird as it allowed you to have single and double dark factors of any colour that was available. The pieds that first came out were not a very good example, but nowadays they have improved these birds a lot and they have mealing all over them. The ivory is a beautiful mutation. To achieve this colour, you must mate blue to cinnamon. The offspring are all green birds split for blue and cocks split for cinnamon. Take one of these cocks and mate with a blue hen and the offspring are ivory. The primrose came by crossing the Sydney yellow with the blue. The offspring were all green. These mated together gave the primrose. They used to be called buttercup. You can sex the primrose and the Sydney yellows, as the hens have a green mottling on their back, while the cocks are pure yellow. Early on most of the Sydney yellows had a blue rump, but this has been progressively bred out of them. Photo Copyright © Shadow's Aviary's (used with permission) Shadow's Aviary's Website and Facebook Photo Copyright © Shadow's Aviary's (used with permission) Shadow's Aviary's Website and Facebook The cinnamon mutation was also an Australian first. In the beginning they had a lot of problems with their feathers but they have sorted this out now. In America they had a cinnamon that was green but we came up with the yellow. They have cinnamon flight feathers and cinnamon tips to the wings. When the young are first born, they have red eyes, but as they get older, the red is still present but the eye turns black. In bright light you can see it is a pink colour. There is also a jade cinnamon and the mustard as the single ard double dark factors are added. Some nests will contain birds with a red suffusion in their feathers. Only a few retain the red; most lose it at the first moult. The red is more often retained in the yellow birds than in the green ones. One problem that you can see in these red birds is that they don't seem to reproduce too well. The lutino is the colour of butter. It has white rump, toenails and a blood red face and white flights. There are a lot of birds around now that they are calling lutino that have a blue suffusion in the rump - a slight blue tinge. These are not true lutinos because a true lutino must be pure white on the rump. The silver cherry comes from putting the golden cherry with a blue. The young are all green split for both. They pair them up and out come the silver cherry. A new mutation is the white faced blue. There is still some work to be done with this one as there is still some green on the wings.