FINCHforum

I see the latest craze in gouldian mutations is the pied mutation. In my opinion Pied is crazy with gouldians because pied detracts from the beauty of the gouldian. People are paying up to R8000 in SA for a good pied gouldian. I know if you convert it into US dollars $573 it is not a lot, but in SA it is a lot to pay for one bird.

Agree 100%. An ugly deformity of an otherwise gorgeous bird.
If one of these showed up in my place it would be considered an automatic cull. But, if someone offered $500 for it I wouldn't turn it down.
The same thing is happening with parrot finches and others. Pieds are somehow considered a premium priced oddity.

Pied has just about ruined Java Finches. It is difficult to find a good normal bird now.

A disaster

The starfinches has been stuffed up with pied and it is very difficult to get normal starfinches where I stay. It also seams that the Aussies have a fascination with pied condon bleu's and pied firefinches. I see a lot of photo's where they are bragging with their pieds. Totally crazy. The normal CB's are such pretty birds. The pieds look like they have been ravaged by some disease.

MariusStegmann

Agreed. At first people go crazy over it because it's rare, then everyone breeds pied, then a few decades later everything's pied and normals go for outrageous prices. So hang on to your normals; they will probably be in high demand in the future. I just wish people kept close records with mutations like these, otherwise you can get "leaky normals" where the birds look normal, but have slightly pied offspring.

Pied tends to get into everything. Societies, zebras, Javas, parrot finches, star finches, and now gouldians. Piebald occurs in numerous non-finch species as well: pigeons, crows, hawks, chickens, foxes, cats, cattle, koi, ball pythons, etc etc etc. It seems to be one of the most numerous mutations, and it and albinism appear to occur semi-frequently in the wild as well.

There's a hypothesis that piebald is one of those mutations that often pops up during domestication, and may be associated with tameness. Look at the Russian fox experiment. But after many generations of piebald, it seems you can break the link between pied and tameness and can selectively breed until you create animals that look like normals but behave like pieds. So by this logic, it is highly possible that self society finches were selectively bred from pied birds, rather than simply being white-rumped munias that were domesticated directly. But normal gouldians are pretty mellow birds from what I've seen, so I don't really get the point.

As bad as things can get in the finch world you should look at exhibition budgies. I got interested in English budgies briefly.
There are some 30-odd recognized mutations which enables hundreds of secondary variants. Everybody has been actively interbreeding these mutations to add some characteristic or other to improve the looks of their exhibition birds.
As a result any given phenotype can be carrying all sorts of recessive autosomal and sex linked genes. There is literally no genetically "pure" mutation and genetically "pure" classic normal doesn't exist outside the wilds of Australia.

paul-inAZ

Yeah, that's annoying. And they can't just keep records on their birds? I imagine that show breeders use cage breeding opposed to colony breeding, so it shouldn't be that difficult. And since Australia bans bird exports, it seems the only way to (legally) get pure normals is to have to extensively test-cross and breed the ones that have the least hidden mutations to each other. I imagine that process would need several hundred pairs for the gene pool to be large enough.

Icearstorm:

The budgie breeders I bought my stock from all provided detailed 3 and 4 or more generation pedigrees on their birds. Thats where I realized that an 'XXX' phenotype most often has at least a half dozen other recessive mutations in it's family tree.
These mutations are introduced to improve specific features such as feather type; markings; head size etc etc. For the show bench each mutation does have physical features with different strengths and deficiencies.
I saw nobody in the budgie club who exclusively specialized in or had a large genetically 'pure' pool of any single mutation.

If you compare the size of show budgies to budgies in the wild, they are at least a third bigger than their wild cousins. The same with show zebras.

English [or exhibition] budgies are much larger not because of genetic mutation but because of selection of breeding stock for ever larger size over the last 150 years. Size is a major criterion in exhibition.

Big parents of any species typically have larger offspring.

I recently saw some Gouldians that were claimed to be much larger than average. Someone was breeding for size. To my eye there wasn't much of a difference. Given some very patient and selective breeding maybe a strain of large Gouldians equivalent to English budgies will evolve. That would be fun.

Pied are my favorite in all domestic birds so I would very happily take all of your "culls". I can see that some of these birds are a bit too muddied but this is one of the prettiest Gouldians I have ever seen.



I absolutely love the addition of the yellow speckles throughout the green body plumage.

The mutations I have no interest in with Gouldians are silvers. If I want a white finch, a society would be the much cheaper choice!

paul-inAZ

Ah, interesting. I think a lot of wild birds have better conformation than the show version, but I do understand selecting for particular markings, as some of the color mutations are quite interesting. But it would still be nice to see more people specializing in non-splits.

Sheather

I don't get the point of silvers either. Maybe if someone likes gouldians' temperament better than any of the other species, it would work. But I don't think people are getting goulds because of their temperament.

I might not be a fan of pied or certain other mutations, but as long as they aren't harmful, I'm fine with them existing. The main problem I have with mutations like pied is that they have a tendency to take over a population so it's hard to find normals in some areas. Just like seagreen in parrotfinches in some areas. People start breeding them without preserving the normals, and then when someone wants normals, which used to be so common, they have difficulty finding them. And if it's a recessive or complex inheritance pattern that has taken over, it's difficult or impossible to breed birds that look like normals from ones with visual mutations.

MariusStegmann

No, just no.

To my way of thinking when you breed for a new mutation, you breed for an improvement on the original.

This is not an improvement