FINCHforum

so a while back, i "rescued" a few zebra finches from a local pet store. i've never had zebras before, so i asked you guys what mutations you thought they were. well, fast forward to now. my zebras had some babies. since i'm mostly focusing on breeding my gouldians right now, i begrudgingly found homes a for all but 2 of the zebras (the babies were damn adorable, too )

so, i ended up keeping one of the original males i rescued and i kept one of the babies i had, which turned out to be female (so i'm sure i'll have babies again soon since they're so cute! ). i figured i'd ask, once again, what you guys think about my zebra's mutations??

All are split to pied....the pied makes it difficult to tell exactly what mutations they originally were. The female may be split to BC since the tear is a bit wider. The male is missing some of it's markings but is a a split pied.

Pied once introduced into a line is difficult to get rid of, it is recessive and can be passed to all the young by just one parent.

so if a pied male is bred to a normal non pied you get
100% Normal/Pied

2 pied parents you get 100% pied, the more pied introduced the whiter the offspring. Telling the true genetic background of the a pied visually can be tricky

The male appears to be a pied penguin and the female is a pied. You can most certainly breed the two and you should get a nice bunch of babies -- with the pieds, you won't necessarily get all pied babies. They will throw a couple odd balls here and there. Good luck!

Bugaboo...I thought the same as you about the male since I raise penguins but I feel the male must have had a split to pied parent since if you put full pied with a penguin all orange is lost.

When using pied you young will not look like the full mutations that are in the parents and grandparents and so on....pied sort of muddies that a bit. The pieds that are interesting are saddlebacks and the all white pieds. The split to pieds have a very soft appearance.

I know what you mean, the pieds always confuse me. I find the saddle backs and the all-white pieds to be beautiful. The only reason why I would say pied penguin is because other than the imperfect slashed cheek, the male appears to be penguin in overall characteristics. Additionally, if you look at his wings, the outer primary feathers are white. In my penguins, the entire wing is gray.

I respect your opinion A LOT. You work with much more zebra mutations than myself and you are like a human database of information.

I also looked at the chest and the absence of breast bars and lines. I think and agree that this could very well could be a split to pied penguin. Sadly though to try to put the orange back in this bird's offspring will take doing if it can be done at all since pied fights the orange in penguins and could flaw the look of the offspring.

you guys seem pretty decided. here's one more pic of the male from the other side

Pretty birds

Beautiful birds!

Split pied penguin for sure.

I had one, a crested male the cheeks were missing had the white wing edges but more white in the back. I bought him with two hens and removed him from penguin flock and bread him to a normal gray for crested

Since is split to pied and not full you can try putting him with a full gray or fawn non pied female. See what happens you may get split to pieds or possibly penguins. Even though. Penguin is recessive but you can still get penguins from the pairing it may not happen every clutch but possible. In your case it will be interesting to see if the pied is reduced or not visable in the offspring if paired with a non pied female.

I think the female is also BB?