FINCHforum

Hello, everyone! I'm new to the forum, but have been a lurker here for quite some time. I recently got a fawn penguin female zebra and a pied penguin male. Due to the rarity of the mutation, and the slim chance of even finding them available down here in Georgia, I couldn't help myself. I have poured over the forums the past few days at a loss of what to do in order to establish myself a line of penguins. I figured since pied was recessive, I could easily cull out any penguin chicks that showed pied to pet homes and not use them in my breeding program. However, it seems that other zebra owners on the boards had bad results from using pied penguins. My question is, how hard is it to separate the pied gene after a few generations? Is there any alternative plan possible to lessen the chances of having pied negatively affect my penguin program in its infancy stage? Instead of breeding the two penguins and not using any resulting pied offspring, breed them to grey, and then crossing some of those two sets to create more penguins, adding another buffer between my penguins now and the pied gene? Any thoughts, ideas, advice, or stories y'all can share would be greatly appreciated!

The issue is, pied shows up forever as a white feather or two on the wings or chin, even many generations after your last highly pied bird. And it will continue to show up in such an ugly form - just enough to ruin confirmation but not enough to be attractive - even after you think it's gone, from apparently non-pied parents.

It's very difficult to get rid of.

Sheather My gray hen has a white feather near the base of her tail. Now I am wondering if she is pied.

Dylan, would your method (if you were in my shoes) be to breed my fawn penguin to two different normal grey cocks, then make a pair out of the half-sibling splits for penguin? Or, would you use the pied penguin cock and make sure to outcross future generations to non pied or pied carriers? Because my brain is rationalizing using the pied penguin cock so at least in the first generation I'll have 100% penguins to work with that are split to pied. Careful breeding to non-pieds with the penguins I retain for breeding and don't find pet homes for would at least give me penguins (albeit split to pied) in the F1, rather than having to raise two clutches of splits and not knowing how many penguin chicks I'd end up with in the second generation. I guess what my question boils down to is: pied is a recessive gene that theoretically can be removed from a line with careful record keeping and breeding practices, I just want to make sure that the split for pied wouldn't ruin my penguins indefinitely.

I agree with Dylan, once the pieds get in it is hard to maintain the birds pure, it is a mutation that sticks to the birds for many generations.

If you want penguins, the best is to mate penguin to penguin, because even if you mate that hen with normals or fawns, the quality of the future penguins would not be high, and you would have to work harder to "clean them up" to standard penguins again.

But, in case you can not find a proper penguin mate for her, the best would be to pair her up with a normal or a fawn (the second is the best, if you want fawn penguins), and then use one of the male offsprings to pair up with her, and so the mom's phenotype would be imprinted on half of the chicks of the third generation.