Watching my Juvenile Gouldians

[Diane]

After moving my juvenile Gouldians into 2 holding cages, I’m sorting out male and female into separate cages as they mature.

While watching them over a period of time I have noticed that…

YH birds seem to colour up all over the fastest. The blue line on the head is already visible on my YH birds, while other head colours have yet to colour up to that stage, despite being older.

BH birds are comparable with the YH, but BH colour seems to be fast on the head only.

RH birds seem to be the slowest to colour, however they do seem to sing more. My 3 best singers are RH. My first hatched young (end Feb) are showing just one or two red feathers yet other younger birds (end of April) of different head colour have just about all their head colour.

I have 2 juvenile holding cages, one for the males, the other is for those birds that are too young to tell yet.
I have a mature female I wanted to stop breeding as she has had 3 clutches so I put her into the “to young to tell cage” and very quickly I found a few males! They started making bouncing advances on the female, so they have been quickly moved into my “boy cage”

Other observations are the shape of the head in the different colours,

YH seem to have longer narrower head.
RH seems to have rounder shaped head.
BH somewhere in the middle.

These are just my observations. Anyone else noticed anything like this with their Gouldians?

[gouldian4]

yeh i have noticed my red heads are taking ages to colour up but are constantly singing. my yellow backs are colouring quite quick appart from their head colours and my black headed babies only have a few feathers on there head and dont make any noise at all where as the yellow backs are quite noisy

[Misso]

My Juveniles don't even look like coloring up. won't be till oct/nov when they will molt, at least that's what happened last yr.

i can see only a small spot of color on some of the juveniles, i have few singers!!

Jarryd

[werty]

Last year all 3 clutches coloured up in october

But this year the first clutch is already colouring up while the second clutch is hatching

Is this normal?