scarlet odd colour

[Danny]

That prompts the question - what are they really worth ? Normal , guaranteed normal birds.

I would like to think they would demand a premium price, but the difficulty that I see is the buyer has no way of telling if they are getting "pure" birds or not.
I would be reluctant to pay a premium price unless I was certain to get what I was paying for.
It's a bit late after you have bred them for a couple of seasons.

Cheers
Brett

That would come down to trusting the seller's reputation. Even then, you could breed 30 clutches and then throw a colour if only two birds in a large colony carry the recessive gene. Knowledge of wild, isolated origins is a great place to start when looking for quality pure stock.

[Myzomela]

Apart from the mutations has anyone else noticed stunted birds ? They are visibly smaller and appear slightly bent at the lower back area .
Ive seen one at a well known breeders ( he culls them ) and Ive seen them often at the pet shops ( not from the same breeder ) ...

No more than usual Deb.
What I have noticed is that many of the newbies don't know the difference between a good bird and a poorly bred one, and often breed with poor quality birds, produce poor quality offspring and are none the wiser. Unless you see every bird before you buy it then that's when you can get caught out, especially with freighted birds.

Go along to any bird sale and you can see the difference with the more commonly available species. The top birds stand out and sell out quickly.

It is a very good point you raise Deb, if a bit off topic

[mr.fox]

I have a similar tale with my Scarlet chesteds. Last season I bred 18 young from 2 pairs. Every youngster showed red -orange on the belly to some extent. The parent birds of both pairs show no orange in the belly at all. I decided to re-pair these original birds to another pair which I bought at my club's bird sale in April. These new birds also have the clean yellow belly which i prefer and I was assured they were "pure normals". Blow me down, in the first nest from 1 pair, I produced blues! Which means that the new cock AND the original hen from that particular pair are split blue. I have been unknowingly producing splits all these years from this beautiful little hen. The second pair did not nest, but a third pair just fledged young and no blues, but all have orange bellies and may be split for blue. This is going to be a mess to unravel! I may not be able to eliminate the orange tint on the belly of my scarlets but by mating untested birds back to these blue offspring I can prove to myself whether the remainder of my original Scarlets are also split for blue. But then, I will only be furthering the problem by producing more split for blues and whose to say the old birds are not split for some other colour? Sorry, but i really hate mutations!