Who's my parent?

[Blue Cuban]

I prefer and breed for black heads (for a number of reasons) so needless to say my stock is mainly black heads with the exception of some quality stock I introduced this season which I didn't have a choice of what head colour I wanted, they were 2 DF pastel blues and 1 SF pastel blue cocks birds with red/orange heads.
When colony breeding there is always going to be question to who the parents are and you can never be 100% sure so when you have a pair of black heads split to blue produce a red head you begin to think someone has been unfaithful.

I have never experienced black heads producing red heads and judging by the basic rules of genetics it should be impossible but one of the joys of keeping these birds are they always keep surprising us.

I'm of the opinion that the black head who I thought fathered this bird is not the father at all and I'm willing to have a punt that the mother had a fling with the SF pastel blue and ill explain my reason for thinking.

We can eliminate the 2 DF pastel blues because the young showing to be a read head bird is a normal green had it been either one of the 2 DF's the bird would of been of yellow or SF colour leaving the SF pastel blue to be the only possibility. I also believe this bird will be a hen which the SF pastel blue can produce and the fact that the father usually dictates the offspring hens head colour.

I'm thinking I have found the culprit........
And if I'm right this would also make this bird 100% split blue.

Rich.

[Blue Cuban]

Alternatively I was thinking the young showing to be a red head could be a male if it's father (SF pastel blue) is a DF red head.
Either way I'm convinced the the cock bird that sat with the hen and feed the young is not the red heads father and that the SF pastel blue has had some involvement.

Rich.

[Tiaris]

The complexities of colony breeding - too much guesswork for me. I like the certainty of knowing the parents & hence genotype of every young bred so I go with single pairs with most of my Gouldian breeding.