Sorry but this post has annoyed me since I joined the forum. So I'm going to have my say, so hopefully someone else will do the right thing when they get an odd coloured bird.
The first thing you should do when a pair produces an odd coloured bird is leave the pair together, as they have the best chance of breeding more of the colour and the more you have the easier it will be to establish, if it is a mutation.spanna wrote:hey guys. got these couple of king quails i've bred myself that show some unusual traits. have put both back to breed with a parent to see what happens (which i dont usually do, will be interesting) but not sure what others think/know about them...
It's not spanna's fault as he has done what most people would tell you to do.
I will start will the male with all the red, he should have been bred to an unrelated hen and then you have a look at the colour of the young, if you get a coloured bird like the father then the mutation may be dominant, you can then breed the young to unrelated birds and If you get coloured birds again, then you know you have a dominant mutation.
If the first mating produces normal looking birds you could have a recessive mutation, so you then breed the coloured male to a second unrelated bird but make sure she is unrelated to the first hen as well, if they produce all normal looking birds then you can continue working as if it is recessive. You should now have split birds from the same male but two unrelated female that you can now breed the young from first hen to the young from the second hen. If it's recessive then you should get some coloured birds that you can then out cross again.
As the first coloured bird is a male, its most likely not a sex-linked mutation unless the hen is a the same mutation as the son and the father could be a split, as sex-linked mutations are first seen as a coloured hen.
Now for the hen, it's not a pied (it looks similar to the spangled budgie). The same breeding should be done as for the male above but before breeding young to each other you need to test if it's a sex-linked mutation by breeding the young males to unrelated hens, if from this mating you get some coloured hens then you most likely have a sex-linked mutation and you can continue out crossing and then after a few generation you can breed a split male to a coloured female to get you first coloured male.
As a lot of mutation come from related pairs, breeding a young back to the parent only cause more problems.
And if it is a sex-linked or recessive mutation then the siblings could be splits and should be kept, as if you lose the coloured bird you may be able to breed more from the siblings.
A silver split for cinnamon should look like a silver and a cinnamon split for silver looks like a cinnamon, the only time the cinnamon will lighten the silver is when you have both mutations appearing at the same time, so a hen would have to get both the recessive silver and the sex-linked cinnamon from the father and the silver from the mother, or a male that would need a Cinnamon/Silver or CinnamonSilver mother and a father carrying both the silver and cinnamon mutations.finchbreeder wrote:I think that those of us who breed quail for any length of time will observe there are a range of shades in cinnamon and silver. I think this is more common in cinnamons that are split for silver, and silvers that are split for cinnamon. My deduction is that like in humans there is a range of blondes, brunettes etc. to it is in quail. However that said. I think that by choosing to put light bird to light bird and dark bird to dark bird we can eventually breed two distinct shades within the cinnamon and silver.
Anything that is different in colour or amount of colour can be perpertrated (in theory) with effort. So that boy of yours could be developed into a line of heavily redish breasted if you wanted to Spanna. Look forward to hearing how your cinnamon/silver pied goes in the future.
LML
As finchbreeeder has said, you can select for things that you want to enhance, it take a lot longer to do then breeding a new mutation but is can be done, just look at the budgies and canaries, they now come in all shapes and sizes.
Dale
