Is there a fawn mutation in Painteds?

[natamambo]

Last week I had single young fledge from a pair of painteds. Unfortunately it was sickly right from the outset - never left the ground except under duress from me and then it would fly about 2 feet. It spent most of the day hiding, rarely begged for food and so on. It was fully cooked, a full "coat" of feathers but it just never developed. Not seeing it for a large part of the day was not uncommon so it took me 24 hours to search the scrub and find the carcass. By the time I did it wasn't worth photographing and somehow I hadn't managed to photograph it before it died. I put it's "unwellness" down to the fact that it fallen out of the nest very early on and I had put it back in again, maybe "something" had happened then....

However, one thing I noticed was that it was very light in colour, almost milk chocolate rather than the darker colour of all my past fledgelings and certainly much lighter than the parents. The parents did not actively look after it after a few days and until it died I took that to mean they were weaning it as it was not uncommon to see it in the seed dish but there was litte / no food in it's crop when found dead.

The parents are down again already, so it may be possible to know if it was a one-off in 6 weeks or so.

The birds came from E Orix BTW.

[djb78]

I had a painted once that was a bit lighter in colour but nit quiet that light but unfortunately next molt turned out to he same as the rest, mine might have been to a vitamin deficiency as all his young and the young from them have all been normal. You might have been lucky to get a fawn type.