Aussie Finch Forum

purchased a pure strain of black headed gouldians which have never been bred with any other mutation. they really look a picture of health and in case you think the hen is minus her upper seed muncher - camera angle lol

Bill,
Interesting you made the comment about the bill, I have had a number of black head hens and cocks with the extra long and skinny beaks, just nipped them off with nail clippers. No probs but after seeing this I wonder if it is something more insidious? Any thoughts, anyone?

Ken

Looks like you have BH yellow tip bills. Nice looking birds

Trim the slightly overgrown lower mandible as suggested, and give it two month or so,
to find out whether the Extra will grow back again.
Yellow Beak BHs are my favoured Gouldians, a glorious looking Bird when in good nick, also the most misunderstood Gouldian,
geneticially speaking and on top of that this is the only Gouldian that displays its genetic make up by its outside appearance .

Brooksy wrote:Looks like you have BH yellow tip bills. Nice looking birds

I agree....

Never say never. I haved had a BH hen turn up from a Redhead cock and a Orange/Yellow head hen. I bred the dad so know his parentage, and my mother bred his dad and grandad. No Blacks round for over 10 years. (Shes a very nice young bird)
LML

Nice blacks but I thought true pure black cocks had a red tipped beak. This way you know they are not carrying the masked yellow head gene or as some breeders say; a yellow tip beak cock or hen is a yellow head masked with black colouring due to the autosomal recessive nature of the gene for yellow head. Re the previous post about producing a black head hen from a red cock, this would indicate the cock is a single factor and the yellow hen is split for black. This pairing has the chance of breeding black hens. If there are other or better explanations for this, I would like to hear them.

Hi Mikes,
A red headed cock can have either 2 RH genes or one RH and 1 BH gene ( RH/BH ), as the hen gets her one ( and only one ) head colour gene from the cock bird then it is possible to breed a BH hen from any pairing involving a RH/BH cock regardless of the hen colour in the pairing. In fact 50 % of the hens from this cock bird will be BH.
A hen has only one main head colour gene and therefore is never split for anything other than yellow. IE RH/YH or BH/YH.
If a RH hen has 2 YH genes then it appears YH. If a BH hen has 2 YH genes then it appears BH with a yellow tip beak.
Hope this clears things up a bit.

finchbreeder wrote:Never say never. I haved had a BH hen turn up from a Redhead cock and a Orange/Yellow head hen. I bred the dad so know his parentage, and my mother bred his dad and grandad. No Blacks round for over 10 years. (Shes a very nice young bird)
LML

Well that is impressive
Your Red Head cocks have been split for ten years and not produced a Black Hen.

Hi Stu,

Yes it would be impressive but still possible, if you go to any Gouldian genetics forecaster you will find that what I stated is entirely true.
Just because 50% of the hen offspring are supposed to be BH does not mean that it will allways work out that way.

Because a lot of the genetic traits ( IE White chest, Aust yellow , RH/BH, YH, Blue back, Dilute ) are hidden you can end up with a lot of different looking birds without ever knowing how they appeared in your flock.

You can check out this site below or any of the Gouldian genetics forecasters available.

http://www.gouldiansgalore.com/headcolor.html