Post by orinax on Feb 22, 2020 13:58:17 GMT
Hey everyone! First-time poster here, and I joined specifically to ask this question (although I've been thinking of joining a forum like this for a while).
I moved in with my girlfriend over a year ago with zero budgie experience--didn't know a thing about them and never pictured myself enjoying birds as pets. I fell in love with her two budgies, Adonis and Fifi, and took to getting to know them, doing some research, etc. Now I've basically taken over as their "daddy," lol.
My GF tells me the green one (Fifi) is female and the blue one (Adonis) is male. In all the research I'd done, one thing I never really paid any attention to was gender because I pretty much took that issue for granted. It wasn't until I recently decided to start breeding them that the question even came to mind. I'm fairly certain we do have a male and a female because they started breeding on their own last year; they had a coconut hanging in the cage and lo and behold, one day there were eggs. Sadly, the coconut was cheap, and with all the increased activity, it came apart and fell to the cage floor one night while we were out; the eggs were broken.
After a few months I decided to study budgie breeding and try raising chicks on purpose this time. That's when I started reading about gender and cere color, which is where my first questions were raised. Now that I've installed a nesting box and they're starting to take interest in it, additional behavioral cues have me thinking we might have the genders swapped in our heads. I want to be sure because if we're right about the genders, my next concern is that one or both might have health issues.
As I said, we thought Fifi, the greenie, was female, but "her" (I'll just keep using the genders I'm used to until further notice) cere is blueish, while Adonis' cere is not only the beige/brown/pink that I've read is associated with females, but it also looks kind of crusty, a sign of breeding condition in females.
Behaviorally, they both chew the bars and the cloth covering the cage. I notice that it's Adonis who now seems preoccupied with chewing around the entrance of the nesting box ("he's" doing it now, hehe), which is another thing making me wonder if Adonis isn't actually the female. However, Fifi is the one spending more time going inside the box and rummaging around, so it's a tossup.
I don't know enough about budgie genetics to determine if these are some of the rarer budgies that deviate from the typical rule re: cere color, but I need to know if we need to take them to the vet.
Anywho, here's the picture. No flash, but I did use a flashlight because it's too dim in the cage to get a good picture. Let me know if I need to take a different one.
Thanks so much in advance!
