The Good, the Bad, and the Birdie

[asterroc]

The Bad
Gabe continues to complain about the lack of seeds in his dish. I keep consoling myself that it can't be more than two weeks from here.

The Good
Gabe ate seeds from my hand! Up till now he's only ever eaten things from his food dish, but I figured that if he's so desperate for seeds, I've gotta be able to get something good out of it!

The Birdie


It's amazingly hard to take a steady picture one-handed, and he was kinda washed out with the flash. Oh well, it's still photographic proof that he finally ate something from my hand. He had a much easier time eating from the palm of my hand than finger tips - he seemed to get confused with which were my fingers and which the seeds, so he'd just nibble at all and eat none. :-P

Comments

[l0stmyrel1g10n.livejournal.com]

hehe, he looks albino from the flash. that's really sweet though, and he's a beautiful bird.

More info than you ever wanted about colorations in 'tiels...

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Cockatiels have two pigments that cause color in them: melatonin causes the gray, and lipochrome causes yellow and orange. Peeper (right) was a typically colored cockatiel (called gray), and posessed both melatonin and lipochrome.

Lutino (like Gabe) is a mutation where they don't have the melatonin, kinda a "half-albino," so anywhere they would've been gray is white instead, and his eyes are red (even without the flash) instead of brown. They still have the lipochrome so retain the yellow head and tail, and orange cheeks.

Whitefaces (left) do have the melatonin so the have gray backs and sides, but don't have the lipochrome so their heads are pure white.

In order to get a true albino, they need to crossbreed the lutinos and whitefaces to get an even more mutated bird without either lipochrome or melatonin.

More coloration info.

Hm, I may just need to post this elsewhere...