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fashionfobie

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Irishj9

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Hi was just wondering about the black on my caiques head will it go away or stay it seems to be turning green. He will be a 1 year in June and was classified as a white bellie
Your baby is a white bellied. Its a poor classification method. Its better to use leg color

Orange legs = Black headed
Yellow Legs = White Bellied ( WBC)
Green legs = Green Thighed ) GTC)

The black head is a legacy from an ancient parent species. Your baby is a White bellied caique, a child species and it will lose the black head feathers in its first moult, in about a year to 18 months.
Its head will then be orange, not green. Even my green thighed baby in the attached pic, will also lose his black head feathers babyfeb2a.jpg
 
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Irishj9

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To complicate matters, there are unhinged breeders in the US who have bred a lime thighed caique by cross breeding the green and yellow thighed variants. In a rapidly failing gene pool ( destruction of forest habitat) muddying the dwindling gene pool like this is a criminal act

Also there is a dilute blue variant of the orange thighed caique in Australia. Yellow +blue = green, so If you can breed out the yellow pigmentation you are left with a rare washed out blue caique with a black head.

In the wild the 3 sub variants in my first post are rarely seen in the same flock. It is supposed that the Massively wide Amazon river split off separate populations of these birds * They ARE poor fliers) and they developed separate color schemes off the same parent species model.

And if you want to get technical, the colors we see are not always true color's. Some colors are pigments built into in the feather structure and some are generated ( for humans) by the way WE SEE light bouncing off feathers.

The birds themselves see a much wider range of color than humans, i.e. well into the infra red range. the colors. That is why the birds can tell male from female at a glance and we cannot. They can see into the infra red spectrum where we cannot, where the differences are obvious to them

Yes, their visual perception is much different from ours. They would think of us as visually handicapped, because they can SEE heat!
 
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dutchlings

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@Irishj9

Have you seen the white bellied/black headed hybrids? They look so wrong to me every time I see one... they’ve either looked like black headed caiques who are missing the green eyeliner, or black headed caiques with big patches of orange feathers on the tops of their heads.

Our black headed caique (not a hybrid to our knowledge) had both yellow and orange feathers on his little legs when we first got him, but they’re fully orange now that he’s molted them.

Even more disturbingly, there’s been a series of posts on Reddit from someone claiming their black headed caique and sun conure “accidentally” had babies... sometimes I really dislike people.
 

Irishj9

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@Irishj9

Have you seen the white bellied/black headed hybrids? They look so wrong to me every time I see one... they’ve either looked like black headed caiques who are missing the green eyeliner, or black headed caiques with big patches of orange feathers on the tops of their heads.

Our black headed caique (not a hybrid to our knowledge) had both yellow and orange feathers on his little legs when we first got him, but they’re fully orange now that he’s molted them.

Even more disturbingly, there’s been a series of posts on Reddit from someone claiming their black headed caique and sun conure “accidentally” had babies... sometimes I really dislike people.
The more I meet people the more I like parrots
 
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