The Budgerigar : Why A Budgie?

As well as the typically ‘parrot’ ability to mimic and thus ‘talk back’ to its owner, the budgerigar is a hardy, cheerful, alert little bird with a great talent for acrobatics. It can master a series of tricks, many of which it discovers for its own amusement, as well as being able to reproduce itself in quantity under captive conditions. Budgerigars usually live to around eight years old.  Instances of ten- or even twelve year old budgies are however by no means rare.  It is fair, however, to point out that the average lifespan of a pet budgie is below this.

Many pets are quite literally killed with kindness, through being fed unsuitable tidbits, or, worse still, being allowed to wander at will tasting everything on their master’s meal tables. This habit is obviously as unhygienic for the owner as it is unhealthy for the bird.

Other pet budgies are accidentally crushed or squashed while at liberty round the house and many escapes through windows or doors which their owners have forgotten to secure before the pet was released. In this context, owners often express great surprise that a bird which was trustworthy all its life, suddenly takes up a previously-overlooked opportunity to escape. It is never safe to leave a cage bird loose in room with the windows and doors open. Nor it is kind.

Although a number of lost budgerigars are recovered, and some find their way back to their owners, usually as a result of being able to speak their owner’s names and addresses, or through the numerically coded budgerigar Society rings they wear, the majority of escapees die miserable deaths from hunger, exposure or being attacked by native wild birds.

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The Budgerigar

The first cage-bred budgerigars, were, as still are their wild cousins today, green birds with yellow facial markings, black decorations on the wings and the top of head, and a ‘necklace’ of spots beneath the bill.      Today, scientifically-inspired selective breeding has produced budgies in almost every color except pink. A $500 prize awaits the lucky breeder who can produce the first truly pink specimen, although, of course, such a phenomenon would, were it capable of reproducing itself, be worth a fortune anyway. Altogether the expert breeder can produce a list of over 130 clearly definable color varieties in budgies.

From the owner’s point of view, it is probably practical to reduce the almost endless permutations possible to the following basic choices:  green, blue, violet or yellow birds, with either grey wing, cinnamon, opaline or pied marking (a blue bird, with the conventional white or the fancy yellow face).

As well as conventionally marked budgerigars there are albinos and lutinos. Both these types in their pure form have pink eyes and, because of their lack of pigment, are devoid of dark stripings on the face or body feathers. Lutino budgies are a clear canary yellow, and albino’s pure white.  Not all white budgerigars are necessarily albinos. Some ordinarily dark-eyed types are so light in color as to appear pure white, but a careful examination usually reveals tell-tale faint tracings of the darker wing marking. All albinos are white, however.

In baby budgerigars a striped marking, running from the back of the neck, extends over the crown of the head to the top of the bill.  With their first adult plumage the youngsters moult out this barred pattern, replacing it with a clear colored hood, yellow in the green-based types, white in the blue variants.

A glance at an adult budgie’s face tells its sex. In cock budgerigars the cere or wattle, the area immediately above the upper bill, is bright blue, where as in the hen bird, it is brown. Exceptions to this rule are immature babies, and the pink-eyed pigmentless albinos or lutinos in which the cere remains pink in both sexes throughout their life. When sexing very young budgies or albinos, it is useful to remember that the cere is almost always more rounded in shape in the cock bird, and that hens have a much greater tendency to nip when handled than the cocks. A good budgie should be about 8.5 inches long and tip the scales at around 1.5 ounces. When seeking a show champion, judges always look for a curved body shape rather than an angular one, not too slim, nor yet too fat and with the body tapering gradually to the tail.

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