WEDNESDAY, May 30, 2007
Those Little Orange Beauties
By Blake Ma
Blake enjoys working with lovebirds and has a passion for exhibiting and breeding them
Click image to enlarge
Orange-faced Australian cinnamon baby lovebird. |
Orange-faced lutino pied lovebird. |
Orange-faced dark Australian cinnamon baby lovebird. |
Have you ever seen an orange-faced lovebird? They are pretty, little bundles of joy! When you add the orange-faced mutation to a normal green, the peach on the bird turns into a very pretty orange. The red on the tail feathers also turns orange.
Orange-face is a co-dominant mutation. You can, however, barely see it at all on a normal green bird unless you know what to specifically look for. To really see the orange, you need to inherit orange-faced from both parents. Even though orange-face is technically a co-dominant mutation, many people refer to birds with one orange-faced factor as being split to the mutation, as the orange face is not really visible. Normal green birds that are split to orange-faced birds should be shown in the AOC (Any Other Color) class of the green section at a bird show. The one orange-faced factor will slightly change the color of the green bird so it should not be shown in the normal green class.
Click image to enlarge
Orange-faced lutino pied and orange-faced dilute lovebirds. |
Orange-faced Australian cinnamon and orange-faced green lovebirds. |
If you pair a full orange-faced bird with a bird that has one orange-faced factor, then 50 percent of your birds will be visual orange-faced, and the other 50 percent will carry one orange-faced gene. If you pair two orange-faced birds together, 100 percent of your babies will be orange-faced. If you pair two birds that each only have one orange-faced factor – therefore are not visual orange-faced – then 25 percent of your babies will be visual orange-faced, 50 percent will have one orange-faced gene, and 25 percent will have no orange-faced genes. And lastly, if you pair a visual orange-faced bird with a bird that has no orange-faced genes, you will get no visual orange-faced birds, but all of your babies will have one orange-faced gene.
The cool thing about orange-faced and any lovebird mutation is that you can combine this mutation with any other mutation. Some favorite orange-faced combinations are the orange-faced Australian cinnamon and the orange-faced dilute.
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Those Little Orange Beauties
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