I picked up 5 new quail today, in pursuit of more breeding goals.
I'm still trying to confirm that 4 of them are what I think they are (I've literally never seen blue or pansy in person), BUT: The first one is tentatively a het blue, extended brown hen with white wing pied (she might be Andalusian EB though), the second one I believe is a homozygous blue pharaoh rooster (and I'm pretty sure that's correct, no white wing tips, no mosaic patches, BUT it was in a cage with a bunch of birds showing Andalusian mosaic patches, so I suspect he has BOTH genes), the third and fourth are pansy (roo and then hen, I'm trying to get confirmation WHICH Pansy since there's American Pansy and German Pansy and they look very similar), and the last two pics are the same bird, which I know for sure is a het fawn het sparkly male.
I have time to chill and ID them, as they are in quarantine for a while. They'll get tested for PT tomorrow and I'll be putting them through a round of endo- and ecto-parasite treatments once they have de-stressed from travel. They all appear to be in good health (and since more people keep quail hutched, they tend to be less likely to have illnesses than chickens, who get into fucking EVERYTHING), so I don't expect to see anything pop up over the next month. Once they clear quarantine, I'll set them up to plain-old make more of themselves, since I don't know how old they are, and once I have a few of each mutation, I'll start working on test breeding and cleaning them and changing the lines over to being celadon in those colors/patterns.
It's EXTREMELY funny to me, because I went to this swap with intention to bring home zero animal. I had said ahead of time that I had no plans, I was just going to visit and browse, but that if I HAPPENED to see a blue or a sparkly, I'd probably come home with them. But it was SO unlikely, because I had been casually looking for them all this year and part of last year, since my last Sparkly fawn passed without laying a single fertilized egg.... I guess the male didn't like her. I've never seen Sparkly locally at least not since I learned to ID it, and while I've probably seen blue, it's so close in color to silver and andalusian that I still would have a hard time differentiating. Pansy.... forget it, I've never seen either version locally or in person ever. That wasn't even on my radar because there was no chance of me finding it.
And yet.... I got blue (hopefully) from two different breeders, found the fawn sparkly immediately after stepping foot in the swap, and the Pansy just happened to be in some random guy's big cage of slb and fee pharaohs.
The guy who originally mass produced celadons made a "red white and blue" line by having roux [ie red] EB + het dotted white + celadon blue eggs. But I think it would be a lot funnier to have blue celadons.
Is it just me or are the first bird's feathers a little ragged? (I ask because I know that melanin keeps bird feathers strong. My ornithology professor researched that.)
They're all pretty beat up at the moment, both because it's JUST before molting season begins properly, and because they had been in transport. The pansies look the best out of that group, but all of them are sporting bald patches (and most of them lesions) from pecking from cage mates and damaged feathers from normal wear and tear over months as well as bird-to-bird interactions and transport first to the swap, being in transports at the swap, and being transported home. Melanin does not so much "keep feathers strong" as it does provide part of the structure and break down less easily in sun/UV exposure. Most coturnix aren't getting a bunch of UV, as they're in hutches inside structures, so even the whites - while they do suffer slightly more easily broken feathers, as evidenced by the second bird - do not really have the same breakdown in feathers w/ color differences as, say, the peafowl, who are out in the sun like they've been hired to absorb sunbeams.
There's other factors as well; feed is probably the biggest amongst them. Without getting the right protein and other elements needed to grow in strong feathers.... they won't grow in strong feathers, and the feathers may break down easier. The cleaner the housing, the less preening they'll need to do to keep their feathers neat, and that means less physical breakdown. The less bird-on-bird interaction they have, the better condition their feathers will be in- for example a hen in a 1:1 enclosure with a male is going to be beat the hell up with feathers constantly in poor repair, because the male will be overbreeding her. A hen in a large, clean aviary with a few other hens is going to have great feathering because she won't have to deal with her feathers getting ruffled in mating every 15 minutes and will not ruffled or scrape her own feathers against wire sides.
I say all of this because it's not as simple as "more melanin = better feathers" and I wouldn't want anyone to assume a care issue is a genetics issue and do nothing to try to fix it just because the bird is lighter colored, or assume that darker birds will automatically look better. Every time I see a "black" morph coturnix it looks like it went through a blender, and some mutations like recessive black (not one the public can breed thankfully, it's lab-only) have messed up feathers because of their mutation.
Which is all to say: yes, she could have slightly more raggedy feathers in general because she's lighter. Or it could be easier to see because her photo is bigger, or it could be damage from transport, or from me holding her against my chest while I walked back to the car, or she could have been poorly fed, or she could have been overbred, or she could have been housed in a small or overpopulated hutch, or or or. It's hard to say for 100% certain.
These are gorgeous quail!! I'm excited because I will be installing a quail enclosure today for the first time and now wondering where I can find good info about proactive parasite treatments for my new quail when I have acquired them?
