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.
