York  Budgerigar Society

The practical application of the principles which I have described is not too difficult if the breeder exercises common sense and feels that he knows exactly what he is doing as regards the choice of the animals from which he is to breed, and the way in which he mates them. When he starts to establish a family, the better the stock he uses, the more will be the good properties they possess, and the fewer the faults; therefore, the sooner is he likely to reach his objective. Better by far have few in numbers of high quality than many inferior specimens.

When purchasing the original animals or birds, if they are from a very successful inbred family, they will be more useful to the novice than if they are unrelated, because the buyer will then be, as it were, carrying on the good work of the person from whom he buys instead of starting from scratch. Owners of the larger animals all keep pedigrees. The fanciers of the smaller animals and birds are not always as particular as they ought to be in this respect.

An elementary rule in mate selection, which applies also when unrelated individuals are paired, is never to put together a male and a female which both have the same fault, even a minor one.

The owner must know well (or he must in his early days consult those who do know) exactly what the ideal is that he ultimately hopes to achieve; in short, he must be able to visualize the perfect bird or animal of the species which he cultivates.

As previously stated, the breeder must never over- look that the maxim ‘quality before quantity’ is of paramount importance. The man who cannot, because of space limitation or some other reason, keep a large number of budgerigars or pigeons, for instance, can still found a strain and breed many winners providing the quality of his stock is right.

The quality line

Every year he must set a quality line, and any bird or animal which falls below that line must not be bred from. Every year onwards that quality line must be raised higher. Taking birds as our example—although the same remarks apply in principle to all livestock—toward the end of the year when the young birds have moulted the owner should cage all the young stock and their parents. Each pair of adults should be put into cages, and alongside them all the youngsters which they have bred. The owner is now faced with the task of selecting those which he should retain for the following breeding season.

Never should a bird be kept merely to make up a pair. There must be a definite and well-understood reason for every pairing. This is the occasion when the rule of ruthless elimination should operate to the full.

The selection of mates should be made ‘on paper’ well before the date of the actual commencement of breeding. The preliminary list of pairs will no doubt be changed as time passes, so that when the actual mating time arrives the breeding team is as near perfect as it can be.

When mate selecting the bird breeder should select the best cock and choose for it the most suitable hen, as judged from both appearance and pedigree, then the second best cock and the best hen for it, and so continue the process until the pairings are complete. To put it in another way, he should not ‘average’ the pairs, by which I mean mating a very good cock to a hen of inferior quality, or an exceedingly pleasing hen to a moderate cock, based on the theory that the bad points of one bird will offset the good points of the other, which method is only likely to result in the production of youngsters of average merit.

The way to improve any property is to have it good in both mates, no matter what kind of livestock is concerned, and the pedigrees of the two specimens put together should also indicate ancestral goodness in the same property. All this applies just the same whether the parents are unrelated or related, though if there is kinship between them, then the chance of producing a better head (for example) is all the greater.

Of course, just as a good property can be improved by the intensifying plan which I have described, so can a fault be intensified if it is shown by both mates of a pair, or if their respective pedigrees disclose it is a family fault carried by ancestors on both sides of the mating.

Health and vigour

When inbreeding not only has one to take into consideration the virtues of the pedigree (and also the weaknesses, if any) and the appearance of the bird or animal to be mated, but also its health and vigour. An animal which has ever had an illness or was a ‘bad doer’ as a youngster, or has ever had a set-back to its development, should never be used for breeding purposes. The reason for this is, of course, as I stated in an earlier chapter, that inbreeding can fix weakness of constitution if proper precautions are not taken.

Stock used for the laying of the foundations of a strain should not be lacking in fecundity. If there is a tendency to infertility in any of the animals used, then inbreeding can accentuate it, although inbreeding itself will not cause it.

Again taking birds as an example only, because exactly the same remarks would apply to animals, let us imagine that we have two related individuals. It is our wish to improve upon their own good properties, and for which their family is noted.

By reason of the fact that they are related they are more likely both to have the power to reproduce their own and their inherited good properties in their children. If they were not related, one might have the factors for the good qualities, but they might be absent in the other, which, incidentally, is one of the main reasons for the success of inbreeding and the danger attendant on outcrossing.

Apart from the employment of foundation sires or dams, and when one is rolling-up the good properties in a family, every bird used for the purpose fully satisfying the owner, it is often desirable to inbreed back to one parent and not the other. Here is an example:

We have had paired two very good budgerigars, the cock excelling in head and the hen not quite so good, and with head not such a strong feature of her pedigree as it is in that of the cock. Among their youngsters there are young cocks and hens with very good heads, and young cocks and hens not bad but not quite so good in head. In other properties all the young ones are of about equal merit.

Even the best of the cocks which are not so good in head must not be mated back to the mother, because they have inherited her weakness. But the best of the young hens which excel in head must be mated back to her father in order to effect still further improvement in head. Of course, I have only used head as an example. There can, in fact, be several properties involved simultaneously in a back-mating of this kind.

As to how close to inbreed is a vexed question. In my own operations, if there is very close inbreeding with a pair one season, say father to daughter, I like to mate their offspring to aunts, uncles, cousins, half- brothers or half-sisters in the following season, thus going a bit further out, though I do not by any means make this an invariable rule. The suitability to each other of the two birds mated is the keystone of my endeavour.

Effect of age

A common fallacy, oft expressed, is that stock is more capable of breeding youngsters of high merit in their early breeding years than they are when they can be described as aged. And another mistaken idea is that the best young ones are bred at certain times of the year, May and June often being selected as the best months for budgerigars, canaries and pigeons. It may well be that the quality of the offspring from young parents, or offspring reared in summer, turn out than others, but in so far as genetics are concerned, neither the parents’ ages nor date of birth have any control whatever. But even though the reason for results may not be what most people think it is, there is an argument in favour of not breeding from two old birds or animals, and it is this:

Although they carry the same genes (factors) for the different properties that they did when they were born, it may well be that owing to advancing years those points will not reach maximum possibility of development in the children, due to constitution, not heritability. And, similarly, youngsters which are reared in the warm, sunny days of summer are often more likely to reach the maximum possibility of development line than those bred in inclement short days of January and February, though I have seen at our shows some fine exhibits which came into this world soon after Christmas!

For the reasons stated I always pair together either two comparatively young individuals, an aged male to a young female, or a young male to an older female.

Breeding by charts

Some who advocate line-breeding prepare elaborate and often complicated charts to demonstrate how the descendants of a given pair of animals (or birds) should be mated to produce after a number of generations the near-ideal specimen. The animals are treated as units and the selection and elimination of individuals does not play such an important part as it does in my much more flexible system. Personally, I have little liking for these charts, the presentation of which to a novice might well give him the impression that the breeding of pedigree animals is no more than a mathematical process, which must result in the breeding of winners with clockwork regularity. If it were all so simple as this, truly livestock culture would lose that uncertainty which is one of its greatest charms.