How to Breed Cage Birds for Colour

Breeding birds is a popular pasttime for enjoyment, new discoveries, challenges, friendships and even an income. Large amounts of money is spent on acquiring breeding stock and caring for the birds in the aviaries. Literally thousands of books, guides and manuals have been written on the subject.

Yet up to now there has been one serious shortcoming. There is no accurate recipe for breeding birds of specific colours. By trial and error most breeders have devised tables of information where they describe that, for instance, crossing a white and a yellow bird, will result in a red offspring, but they do not know why!

This book now for the first time discloses new discoveries in the creation of bird colours that will allow bird breeders to exactly plan and predict bird breeding to achieve specific outcomes and colours. The new discoveries centre around:

* Normal bird colours are a creation of only three basic colours, mixed in different proportions.

* Each bird species’ members have specific colour blocks on their bodies where the three colours are either active or not active.

* All colour changes are as a result of specific inheritable, identifiable and controllable defects. No colour change is spontaneous or a sudden new mutation!

Amazingly the human eye can not detect the magenta colour of light waves, as it is not a colour on the visual colour spectrum. A magenta coloured bird in the aviary will appear white to the human eye! But if the breeder wants to breed with it, he must know its true hidden colour, referred to as the virtual colour of the bird. This “magenta trap” explains why a white bird crossed with a yellow bird reproduces red birds. It is because the white in some birds is actually magenta, and magenta and yellow produces the red offspring!

In studying bird colours for more than 40 years, amongst others as a bird breeder, the author has made a number of remarkable new discoveries related to the creation and changes in bird colours. What he has discovered explains all the different bird colours appearing in aviaries and as seen by bird watchers in nature, and also point scientists in a direction to revise and perfect the “Science of Avichroma”, the name that he has given to the science of studying bird colours.

The book contains four sections, discussing the formation of colours in birds, describing the 9 colour defects, of which 4 causes most colour changes, describing step by step how bird breeders should plan, track and breed their birds for colours, and a section with general information.

With the knowledge contained in this book, bird breeders will now for the first time, by breeding with virtual birds and keeping proper records, be able to fully understand the differently coloured birds of the same species that they may breed.

This publication establishes Avichroma as the Sciene of Colour in Birds and will contribute immensely to the understanding and predicting bird colours when breeding birds.