Educational Budgie Pix

In captivity, this budgie has good food and water available all the time. Her instincts are telling her it is time to breed, since there's enough food and water to support babies. However, she does not have a hollow tree or a nest box. Just like wild budgies, she is trying to dig a nest cavity at the base of this potted tree.

The blue and white budgie above, and the blue and yellow budgie to the left, are both "dominant pied" birds. Pied refers to the splotchy patterns of colors on the bird. Dominant pieds, like the ones displayed here, have characteristic patterning to the colors. Dominant pieds have the spot on the back of the head, and white or yellow flight feathers (the long wing feathers). If those are the only pied markings they have, the bird is called a "clearflight". The blue and white budgie is a clearflight. But others, like the budgie to the left, have a horizontal band of white or yellow color across the belly. When you see a clearflight or a bird with that color band across it's belly, you know it is a dominant pied. To see another example of a dominant pied, check out the wallpaper at Budgerigar Heaven

There are other pieds which do not have these characteristic markings; those are called recessive pieds. The yellow bird to the left is a recessive pied. Notice that it doesn't have the same markings as a dominant pied (for instance, almost all the head markings are gone on this particular bird, not just a spot). The recessive pieds tend to have more random patterns of splotchyness to them.

How do you tell if a budgie is male or female? Well, that depends. If the bird is an adult (birds in pet shops are usually babies), and if it is not pure yellow, pure white, or recessive pied, there is an easy way to tell the sex.

See the little fleshy place at the base of the beak, where the nostrils are? That's called the "cere". The cere on an adult male budgie is blue. The cere on an adult female budgie is tan or brown. These two birds are males.







We know these two birds are female, becuase of the brown ceres.

If you have a white, yellow, or recessive pied budgie, the cere of the adult male is pink. Both of the birds in the picture to the left are males.

Baby budgies' ceres are a purplish color. To tell the sex of a baby budgie, you will have to observe its behavior. We will look at the behavior of male and female budgies on page two..