Tony Silva NEWS: Questions and answers. “If I rear a Sun Conure and a Green-cheeked Conure together, can I produce Sun-cheek Conures?”

Tony Silva NEWS

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QUESTION:

If I rear a Sun Conure and a Green-cheeked Conure together, can I produce Sun-cheek Conures?

ANSWER:

The answer is simple: No. Having an understanding of the name given to a species can certainly help understand its background. The Catalina Macaw is a hybrid between the Scarlet and the Blue and Gold (or reverse pairing). The name Catalina Macaw is derived from the now defunct Catalina Island Bird Park, where this hybrid was first produced. Their developer, as a means of giving that form recognition, can name the hybrid or mutation anything that they deem fit.

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A lory hybrid parrot at Lowry Park Zoo, USA. (c) Marcus Quigmire. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

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This year we inadvertently produced a very unique hybrid. In a flight cage containing Amazon parrots, I placed a male Illiger´s Macaw. This bird was accustomed to sleeping in the nest; the Amazons never sleep in a nest. The first night, the small macaw called all night, so the next day I affixed a small nest to the cage. I never worried about the birds as the Amazons were all males. The group included Yellow-crowned, Double Yellow-headed, Yellow-winged Amazons and a single Vinaceous Amazon, which I had acquired with an understanding that it was a male; the other birds had been DNA sexed by me and placed in same sex groups as I did not want any fighting. Overs months, the birds in the group separated into “pairs”. These “pairs” fed, played and roosted together. There was really never any aggression in the group.

This spring when I returned home from a prolonged European work trip, I immediately left my suitcase inside the house and went to see my birds. It was getting dark and I could not see with certainty but the Vinaceous Amazon could not be accounted for. The Illiger´s was in its cage. I had thought about getting a flashlight and looking, but that would have caused pandemonium in the birds. So I waited for daybreak. The sun had not yet emerged when I was standing in front of the cage. The Vinaceous was clearly gone; the Illiger´s was inside the nest. Something made me open the nest and to my great surprise the Vinaceous was inside resting next to the Illiger´s. The Double Yellow-headed Amazon immediately flew to the front of the cage and began to display with the Vinaceous, which had hesitatingly emerged. What the nest contained was my greatest surprise: a chick aged about a week. The bird was in fact a female and it had nested under amicable terms in the Illiger´s Macaw nest. Had that experiment been attempted it would have failed, with one bird or another being injured, but Murphy´s Law had not peered its head. The chick eventually had to be taken for hand-rearing. It was coined by a worker the Redland Amazon, this after the city in which I reside. I suppose that we could take that liberty as I have never heard of this hybrid pairing before.

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Lovebird (Agapornis sp; a hybrid cross between Agapornis personatus x Agapornis fischeri). (c) DEMOSH. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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Now back to the Suncheek. It is not a hybrid but the pairing of a pineapple and a dilute. So rearing a Sun and a Green-cheeked Conure will not yield this coveted new form.

Over the next few months, I will continue to select a few questions and answer them in this forum as a means of sharing information.

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Title photo: (c) Derik Coetzee. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

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