A Guide to Exhibiting and Showing your Budgerigars: With Tips on Exhibition Cages. Breeding Winners, Preparing and Washing your Budgerigar, a Guide to Judging and the Points System Used, with Pictures of Undesirable Features

By Read Books Ltd.

This antiquarian volume comprises a complete guide to exhibiting and showing budgerigars, including tips on exhibition cages, breeding winners, preparing and washing your budgerigar, and a guide to judging and the points systems. This comprehensive and profusely illustrated handbook is highly recommended for modern budgerigar enthusiasts, and constitutes a must-read for those with an interest in entering budgerigar competitions. The chapters of this book include: “Exhibiting”, “How to Breed Winners”, “Preparing for Exhibition”, “How to Wash a Budgerigar”, “Judging”, “Points for Colour”, “Masks, Spots and Wing-Markings”, “Undesirable Features”, and “Good Husbandry Pays”. This antiquarian book is being republished now in an affordable, modern edition - complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on aviculture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781473390560

Book preview

EXHIBITION BUDGERIGARS

INTRODUCTORY

IN MANY FORMS OF LIVESTOCK we recognize two distinct sections, one bred almost wholly for economic or utility purposes and the other for development of show points. That there is no correlation or at least no reliable linkage between such show points and productivity is a well-established fact; the set of a boar’s tail or the thickness of his tail has nothing to do with his ability to sire young which excel in the quality of their bacon; the size of a cow’s udder has nothing to do with her milk yield and neither has the straightness of her back. The exhibition cockerel is less likely to influence his wives in the production of high-yielding pullets than the common rooster. That there is some connection between show points and performance as a producer has been maintained by pedigree breeders, by breeders who turn out show winners, because it is of economic importance to them to maintain this belief. The faith in the value of show points as a means of increasing the usefulness of producers is without factual foundation.

Fortunately in the budgerigar we are concerned wholly with show points, and, apart from the young which may emerge from them in due course, the eggs laid by the budgerigar hen, her sole production, are of no economic value; we thus do not require to concern ourselves with anything other than show points, and, as a hobby which brings great pleasure and interest into many humdrum lives, the sport of budgerigar breeding and exhibiting is highly commendable. It is not devoid of educational value, and I think much could be done to further interest amongst young people by the inclusion in the curriculum of schools, of elementary teaching in Mendelian inheritance, and, as an example, the budgerigar is probably the most useful.

The colours are distinctive and easily recognizable; the bird itself is attractive and easily catered for, and I know of no other cage bird which provides such an instant appeal to the very young. I have many very young children who stop me on the street and say, Please can I seen your budgies some time? The novice is attracted by the colours and mannerisms, and for a time this meets his requirements; he becomes interested in studying how the birds nest, how they lay their eggs, how they rear their young and how their young develop; for a few seasons perhaps he is engrossed in these repetitive proceedings.

The edge wears off after a bit, however, and I know of few fanciers who keep budgerigars merely to see them in an aviary after a few years. One becomes accustomed to the birds; one grows used to seeing Greens, Blues and Yellows flying around inside wire-netting enclosures, and like everything else familiarity breeds a certain amount of indifference; the breeder no longer watches the birds with his original interest; he takes them for granted; he takes it for granted that they will go to nest when given a box, that they will lay an egg every second day for a week or ten days, and that young will eventually leave the nest, and then he merely has some more budgerigars.

This sort of thing alone becomes monotonous; but there is fortunately something beyond all this, something which yields an interest never previously experienced, something to which there is no limit, in which keenness rather than becoming dulled by the passage of time, becomes sharpened. The breeder who makes the mere multiplication of budgerigars the beginning and end of his hobby does not experience a fraction of the pleasure obtainable from the full development of budgerigar cultivation as opposed to mere increase of stock.

In most cases the time comes when the breeder visits a bird show and sees on the benches birds which surpass his own; he visits a few more shows and gets to know a number of fanciers; he himself becomes a fancier because he begins to study the Fancy Points, the show points; he listens-in to discussions of head quality, wing carriage, throat spots and feather texture, and he finds his hobby something much more satisfying than he realized.

This was my experience; I kept a few budgerigars for a year or two before I visited a bird show; I used to tame them and had them flying about in the room. I multiplied them until I had to build an outdoor aviary to accommodate the young; I next transferred the breeding pairs into this stock aviary, and there they bred whilst the young were found extended accommodation. I had no thought of anything beyond this side of the hobby until I happened to see a budgerigar on a show bill in town one afternoon. It caught my attention and, having little to do at the time, I visited the show.

I have never forgotten my amazement at the indescribable noise which met my ears when I entered the hall. I had never experienced anything like this in my humble aviaries; to me, a novice, it was almost deafening, and budgerigars, canaries, foreign birds and British songsters can, in the aggregate, create quite a noise. I had a look at the budgerigars; only a few were on show in these days, and only Greens and Yellows, mostly in pairs. They certainly looked much superior to my specimens and I began to wonder why.

I buttonholed a few strangers who seemed to know something about them, asked a lot of questions, and was initiated into the show points of the budgerigar. I was put out of the hall with the last few when closing time came, and from that afternoon I have never ceased to appreciate the vast increase in interest which followed my introduction to the budgerigar as a show bird. I became much keener than I have ever been about anything; I bought every book I could get on budgerigars, studied every drawing, went through my stock with a fine-toothed comb, and chose the two or three which were in my estimation superior to the rest. I foolishly spent a great deal of money for a year or two after that, buying winners, excellent show birds, pedigreed stock, until I realized that this was leading nowhere. Few of my purchases got into the tickets, and I realized at long last that one does not buy winners, but that one can breed them. In my early years I showed at show after show and never even got within reach of a commended ticket.

Success Cannot be Bought.

It was only when I realized my folly in trying to buy success instead of working towards it that I began to have my birds noticed by a judge at a small show now and again. I have never regretted these early experiences, and I am indeed glad that my career in the Fancy was from the lowest rung of the ladder. Apprenticeship is vitally necessary.

My late father, a retired clergyman, who had bred canaries, British and mules, for several years, repeatedly dinned into me the need for good foundation stock and for the adoption of a correct system of breeding in place of the haphazard one employed by me. Eventually I listened and realized the need for this apprenticeship; I grew in humility and went out in search of knowledge from fanciers who were gaining successes on the show bench; I joined the Budgerigar Society.

I advise every breeder of budgerigars to join the Budgerigar Society. Until he becomes a member of this great fellowship of fanciers he cannot find full satisfaction in his hobby; he has no means of getting in touch with more than a few local fanciers; he cannot have accurate official guidance as to show points and the breeding methods used to establish these in his stock.

In the Budgerigar Society he will meet personally or by correspondence well-known successful fanciers whom he would otherwise never meet; in the Bulletin he will get a wealth of information and many of the answers to his problems, and he will be contributing to the advancement of the sport.

I still read Cage Birds each week from cover to cover, not only the articles but even the advertisements which appear week after week in almost identical form. I go through all the show reports and note the names of those who are successful. Many of them I know personally, and their continued success over many years is a tribute to their high ability as producers of exhibition budgerigars. Many well-known names no longer appear and some will never appear again. Many grand fanciers have passed, but, in their passing, they have left behind them a grand memory of rare tussles for honours, of stories galore, of rare good fellowship.

These old-timers were imbued with the spirit of the sport; their thought was not of financial gain so much as being able to turn out