Parakeets For Dummies. Nikki Moustaki

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Chapter 1

      Parakeets: More Than Just Pretty, Whistling Birds

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      The word parakeet is a generic term for any smallish, slender bird in the parrot family that has a long, tapered tail. But when most people think “parakeet,” they think of the small, brightly colored bird common to most pet shops and to almost everyone’s childhood.

      Parakeets are about 7 inches in length (with the English budgie at around 9 inches), and most of that length is taken up by the tail. This species, Melopsittacus undulatus, also called the budgerigar (budgie is its nickname), is found in large flocks in the grasslands of the Australian outback. The English budgie has the same Latin species name, even though it is much larger.

      WHERE PARAKEETS COME FROM

      Parakeets arrived in Europe around 1838, brought from Australia by British naturalist John Gould and his brother-in-law, Charles Coxen, who raised the first clutch (batch of babies). Europeans found that these birds were easy to breed, and wealthy people fell in love with them. They soon became popular in Germany, Belgium, France, and Holland.

      A yellow mutation occurred in Belgium around 1875, leading to other color mutations, including olive, dark green, gray-green. Companion parakeets were simply green, as they are in the wild, until around 1881 when a Dutch bird keeper found a blue chick hatched in the nest boxes. This blue bird was responsible for other mutations: cobalt, mauve, slate, gray, and violet.

The parakeet arrived in America around the late 1920s, but didn’t become popular as a companion until the 1950s. Today, there are hundreds of color mutations and variations. Even so, the most common colors are the most popular: green, blue, yellow, and white.

The American Parakeet versus the English Budgie

      Though the American parakeet and the English budgie both got their start in Australia, the American parakeet is more similar to its wild cousin than the English budgie. The English budgie is what hobbyists call an exhibition bird or a show budgie, because it is often shown in large budgie shows (kind of like dog shows, but for birds). It’s nearly twice the size of the American parakeet, and it claims its English name because the British, who received the exhibition size budgie from Western Europe, sent the exhibition budgie to America.

The English budgie is basically domesticated, which means that it has been changed from its wild form using selective breeding practices. This kind of selective breeding (choosing to breed only the animals that have desired traits so that the young will also have and pass on these traits to future generations) is what humans have done with dogs for thousands of years. (Notice how different dog breeds look so dissimilar from one another — it’s hard to imagine that they all originated from a couple of species of wild dog.) Though no parrot is truly domesticated, the English budgie is the closest.

Though technically called the budgie, the terms parakeet and budgie are interchangeable (see Figure 1-1). Some people call the larger version of the parakeet the budgie and the smaller version the parakeet — but it really doesn’t matter which term you use. For СКАЧАТЬ