Color Identification

Paulines Spangle

Steve remembers playing in the dirt of his father’s aviary as a young boy.  Today he is in a partnership with his father and brother called "The Holland Stud".  They are all judges and Champion exhibitors.  The MBS is grateful for Steve's contribution to our Articles list.

It’s strange how events happen that make you think of different things! A few weeks ago the committee of a local club, asked me with a large number of new members, if I could give a talk on color identification. Within a few days I received a copy of the new color standards from the Budgerigar Society. Not until I look through the magazine did I realise what a daunting yet awe inspiring task it must be to identify different types of this bird we so love.  Our new standard contains two-color plates both of light greens, then written descriptions of all the other main colour types.  I guess as someone who has been around the budgerigar all his life it comes as second nature to go. …Well that’s a xyz, but to the newcomer to the hobby this must seem like some black art. Especially when you consider the number of combinations there must be, I would guess they run into the hundreds if not thousands. The truth is when I started to write this article I tried to work out how many combinations there where, when I reached over 8000 and still know of more I called it a day.  So I thought I would try and put down a few simple guideline that may be of help. With this in mind this article is primarily aimed at the newcomer to the hobby.

 I guess the first thing that should be remembered is that the description given to any budgerigar can be made up of up to three elements. First the body colour element of the bird and secondly the variety element of the bird this may be made up of several different elements and finally if applicable the variegation element of the bird again which can contain more than one element.  

Body colour

When I started to look for information that was a little more pictorial than the written word in the colour standards I came across a chart on the World Budgerigar Organisation web site that refers the body colour of budgerigars to a set of standardised color chart. The Pantone Colour Charts have been selected as their standard with each colour having a reference number, for example Light green is pantone colour 375. I felt if studied these colours will give the newcomer to the hobby a much better insight to the actual colour of a bird rather than the written word. After all the conversion of a visual image into the written word then expecting the newcomer to convert that written word back into a visual image is beset with problems. The only color selections I would disagree with are those for the Grey Green and Grey. Both seem a few shades light for the normal variety of the color type. As it also must be remembered that these colors on the color chart relate to the normal and therefore the darkest form of the colour, any variety variation from the normal wing markings acts as a lightening factor on the body colour.The opaline wing marking is one lightening factor,The cinnamon wing marking is two lightening factorsThe opaline cinnamon wing marking is three lightening factors, and so on through the entire wing marking variations.Certainly in the UK the newcomer can gain a lot of knowledge as to which of these lightening factors a given wing marking has by following the classification in our standard show schedule. Normal is followed by opaline, then cinnamon, then opaline cinnamon etc. This gives a reasonable indication as to how little the body coloration of a bird would be given any variety markingThe other piece of advice that still rings in may ears, comes from my father. As young lads learning about budgerigars he would regularly say, “the top and bottom of a bird will always tell you what it is”. What he meant by this is that a birds check patches and tail are excellent guides to a birds color. Take for example the distinction between a dark green and a grey green. In the case of the dark green the check patches are violet and it tail is dark blue, where as the grey green has a grey check patch and a black tail. If you look at the color standards a number of these distinctive differences can be found.