The Start of the Red Canary

In this sticky I will attempt to state how the Red canary was formed.

Here we have a pair of "Black Hooded Red Siskins" If you look at them the cock looks totally different to the hen.
This is referred to sexual dimorphism [Mosaic]





Then some one had an idea of crossing a Siskin with a canary and produced a F1

Here we have a F1 [first cross]




Originally I believe that first cross was done with a roller canary and in the early days the Red Factor as they were called was shown in a Lizard show cage in the UK, and very often the exhibits used to escape through the drinker hole of the show cage.

They then found that some of the Hybrids were fertile.
During further breedings some of the female offspring was very heavily frosted and were discarded as inferior, but infact they were following the hens dimorphic pattern [now called Mosaic]and gave the Red Factor something no other breed of canary had up to then and that was a third feather type "Mosaic".

Here I have found a couple of photo's of wild canary's

Red devil wrote: Here I have found a couple of photo's of wild canary's

looks simular to a mosaic yellow agate.
bob.

I see where your coming from but I think the horny areas are a little to dark for an AGATE but I do agree about the Mosaic pattern

That"s a very nice presentation Devil.

Red devil wrote:I see where your coming from but I think the horny areas are a little to dark for an AGATE but I do agree about the Mosaic pattern

I didnt take notice of the horny areas ile keep that in mind for another day.

bob

I don't know if anybody has mentioned this already but a great book on the subject of the red canary and its creation is The Red Canary: The story of the First Genetically Engineered Animal by Tim Birkhead, 2004. It's a brilliant book written by a geneticist with an interest in cage birds.

The wild cary is a yellow ground "normal" or put it another way in modern naming a Yellow black.
Bearing in mind a Brown series can only be visually brown but a black series bird can be visually black and brown. In modern birds we have bred blacks for shows to minimalise the brown so modern yellow blacks are visually green literally due to the reduced brown. The wild canary is not. Why? because it shows a lot of visual brown which mutes the colour and you also have this mosaic effect on the face.
Just think of a bad Red black (showing a lot of brown.) especially a hen, I had one, and I am not alone, it had a mosaic effect on the face - like a cock mosaic, and didn't show much red because it was masked by the visual brown.

So the wild canary looks the way it does because it has a lot of visual brown which masks the yellow......million miles from a mosaic.

Just going through these posts has reminded me what I was attempting when I started this sticky,
Which is the wild Canary is the for father of all Canaries and not just Coloured Canaries
and you think that there are over 80 different varieties in the world there are very few that has any resemblance in colour or size to the wild Canary.

Red devil wrote:Just going through these posts has reminded me what I was attempting when I started this sticky,
Which is the wild Canary is the for father of all Canaries and not just Coloured Canaries
and you think that there are over 80 different varieties in the world there are very few that has any resemblance in colour or size to the wild Canary.

I would split that into two differing camps red,,,the type canarys,,,which came from the original canary,,,and the coloured canarys which we can see came from hybrid stock,,,but as you say the original canary was in all of em,,,,johnboy...

JohnBoy you took the words right out of my mouth.
But I didn't go down that route as many will argue that although coloured canaries started as a hybrid they have been paired back to canaries that many times that all that is left of the Siskin is the red colour and mosaic feather type.
Also going one further classing coloured canaries as one type there are also three other types as well which are posture type and song.
But just trying to keep it on a lower level so that new comers can gain knowledge at a easier pace rather than being baffled by to much info at once. But I do agree with you.

god help em when the jaspe comes into it as well,,,a hybrid, hybrid ,,,with my understanding that the jaspe is a dominant mutation there will soon be a lot about imo,,,johnboy...

Thought I'd post a link to this article concerning the discovery of the gene causing red feathers in birds. I have also added a link to the original paper upon which the news article is partly based.

News article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-36302791


Link to the original paper concerning the red canary:

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdf/S0960-9822(16)30401-8.pdf

Shaun

Thanks for posting Shaun

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