Hobbyist bird breeding farm in Liege Province, Belgium
Double factor blue-face brown Chinese painted quails (Coturnix chinensis).
Breeding birds for the season 2020.
My objective is to produce solid dark brown birds, without white patches anymore.
I firstly would like to precise that the below-pictured birds were not bred in my aviaries but well bought from another breeder.
They normally should have been pure specimens of the Masked bobwhite (Colinus virginianus ridgwayi) but a quick 5 seconds examination confirmed that there is without any doubt blood of Northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) mixed inside…
I have no idea how much %, F1 or F2? and the exact mating(s) done…
Male:
Female:
This is a little “head comparison” collage I made of the two pure species and my “hybrid” bird in the middle… I think it helps to understand better!
It is quite difficult to determine how much % blood of common Northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) is present in the genotype of those hybrid birds but, in my opinion, the breeder crossed more that one time …
I will not try to make the same collage with female heads because the difference is most on the back for hens.
In the series of brown birds, the palette of shades is really very wide.
This is even difficult for me to understand.
Here is a really dark bird that was born this year 2019.
My personal taste goes for these darker birds as they have more contrast and better marks. Pale brown birds are often fuzzy, especially on the back.
I regret that the bird had not already completed his moult when I toke those pictures on September 22th, 2019 but in all the cases I will take better snaps in a few weeks.
I photographed this bird because he seemed very dark to me, I mean very blue.
However she doesn’t come from my “Graukopf” bloodlines, I already paired this female with a young US Red-breasted silver type “Graukopf”
I am curious to see how the progeniture will look like!
