Cotton Bud - Male or Female - Mutation

[freddyboy]

Cotton Buds behaviour, repeating whistles, being noisey until he goes to bed, indicates that he is a boy. I am just wondering his mutation is, he's a white face / something else. Can you tell me what the something else is.

[freddyboy]

This is after his 6mth molt I believe these two pictures so it can hopefully make it a bit easier to tell than the other ones I posted a few months ago.

[Mythara]

She's a cinnamon whiteface, and from the photos she's a female. a male would have a white face mask - like normal males have yellow ones. Unless you're off with the age, or she could just have had an early moult, you have a noisy female.

[srtiels]

From the looks of his face he is just starting to molt in his white facial mask. Right now it looks like he has speckles of white on his cheeks.

[tielfan]

He looks like a "spot gene" chick too - this seems to be an unrecognized mutation that some of us have been speculating about for months. He looks a lot like my Pippin, who is a young whiteface grey male.

http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j24/ch_tielfan/DSC00138.jpg

http://i76.photobucket.com/albums/j24/ch_tielfan/pippin.jpg

[freddyboy]

thanks tielfan - your picture of Pippin looks exactly like what Cotton Bud looks like in person. Unfortunately, my camera has stuffed up and my phone camera isn't the best.

Why is the mutation unrecognised?

[tielfan]

I guess the pattern isn't striking enough for the cockatiel associations to take an interest in it and investigate it. It seems to be strongly associated with the whiteface gene in the US, but apparently it's sometimes seen in wild cockatiels in Australia. It might be a common genetic variation in the wild that has somehow become more specialized in the US.

[freddyboy]

it's ashame, I believe this mutation is a very beautiful one to my Cinnamon Whitefaced.

[tielfan]

I wish they'd look into it so I can find out what the transmission mode is! I don't know if it's dominant, recessive, sex-linked or whatever. My mother bird definitely has the gene, but males lose their spot markings when they get their mature plumage so I can't tell whether my father bird has the gene or not. He already had his adult plumage when I got him.