Hello everyone, we will take a look at the reduced colour birds in a second, but I do need to do a bit
more work on the loft today. We had a big storm last night and you can see that a bit of water
got in, so I really I'm going to have to do some work on the front of the loft because it just
really isn't going to be possible for me to have a successful race team in a the loft that gets wet.
I'm thinking about trying something out here in the aviary section. I do like having this open roof
in the aviary section that the birds can sit in and enjoy a little bit of sun but I'm thinking about
making up some temporary roofs that I can put on the top section there just when it's going to rain
and hopefully that'll help a little bit in keeping the rain out. I'll have to do a few
more experiments, I think it's going to rain again over the weekend so I might put a little bit of
wood up the top just during the rain and see if that helps. Otherwise we might have to take
a bit more drastic action and put some shutters on the front to completely block the rain out.
Now before we take a closer look at the birds I'm going to do a bit more work lining the back
walls here with plywood. All right well it's a bit later in the day my, drill did go flat whilst I was
putting these panels up but you can see I have put the back panel up and I've also put
a panel down here underneath the aviary section. Another thing I've done is wired off the front
here, it was actually a mistake when I ordered the loft I forgot to tell them to put wire here
so I've put some in myself. You can see out there is the trap which is going to go here
and then there will be a wooden landing board out here as well. So all that really needs to happen
now is to put some perches on these walls and then the rest of the birds can come in.
What I haven't done yet is put up this side wall and that's just because I haven't decided how to
do it yet, but now that we've done that let's have a closer look at these pigeons. So I'll start with
this one, these birds are nice examples of a fairly rare but quite beautiful colour called "reduced".
This one's a hen and I'm pretty sure she's a reduced blue checker. There is a chance that
she might be a spread reduced, I'll have to do some breeding tests to figure that out for sure.
And if you've been watching my channel for a while you'll notice that this colour looks quite similar
to the recessive opal spread that I've been trying to breed but
although they look similar this is actually a completely different and totally unrelated colour.
Reduced is actually a sex-linked gene and I'll do another video on reduced in the future
but for now I'd just like to tell you a bit of an interesting story about them.
I'll grab one of the others and we can talk about it some more. So this one, I think, is a cock bird
and if you have a closer look you notice that he is an ash red reduced,
and this is a colour I actually hadn't even seen in person before I picked this guy up.
Reduced is a gene that works similar to dilute in that it reduces the amount of
colour in the bird but when you combine dilute with ash red you get a yellow whereas reduced
makes this beautiful pastel pink colour. Anyway I did say I'll tell you an interesting story about
reduced and that relates to the history of the colour. If you read any genetic book or
website it'll tell you that this gene, reduced, was discovered in America in the 1950s in
roller pigeons. The story goes that there was a young kid who had some funny coloured birds
and he bought them to show an older fancier who realised that there was something different,
he did some breeding tests and then described the new colour, reduced. But the interesting thing
is that in Australia it seems that this colour, or this gene reduced, has been in long distance racing
pigeons for a lot longer than that. This bird in particular is actually quite closely related to
to an 800 kilometre winner and a 1,000 kilometre race winner and it's not too uncommon to find this
gene in a lot of good quality long distance lofts in Australia, and something to remember is that
Australia was actually cut off from pigeon imports for a long time from the 1940s till about the
early 1990s so it's really unlikely that this colour was brought in from America.
It seems like this was a genuine mutation that occurred in Australia
completely separately to the mutation that happened in the States. You might remember
that I had reduced in the past if you've been watching for a while, I had the
"pink bar pigeon" but I actually lost him, he actually died before I was able to breed so I'm happy
to have this colour back and these ones are much higher racing quality than the previous one was.
These guys have been enjoying their time in the loft but I'm actually going to move them back into
their breeding box now, she's probably going to lay eggs in a few days so I'm going to put them back
in the nest box so let's bring these guys back out into the breeding boxes and have a look at the
other birds out there as well. Well he's very happy to be back in here, you might notice one change,
I've switched out their nesting bowl for a little corner scrape here. That's just to
stop them from having to jump into the deep bowl and damage their eggs like they had in the past.
I think she'll jump down and join him soon, and these guys will probably lay eggs in the next
couple of days, so let's give them some space and have a look at some of the other birds. Well
there's not too much more to talk about down here in the breeding boxes apart from these
little guys being just about ready for rings. Let's pull them out and see if they're ready.
Here they are. I think they're six days old now so they're probably just about ready,
let's give them a go.
I always put the lower ring number on the largest baby
which I think is this one and I always put the ring on the right leg upside
down which means that when you're holding the pigeon you can read the ring the right way up.
Actually looking at his feet we might be a day early but we'll give it a go.
So I take the foot, slide the front three toes through the ring,
push the foot through,
and then pull the back toe through. Oh! Yea, perfect size! Now we'll do the other one.
Same thing, right leg
the toes through, push the foot through, and pull the back toe.
And that's it. These guys have their rings, let's put them back with their parents. Well guys that's
about all for today the reduced birds are behind me down there. But thanks for watching and
if we're lucky the next time you see me on the weekend we'll have the rest of my birds in this loft!
And in the corner over there we have my third reduced, that one is a reduced grizzle
but I'll wait for her to get a bit older before I give you guys a closer look.