My Experience with Dominant Pieds

Early Attractions

I was first attracted to dominant pieds by their beautiful markings and the distinctive colours shown in the variegation on their wings and body markings.  It then occurred to me that it would be nice to see a ‘pretty budgie’ winning the top awards at major shows and this aspiration became almost an obsession.  To this end, year after year, I have intentionally paired my top normals to my pieds. 

When I first started breeding pieds it was quite common to see banded variegation, sadly today this is seldom seen.  I have brought this imperfection about in my own stud as a by-product of striving to produce dominant pieds that have a full set of spots.  Nowadays judges tend to place a fully spotted bird of lesser overall quality in front of a well marked pied that might have a spot or two wiped out by the variegation.  It is a puzzle to me that spangles that are lacking spots are seldom penalised in this way and can even be considered for major awards despite the BS ideal clearly stating that they should also have spots.

Background

Almost all of my initial stock of budgerigars was acquired from Ken Spraggs in 1986.  He was at the time a very highly rated fancier both in the south west and nationally, having won many prizes at the highest level.  He was a great help to me in my early days in the hobby.  In 1987 I returned to him to buy one or two good outcrosses and saw the most beautiful sky blue dominant pied in his sales cage.  Needless to say it was the highest priced bird there, but I swallowed hard and bought it.  It had been bred from Eric Lane stock.  Eric at the time was undoubtedly breeding the best pieds in the UK and I was delighted to have a bird from his bloodline.  This bird proved to be a very good investment as it bred prolifically.  In its first breeding season it sired many youngsters that won major awards for me during my second year in the hobby.  Amongst them was an outstanding sky blue pied which won many best young bird awards.  At the club show that year it won a young bird Challenge Certificate and was well placed in the beginner young bird section line up.  This was when I became a serious pied breeder.  Although I had taken the first step towards my early objective, I still needed to win Best Young Bird in Show, or better still, Best in Show with the variety.

Establishing a Family

As I wanted to develop a stud of top quality Dominant Pieds, all the chicks bred from the cock I bought from Ken were retained and paired back into the birds that I had obtained from him the previous year.  Checking his records proved to be very beneficial as I found that I had bought other birds that contained Lane blood.  All pairings were made with this in mind and fingers crossed.  The sky pied that won for me at Doncaster bred seventeen chicks in three rounds, and seven of them were pieds. His brothers and sisters, pieds and normals, also bred very well.  Every pied in my stud can be traced back to that original winning sky blue pied.   From that time I continued to win many awards achieving my ambition in 1996 when my young grey pied won Best Young Bird in Show at Worcester BS.  This cock went on to win the CC and best pied in show at Doncaster that year.  It also won me my first Best in Show award at the open championship show at Bristol in 1998. 

After a few years of line breeding I noticed that the number of pieds bred were diminishing year by year.  I found that I could overcome this problem by the regular introduction of new blood into the family.   A study of my breeding records over fifteen years backs up this theory.  This course of action also helps in the breeding of other visual dominant varieties. 

Show Success

I have continued to do well on the show bench and also in the breeding cage with dominant pieds, winning many major awards every year since the open show at Worcester in 1996.  I have won Best Young Bird in show twelve times and Best in Show five times with this variety.  The normals from this line have also performed very well winning even more top awards than the dominant pieds.  However, last year a cinnamon light green pied cock that was late bred in 2001 came to the fore winning no less four Best in Show awards, eight Best Champion Any Age awards and thirteen Challenge Certificates, probably making it one of the most successful dominant pieds of all time.  The successful year peaked at the Budgerigar Society Show at Doncaster where it won Best Champion Any Age, a Challenge Certificate and Best Pied in Show.  This bird is a natural in the show cage and takes absolutely no notice of a day out at show.  On its return home from Doncaster, following a short rest, it was paired to a hen from the same line and she has produced eight fertile eggs - fingers crossed for birds on the perch.

Using Dominant Pieds as Outcrosses

Over the years I have established a successful line of redeyes in tandem with my pieds.  I have used pieds as outcrosses to the redeyes to produce very high quality lutinos and albinos.  I have won many Challenge Certificates with both redeye varieties, including Best Redeye in Show at the Club Show both with a young lutino and an albino.   I believe pieds make excellent outcrosses not only because of their size and feather quality but also because they have good colour and markings which enhance the redeye varieties, particularly because of their clear flights and variegation on the wings.  My ideal pairing to improve lutinos would be an opaline yellow face cobalt pied hen to the best lutino cock in the stud.  This will provide very high quality lutino hens.  The cobalt colouring does not create any suffusion on the yellow feather, which is often the case when using dark greens, and the yellow face element improves the general body colour of the offspring.  In the same way, the best outcross for an albino would be an opaline grey pied hen, even if she is flecked or heavily marked with little or very poor variegation as this, in my experience, would create no problems in the offspring.  I have used this method to improve both varieties and my redeyes are now ‘good budgies’ and, in this respect, equal to my other varieties.  This was demonstrated when I won Best in Show with a baby lutino at Somerset BS Open Championship Show in 2000.