Calculating colour
PETER GLASSENBURY was just a kid in short pants when his dad, Les, famously fronted up to his local bird club in Port Pirie, SA, with a pink budgie. “He had dipped it in beetroot juice as a joke,” Peter, who is coordinator of the Australian National Budgerigar Council (ANBC) colour and standards committee, recalls with a chuckle.
More than 60 years on and bookmakers still consider the odds of producing a definitively pink budgie as only marginally less likely than the Loch
Ness monster surfacing.
The reason the pink budgie remains as elusive as a unicorn is because, unlike 80 per cent of 350 parrot species, there is no red pigment in the genetic makeup of Melopsittacus undulatus.
But what the budgie lacks at one end of the spectrum it more than makes up for with an array of genes that, through selective breeding, allows up to 3000 possible combinations of colours, patterns and markings.
No bird species on Earth has had such close attention paid to its genetics by so many. The modern exhibition budgie strutting its stuff on the show bench represents more than 150 years of selective breeding, including inbreeding or line breeding, to conform to avian supermodel standards. These budgezillas are more than twice the size of the original wild type and also larger than the pet shop variety.
Wild budgies average 18–20cm in length and weigh 25–30g. Exhibition birds weigh 60–70g and have an ideal length of 24cm with pet shop birds falling in between. As high school biology students know, Gregor Mendel, founder of the science of genetics, studied pea plants ad nauseum to determine how traits are passed on from generation to generation.
But even before Mendel died and his masterwork on the principles of inheritance was posthumously recognised, budgerigar breeders were unknowingly following similar lines trying to reproduce first yellow and then blue birds, which had tantalisingly appeared in European aviaries in the 1870s.
Within the DNA of the budgerigar there’s a range of genes and genetic mutations that can influence colour and marking. Some of those traits are dominant, some recessive, and others are sex-linked.
A Stanford University study recently found that just as people with blue eyes have a single common ancestor, all blue budgies are derived from a single ancestor – the result of a single amino acid substitution on one gene.
More than 150 years of selective breeding has done nothing to alter the fact that the green gene remains dominant and if all the myriad coloured budgies in the world were left to breed freely, they would eventually turn green again.
appeal as a pet even before the first colour mutations appeared in European aviaries in the late 19th century.
THE APPEARANCE OF the first yellow and blue budgies in aviaries in Belgium in the 1870s sparked a craze for colour. By the 1920s birds of a rare-hued feather were attracting princely sums. Japanese nobility, led by Emperor Hirohito, ignited an extraordinary boom in the budgerigar market when the birds became popular as betrothal gifts from the families of wealthy grooms to their brides-to-be. In 1927 one member of the Imperial Household paid £175 (equivalent to more than $20,000 today) for a single blue budgie.
The blue parrots were so prized that the British bestowed them upon the 14th Dalai Lama when he was enthroned in Lhasa, Tibet, in 1940. Two pairs of budgerigars, bounced across the Himalayas in below-zero temperatures on pack mules, proved far more interesting to the then four-year-old Tenzin Gyatso than the freshly minted gold bar, 10 bags of silver and other gifts that accompanied them.
Budgie fanciers have included some of the world’s most prominent figures. Toby the budgie used to perch on the pen of British prime minister Winston Churchill. And the Queen once exhibited birds when still a princess. To this day a flight of royal homing budgies is maintained, complete with their specially designated keeper. A young Richard Branson recorded his first entrepreneurial success breeding budgies as a teenager.
By the 1950s and 1960s budgies could be found perched in every fifth household in Australia, the UK and Canada. In the USA, where the birds are known as parakeets, they were no less ubiquitous and found themselves at home in the White House as pets of John F. Kennedy’s children
and also in the homes of such celebrities as Marilyn Monroe and Clint Eastwood. Even the domestic terrorist known as the Unabomber had a pet parakeet as a child.
The birds became embedded in popular culture, arriving in earnest when a budgie called Joey was written into the longrunning BBC radio drama The Archers in 1953. They later also found roles in hit British sitcoms such as Porridge, Bless This House and George and Mildred.
The word budgerigar naturally became enshrined in Aussie slang. A “dunny budgie” is a giant blowfly, while “budgie balls” reflects quite the opposite view of testicles. In World War II the word budgerigar was used to describe soldiers who frequently wrote to wives or girlfriends. If a tent had a number of budgerigars it became “an aviary” in army lingo.
More recently, the late, great comic genius John Clarke, who was born in New Zealand but lived and worked in Australia from the 1970s, coined the profoundly ego-withering term “budgie smugglers” as a descriptor for the type of swimming briefs favoured by surf lifesavers and former
Australian prime minister Tony Abbott. That phrase found its way into the Oxford Dictionary in 2016.
The birds’ tweety image has been used to sell everything: whisky, waffle syrup, laundry detergent, home loans and even cigarettes. The John Player brand of collectable cigarette trading card sets included budgerigars while a magazine ad for Old Gold, a US cigarette brand, featured one sitting on the fingers of a hand holding a lit cigarette.
Budgie owners also represented an incredibly lucrative market during the ’50s and ’60s, with firms such as American Bird Products offering everything from moulting food, blood tonic, bird wash, bird bitters, mating food and vitamins to boxes of fluff for nesting material and deluxe centrally heated cages with automated showers. But the pièce de résistance of marketing mojo reflected the explosion of products in the sanitary category, with a tiny, cotton-knit parakeet diaper, or budgie nappy.
The budgie has been painted by masters, rendered in the finest porcelain, modelled in plastic, bred artificially in test tubes, used as laboratory subjects to study hearing, vocal communication and aerodynamics, and depicted on the postage stamps of more than 30 nations, from Antigua and Barbuda to Zambia.
Although no longer as fashionable as in its heyday, the budgerigar still represents Australia’s greatest diaspora. In that sense it has, truly, become a world bird.
Budgerigar was used to describe soldiers who frequently wrote to wives or girlfriends.