Dilute Budgerigar Mutation - Historical Notes

Historical Notes

Budgerigars were first introduced into Europe by the ornithologist and bird artist, John Gould, in 1840, when he imported to England a pair which had been bred by his brother-in-law, Charles Coxon . They grew steadily in popularity. For the first thirty years of their domestication only the wild-type Light Green budgerigar was known, but in 1872 birds with greenish-yellow bodies and very pale wing markings were reported from Belgium (in both Brussels and Antwerp) and Germany (in both Kassel and Berlin). This, now known as the Dilute mutation, was the first mutation observed in the domesticated budgerigar.

Joseph Abrahams obtained some of these new yellow birds from Belgium and bred the first Yellow, as it was called, in Great Britain in 1884. These strains, in both Britain and Europe, laid the foundations for the very popular exhibition Light Yellow of the 1920s and 30s, which were often known by the alternative names of Buttercups or Buttercup Yellows. The popularity of the variety declined after the Lutino became available in the late 1930s.

In 1896, George Keartland of the Calvert Expedition to the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia, observed a yellow budgerigar flying wild in a flock on three occasions. This suggests the Dilute mutation is relatively common in heterozygous form among the wild populations, as two such heterozygous individuals would need to mate in order to produce a visible Dilute.

Although the Blue mutation was first seen soon after the first Dilutes, in 1878, and had become established by 1890 in Europe, the first combination of the Blue and Dilute mutations in double homozygous form did not appear until around 1920, some 30 to 40 years later. This combination was the White (known as Silver in Australia), and it was first bred in England by H D Astley in September 1920 from a pair of Skyblues. A White was also reported in Paris in the same year. Whites were never as popular as the Yellows, as it was much harder to approach the exhibition ideal of a pure white bird.