kedreeva:kedreeva:kedreeva:(x)It’s so difficult to find a good photo of a charcoal peacock, but here
kedreeva:kedreeva:kedreeva:(x)It’s so difficult to find a good photo of a charcoal peacock, but here’s a charcoal blackshoulder someone posted to one of my groups. Usually their wings are grey and it’s hard to tell that the bird isn’t also grey instead of black (most photos are overexposed in order to see detail), but in person, they are a black based bird.Charcoal peafowl are a mutation that shouldn’t be bred forward; their lifespans are often half what a normal peafowl’s is, and the hens are all sterile. It survives and continues to be bred because people like melanistic birds. Charcoal is propagated via breeding the males to hens that are heterozygous for the mutation, which for many breeders often means breeding a male to a wild type hen, and then breeding the het charcoal hen offspring back to their father.@vincedakota asked if there were any more ethical dark morphs, and there are a couple!Buford bronze, sonja’s violeta, and midnight morphs are all good, dark ones.Here’s a buford bronze BS, though this is a little washed outAnd a sonja’s violeta BS (sometimes people call these ones “violet” or “violete” instead of violeta but the person who original produced the morph named them Sonja’s Violeta after either his wife or daughter I forget which, and I choose to respect that nomenclature, especially since it makes it easier to tell someone’s talking about THIS morph instead of european violet). They actually shine purple in good light.And a midnight BSOf course I make this post and the same day find out that there’s a new black morph that has recently appeared in France, that they believe is separate from charcoal given the stark striping on the wings instead of the grey striping. The male it appeared in first is pied, which is why he has white spots.His first full-black hen children will be breeding age this summer, at which point we will be able to tell if they are a charcoal-mix (like, a double-color or something), in which case she should be sterile, or an actual new-black color, one that is capable of breeding. Since the original mutated bird is only a few years old, it will be unknown whether their lifespan is affected but if the hens are fertile, it’s a good bet that the lifespan may be normal, too.Here’s the first lady!If it proves out as a new and unique morph, then it will take a little work to breed the leucistic out of them and BS into them, but it will pay off in an all black bird that is actually healthy, and maybe breeding of charcoal birds will be allowed to die out in favor of these guys.(I am still trying to locate the source of the birds, these photos are being passed around groups but so far I have been unable to locate the farm that took them). -- source link