Aria From A Birdcage

You will notice that these two-day old nestmates have different colored eyes.  The one on the left has garnet colored eyes, while the baby on the right has black eyes.  Garnet colored eyes are an indicator that the chick on the left is a cinnamon (or a fawn depending on the ground color it will have).  As the chick gets older, its eyes will darken and will appear the same as non-cinnamon birds.  It is possible to determine the sex of a chick this young in some cinnamon pairings based on the traits of the parents.  The baby on the left in this photo is a girl.  The chart referred to above gives you clues as to what sex garnet eyed chicks may be depending on the parent's cinnamon traits. 

If you click on the button below, you will find a .PDF of the Color Pairing w/Cinnamon Factor Chart that shows you the possible results in offspring, color-wise, when you pair a male of a certain color with a hen of a certain color.  It's an updated chart from what I show you in the video.

I'm going to give you a bit of a lesson in genetics, and want to make it easy to understand.  I've put the information in this video, and hope it helps to have it in this format, rather than have you do a lot of reading.  If you start the video, and then move your mouse curser off of the video , the YouTube controls will disappear to give you full view of the slides.   When you want to stop the video, just move your mouse curser back over the video and they will appear again.

Here are the same two babies at about three weeks old.  The cinnamon baby has feathered out with the white ground color of her mother, so is technically called a "fawn".  Her garnet colored eyes have darkened and look the same as her nestmate now.   Her sibling is a medium-variegated green, showing the yelow ground color in areas where the melanin is not present.  At this age, their instinct has them crouch down and remain still when a "predator" (including a human) is around.

Cinnamon and Fawn colored canaries.. don't you just LOVE them?   I certainly do, and if you breed canaries it will help you to know how the genes for this brown pigmentation work, and how to manage them in your birdroom.