FOI logo
  back to My Articles page     Pages: 1 2 3 4 go to next page

MELANIC EUROPEAN GOLDFINCHES
Simple aberration or mutation?

My dear friend Luigi Corbetta, from Casatenovo Brianza (Lecco), Italy, a well known not only as an "hybrids/mules maker", but also as an expert breeder of European finches, this year, during the breeding season 1999, he has had the luck to obtain some young melanic European goldfinches.
I think that such event is very interesting because it isn't related to a partial melanism or a classic one (a strong melanization with loss, often, of original pigments), but it's related to a "modulated" melanism, that is extended on all the plumage not in substitution but in superimposition to the greater part of the ancestral pigments.

The young goldfinches have been generated by a domestic pair of European Goldfinches (Carduelis Carduelis Carduelis) which have been paired for the first time this year. Both parents were born in captivity, they have got a FOI (Federazione Ornicoltori Italiani) irremovable closed band ring and they haven't any type of parentship.

Photo 2 - Melanic Europen Goldfinch Male

 
Photo 1 - Melanic Goldfinches pair (male on the left, female on the right)
The male is two years old, the female is one, in fact she has had her first breeding experience this year.

Both parents were and still now are in a good health, they do not show any tangible sign of anomalies. In fact, as a detailed observation shows, both parents, during all the breeding season and during the molt one, haven't shown any alteration or abnormal items in their plumage, behaviour, metabolism or physical motion.
Also under the feeding and environment aspects there aren't peculiarities, in fact they received the same feeding of other pairs and were lodges in the same environment, next to other pairs of greenfinches, redpolls, siskins and other birds which have produced normal youngsters.

Such pair has carried out two broods: the first at the beginning of May and the second one at the end of June. In the first brood, all the four layed eggs have turned out not fecunded.
In the second brood, on four layed eggs, three babies born which, at the birth, showed a dark skin (blackish) and a black featheriness.
Such babies have been raised from both the parents in a regular way without problems, they have had a regular development, all parts of their body have developed in harmonical way, but, unfortunately, one of they has been thrown from the nest after that they had been closed band ringed, provided of a closed-band ring.

  back to My Articles page     Pages: 1 2 3 4 go to next page