I have a beautiful, two factor dominant pied parakeet. Due to the genetic makeup, he should have dark eyes. However, only one eye is dark and the other has a grey iris. Have you ever heard of this? I can find only one reference to a one-eyed pied. Thank you.
Hi Rebecca,
This does happen sometimes and can be genetic, or due to an injury or sometimes one eye changes to adult coloration sooner than the second eye. This is probably genetic in your bird. American parakeets have been inbred for decades. All were derived from the green budgie which is the natural budgie color. Americans started breeding for color and took a lot of shortcuts. And for profit breeders tend to breed in large colonies for volume, with no control over which birds breed with each other. So even if you purchased these as show birds or have been breeding for a while for certain mutations, your birds still have inbreeding in their background. There’s no way to know everything in their genetic history. It’s nothing to be concerned about other than probably preventing him from being a show bird.
Thank you for asking Lafeber,
Brenda
