The Scarlet-Chested Parakeet

Abstract

The Scarlet-Chested Parakeet (Neophema splendida) has been sought after for years and during the period just after its discovery the Scarlet was very rare to aviculture and ornithology.

In 1871 the Scarlet was almost unknown, but in that same year a pair was received by the Zoological Society or London. That pair was said to have bred and hatched one young in 1872. After that date there was little written on the Scarlets until 1903 when Cambell in his Nest and Eggs of Australian Birds Vol. 2 wrote a little about them. There seems to have been few or no further documented observations until some 30 years later.

Nearing the end of these 30 years, reports started coming in. Records show that Scarlets were first bred in captivity by Mr. S. Harvey of Adelaide, Australia in 1932. Then in Holland by Mr. Polak Amersfoort in 1934; and finally in England by Mr. Boosey in 1935, for which he received the Avicultural Society's Golden Medal. The Scarlets were first brought into the U.S.A. in the mid forties. They were then successfully bred by Mr. Dave West in Montebello, Calif. in 1947.

Greater numbers of these beautiful birds reached Europe in the 1930s. One pair, owned by Lord Gowrie (then Sir Alexander Hore-Ruthven), was housed by the Adelaide Zoo before being sent as a gift to King George V of England. Another pair was brought over by the late Duke of Bedford and given to Mr. Boosey in the autumn of 1933, (the pair mentioned above which bred in 1935).

Several years later in 1939 an irruption of Scarlets took place near Wynbridge, Australia and several hundred birds were caught for the avicultural trade. It is said that these were the nuclei for the birds we are now breeding.

Today there is no fear that the Scarlet will vanish from aviculture as they are breeding freely in America as well as in Europe.

Since good descriptions of the Scarlets can be found in any book on Australian Parakeets, I have decided to delete it from this article.Young hens are a lighter version of the adult females as are males at an early age. The young also have horn colored bills when they first leave the nest.

Sexing

Adult Scarlets are easy to sex at a glance, and it is only when one is dealing with young, not yet in color that problems in sexing occur.

It is said that one can sex young Scarlets by the wing stripe which is found on the underside of the wing, and by the young males showing a brighter blue in the foreheads. This way of sexing is very unreliable and does not always hold true. Two hens in my collection showed no wing stripe since they were babies so I thought them to be males. Since they never colored out and have produced young, I am now sure they are hens.

A. Lendon in his article Sex in Australian Parakeets said of the wing stripe in Scarlets: "the immatures are very variable; some, which appear to be invariably females, exhibiting a marked stripe while in others of both sexes it is absent. Correspondingly it is invariably absent in the adult male and quite inconstant in the adult female, being well marked or entirely absent".

I have found it best to use the wing stripe in correlation with other means of sexing

in order to get a better idea as to the sex of a particular young Scarlet.

Buying Scarlets out of color is not a bad idea, as generally the price is cheaper per bird and one can buy several birds in order to assure a pair. If one is buying Scarlets in color or just starting to color up, one can be sure of the sex, but the price is also a little higher. The breeder has had to hold onto the young until the males start to show some scattered red feathering in the chest, which starts to appear at three and a half to five months of age. The male will continue to get red feathers in the chest until at about a year of age he is completely colored in his adult plumage.

Another means of sexing is "Hoganising" which is commonly known as the pelvic bone test. One takes the bird in question and measures with a finger the distance between the two pelvic bones by the base of the tail. Usually the bird with the closest spacing is the male, and the widest would be the female. Another method of sexing is to observe the young Scarlets - young males are often more active and vocal than the young females. Young males usually fly from perch to perch making several different twittering notes, this being another indication of the sex. This same twittering can be heard in adult males during courtship, or before the male feeds the female.

None of these methods are completely reliable alone, but when used in combination with the ones mentioned earlier, you can get a fairly good idea as to the sex of the young birds you have.

I have even gone so far as to pull a couple of breast feathers in the babies at about two months of age and wait till they grow in. The young male's feathers will grow in with red on them, the young female's will grow back in green.

Obviously the best method is to wait.

The young will color up in approximately three and a half to five months, and one can go from there.