The Show Season Begins...

Show Season Begins..

The first of May saw the start of the 1999 show season in New Zealand. With our summer temperatures being hotter this year and the weather a lot more humid, it has confused the birds as well as ourselves and a lot of the birds did not go into the normal pre-show season moult as early as normal. This has led to some difficulties in getting birds onto the show bench in top condition.

Saying that, numbers on the show bench have been comparable or even better than previous years. It has made judging a bit more difficult with quite a few birds suffering from being too soft and the odd one or two knocking the unopened feathers on their heads and ending up bleeding.

This season also saw the introduction of a new schedule of classes. There was some concern that there were too many classes of one or two birds so with consultation and voting, the membership has come up with a new schedule. The cocks did not see too many changes. We have put all the normal dark factors together in a class and the same with the opaline dark factors. The spangle classes we have combined except for the double factor. The reasoning behind this was that we have noticed that there are a lot of poorly marked normal spangles often showing their body colouring in the wings. (More so with the introduction of English birds) This led to confusion and had some exhibitors getting out of Spangles because of being wrong-classed at one show, putting it in the suggested class and getting wrong-classed again.

The hens were the main area of change; where we have lumped three or four classes into one e.g., blue series normal has sky, cobalt, mauve, grey and violet together and so on. This has been done throughout the hen classes and looking at the early shows has seen bigger classes. I judged last weekend and found it was an improvement, as it is more enjoyable to judge six in a class instead of six classes of one. Individual colour specials can still be awarded.

I will send more details of the show season as it progresses.

Original text Copyright 1999, Keith Flockhart

Back to The Budgerigar Scene in New Zealand