Then along came Chummy, Chum Bum as Jo liked to call  him.  Our Jo fell head over heels again. She found him in a Pet Store, peaking out from under a piece of newspaper.  He really had them fooled though.  While they were reading and learning constantly about us, they just could not figure out why his beak was so orange.

They did not know much about all our different mutations at the time, so Lou went to work again and began his long journey of studying mutations in his attempt to find answers about Chum Bum’s beak.  Well in this journey, Lou learned the story about hybrids.  You see, there are nine different species of lovebirds, we are called Masked, then there’s the Fishers(Agapornis fischeri) who originated  from South and Southeast of Lake Victoria (located in East Africa, north of Tanzania.), then there’s the Peachface and the list goes on.  We’ll stop there as that is all Jo and Lou have.  We will all mix freely with each other, but we should not be allowed to bond with each other, as that leads to babies down the road.  That was the story for poor Chum Bum.  They determined he was a hybrid and while they really loved him, they were not happy at being duped and returned him.

Now the story speeds up.  Lou got all fascinated about our many different mutations and colors and started collecting maybe one, or maybe pairs of different mutations.  Jo and Lou traveled far and wide.  They stopped buying from Pet Stores and began their quest on finding breeders who would know the exact history of each of us, as they would buy us.

You see, they wanted to make sure they did not pair any of us with siblings of each other.  Rumor has it, they even wrote a car off when a deer hit them 3 o’clock one morning on one of their trips to Montreal to pick up some of us guys.  They just rented a car and continued on their journey.   Jo says it was worth it, as this was her birthday present and she had been waiting a long time to find this pairing.  They are a slate masked and a violet masked, called Mindy and Mork. 

From here on in we’re gonna  let the next spoiled brat, Peanut,  take her turn being  your narrator.   Her husband, Kibbles, gets his turn later in our story as well.  I think he talks about the Aviaries.

Hi Folks:  My name’s Peanut.   (I’m the cobalt in the picture) I am one of the gals who has Jo wrapped around her finger and get to sneak out and sit on her head!!

My husband’s name is Kibbles and he is pretty spoiled also.  I’m pretty good, when I get out I go right to Jo and she has no trouble getting me to go back home.  But Kibbles, well he’s a pretty smart fellow and it takes Jo forever to get him back home.

But back to our story …….. after collecting a dozen or so of us, Lou started scratching his head and thinking maybe he should start building our homes.  Jo did not like cleaning those store bought cages,  she wanted ones she could fit right in without having to take them all apart in pieces!!  So Lou went to work on a design and before you knew it we had our first homemade homes.  If you visit our Aviaries Page there are lots of pictures of our homes.

Now that they had our homes under control,  they went back to work on collecting more mutations of us.  They even imported some of those whiteface guys from Belgium.  We now have double factor violet, lutino, cobalt, slate whiteface, etc..   They are very careful and quarantine and disease test  all new additions to our flock before Jo mixes them with us.  They have a lot of mutations of us “regular” guys too.  Cobalts, slates, american cinnamons, australian cinnamons, silvers, silver pied, lacewings, lutinos to name a few.  Most of us guys are split to this or split to that.  We are all  listed on the Lineage Page.  Lou is most definitely the genetics specialist.  He has written a page on genetics, which is not meant to be a course on genetics, but rather his attempt to provide a short and simple explanation of some of the different peachface mutations available in our  aviary.  

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