Babies!
This is a day-old chick, born Thanksgiving Day,
1997. The picture is about actual size. (To give you an idea of size,
an egg is about the size of a thumbnail.) When they are born you can
barely distinguish toes, and they weigh not much more than a
button.
Some peachface mutations you can identify at
birth, before they even get any feathers. If you look at these three
chicks, you can see that they all have different colored eyes - even
though the eyes are not open yet!
The baby in the middle has dark eyes - like
most lovebirds. But the one on the left has "plum" or "wine" colored
eyes at birth. It is an American Cinnamon. (Her eyes will darken as
she grows older. By the time she is all feathered it will be hard to
differentiate her eyes from the bird in the middle.) The bird on the
right has red eyes. (It almost looks as though it has NO eyes!) She
is a creamino. All three birds came from the same parents. Both
parents are seagreens, but the father is split to cinnamon and
creamino.
You can also tell if the bird is going to be a
"green series" or "blue series" bird as soon as it hatches, by the
color of its down.
A "green series" bird will be born with orange
down, like the bird on the left, whereas a "blue series" bird will
have white down like the bird on the right. (These two chicks came
from the same clutch.)