Hybrid amazon parrots

[ArkAvian]

Has anyone ever heard of a hybrid from the yellow and black bill amazon parrots. What do u think the offspring will look like? Do u think the hybrid would be bigger than both parents?

 

[oldhenlikesdogs]

Do you mean like a blue fronted Amazon breeding with a double yellow headed? Most folks avoid hybrids in parrots so I doubt you will get an answer. I hadn't even thought of the possibility of them mating and raising chicks, so . I assume you have 2 different Amazon species?

 

[ArkAvian]

Do you mean like a blue fronted Amazon breeding with a double yellow headed? Most folks avoid hybrids in parrots so I doubt you will get an answer. I hadn't even thought of the possibility of them mating and raising chicks, so . I assume you have 2 different Amazon species?

Its just an experiment and who cares what people think. I think we should breed crosses and leave what's left in the wild but not everyone has same views and opinions. W.E.

 

[townchicks]

I have only ever heard of hybrids in Macaws. Most of them are sterile, I believe. Breeding crosses in captivity has nothing to do with leaving birds in the wild, BTW. It's been illegal to bring wild caught birds into this country for decades. Some birds still are smuggled in, but breeding crosses isn't going to have any effect on that whatsoever.

 

[oldhenlikesdogs]

Its just an experiment and who cares what people think. I think we should breed crosses and leave what's left in the wild but not everyone has same views and opinions. W.E.

I wasn't be rude or judgemental. I was just asking. I don't care what you do.

 

[ArkAvian]

Its just an experiment and who cares what people think. I think we should breed crosses and leave what's left in the wild but not everyone has same views and opinions. W.E.

 

[Lady507]

I am not sure about amazons but I know that lovebirds, when crossbred, tend to be infertile. I can only assume the same for amazons. And chicks usually grow to the height of parents, usually not taller. About looks that will be a mystery until feathers come out. They usually tend to look like one parent though, from what I have observed in lovebirds and heard from macaws, I assume the same for amazons.

 

[OhZark Biddies]

I tried to order hybrid parrots on Amazon, but they were sold out....

... seriously though hybrids of this type are common ( not sure about you specific cross)... and generally considered a lesser of the two originals... muddy colors, neurotic offspring that don’t connect with either parent species, no market for selljng them, etc.

In short, the parrots you want to cross, are different species... so the outcome is different than say crossing two breeds of chickens... which are all the same species.

My thought is that, captive parrots are barely removed from nature, which selects vigorously against hybrids in most cases ( there are of course accretions), so I would expect the results to be “ meh, boring ”, meaning not so great, same as many F1 chicken crosses are ... or another way of thinking about it is that if the cross was spectacular it would be done to death, and there would be lots to read about it already... and you wouldn’t be asking here...

Not knocking you for thinking and asking about it... just sharing thoughts.

Edit: sorry for the typos... typing from phone

 

[Fishkeeper]

I'm not really in favor of breeding ANY large parrots. There just aren't enough good homes for such high-maintenance birds, there's no need for more of them circulating around in the trade.

 

[Rosa moschata]

The yellow-billed (Amazona collaria) and black-billed (A. agilis) Amazon parrots don't have much opportunity to be crossed in captivity because of their rarity -- yellow-billed Amazons are slightly easy to find, being as a few breeders were raising them, but the black-billed Amazons probably don't exist in the pet trade and are kept for conservation breeding. While both species come from Jamaica, they're from different lineages within the Amazon genus -- the yellow-billed Amazon's closest relatives are the spectacled, yellow-lored, and Cuban Amazons, and (if I recall correctly) the black-billed Amazon probably evolved from something more like the mealy Amazon (A. farinosa ssp.). They didn't evolve by separation of one Amazon population on the island into two -- they arose from separate colonization events by two Amazon lineages that were already different enough to remain distinct, and thus diverge further over generations.

Hybrids between them would be fertile, as are the other hybrids within the Amazon genus, but I don't know what the benefit to breeding them would be. While macaw hybrids can have interesting colors, especially when involving scarlet macaws, this is because macaws vary much more in body coloration. Amazons, save for a few very rare species, are essentially green birds with species-specific coloration differences on their heads, sometimes also their shoulders. Hybrids between species with very different head coloration typically results in birds with just subtle hints of their parents' markings blended into the green -- in other words, offspring are typically less colorful than either parent species.

And to clarify for reference, macaw hybrids are not sterile, unless one of the parents is a Hyacinth (Anodorhynchus hyacinthus), because that species is more distantly related to the others. Generally, hybrids within the same genus of parrots are fertile, with a few exceptions, one of which is Lovebirds (Agapornis sp.), and that's only when the peach-faced is crossed with one of the eye-ring species. Hybrids within the eye-ring species, however, are fully fertile. With Lovebirds, I suspect that some DNA investigation would reveal that the genus really should be separated into two or three genera, but they've remained as one genus until then.