“Why doesn’t Makana look like any Green Cheek Conure I’ve ever seen?”
Any time spent with Makana, and you’ll know that she is a very special little lady. But even personality aside, really, she is.
Makana has a mostly light grey head, save for a splash of matcha powder green on her face, and silver cheeks. Her belly is silver but still has a bit of peach towards her feet. She has orange epaulettes. Her wings are a mossy green with hints of turquoise, and her primary flight feathers are electric blue. Her underwings and pants are seafoam that gradually turn baby blue the higher up her body you go. Her tail is a kind of reddish desert sand color that you’d probably find in the Grand Canyon.
Makana is a Pineapple-turquoise Green Cheek Conure. “Pineapple-Turquoise” is her mutation (a “mutation” in this case being a naturally occurring, spontaneous coloring found in nature) and “Green Cheek Conure” is her species. Her mutation is a combination of basically every conure mutation out there (she’s visually Turquoise, Cinnamon, and Yellow-Sided), and is quite rare. I don’t think anyone expected her to come out this way - Her siblings were visually “normal” GCCs, but it seems her parents had non-visual recessive genes.
Her mom was probably Pineapple or Yellow-Sided with recessive non-visual Turquoise genes, and her dad was probably some combination of Pineapple and Turquoise. The chances of getting each of her parents in specifically that combination of mutations is something like one in 16, and if you pair those specific two parents, the chances of getting Makana’s Pineapple-Turquoise mutation is one in 11. (You’re welcome to do the math.)
When I first met Makana, I didn’t know GCC mutations very well and I didn’t know how rare or strange her coloring was - I really just fell in love with her personality. As Ben and I came down to crunch time of whether we’d really take her home or not, I did some research and ended up confused because I couldn’t figure out what she was. I asked and confirmed it for myself, and learned about all of this, but neither the store nor I really understood or cared for how rare her mutation is. So as nice as it is that our extra special baby is more extra special than I could have imagined, I’m happy to say that she was not intentionally bred for her colors, nor was she brought home for them :)
(Source: midoriw)
