Features

Where do Blue and Yellow Quakers Come From
By Tom Nemerovsky, copyright 2000

Blue quakers were a mutation that showed up in the wild many years ago. The Duke of Bedford in England who was a wealthy bird keeper had a few pairs trapped for him and all blues originated from that stock. There were only about 4 pairs that I know of that were imported into the US originally because of the high cost . Linda Greason got two pairs of these from a friend of hers that was very ill and lost one bird. She started out her breeding program with 3 blue birds. There are many blues in the US now as she sold to many breeders in the last 12 yrs or so. ( don't hold me to the number of years). I was lucky to get 1 pair unrelated to hers from a breeder out west ,and I managed to get 2 pairs of unrelated imports from a breeder in Florida that had them imported from England back in 1993.

I started my strain with 3 unrelated pairs and have mixed in outcrosses of large green quakers to give them good size and conformation. My wife and I are the ones that bred the first dark eyed cinnamon quakers in the US in 1988.. While line breeding and inbreeding some of my lighter colored cinnamon stock to improve on their color, I bred the first and only dark eyed Yellow Quaker out of a pair of one of my cinnamons. The hen is a very light green cinnamon and the male is a green split to cinnamon that has a lot of pure yellow on his flanks and his under side and around his tail area. I had talked to breeders in Europe and Africa about Yellow and cinnamon quakers and they informed me that the first red eyed cinnamon quaker was bred out of a pair of red eyed cinnamons. This told me that the yellow genes are in the cinnamons and with the right paring combination of recessive genes we could eventually breed a yellow and we did.