Quaker parrots can be green, blue or yellow

Q: In the park not far from me lives a large flock of those noisy green quaker parrots. My nephew has had one as a pet for a few years and he just bought a mutation blue color quaker parrot as a friend for his green one. He says he is saving his money to buy a mutation yellow-colored one next year.

I was curious what the breeders of these birds have to do to them to cause the colors to mutate like this?

A: I can assure you that breeders of animals do not do anything to the animals to create a mutation as it occurs naturally. It is just a random mixing of genes that happens during development of the embryo that causes the resulting baby to be different from either parent.

Any artist will tell you that green is a combination of the primary colors blue and yellow. So if a quaker parrot hatches without the yellow gene in it, then it will be a blue color and, conversely, if one is missing the blue gene, then it will be a yellow color.

Now if a blue or a yellow quaker parrot hatched in one of those big nests in the park, that bird would not survive very long as it would stand out in the flock and thus attract the attention of a predator such as a hawk. To survive in the wild, a quaker parrot needs to be green.

However, if a blue quaker parrot was hatched in the controlled aviaries of a bird breeder, then the breeder would keep the blue bird alive and protected. When that bird grew up and had babies of its own, it would pass down the gene for the blue color to the next generation.

Q: There is a feral cat in my back yard that had two litters of kittens this past year. I found homes for the kittens each time, but now I want to trap the mother and get her spayed so that this cycle stops.

We watch her in the backyard at night from a window and we have seen her sitting right in front of the trap looking at the food, but she refuses to go in. Is there anything else we can try?

A: She sounds much more cautious than most feral cats, and if you just leave things the way they are now she may try to enter the trap in such a slow and careful manner that it may try to close prematurely and then she will never go into it.

I would advise you to wire the trap open so that it cannot close at all for now and just leave it out with food just in front of it. When she is eating the bait in front of the trap then you can gradually move it farther and farther into the trap until she is so confident that she just goes in and out of it with no hesitation at all.

This should take about two weeks. Then you take off the wire that is preventing the trap from closing and leave it set out. Most likely you will catch her the first night.

Q: We found a tiny baby turtle crawling in the parking lot of a restaurant that we frequent. It is the size of a nickel. We looked on the internet and it seems to be a baby diamondback terrapin and, from what we read, they live in the bays all over Long Island.

A: Baby turtles are as cute as puppies, and I can identify with your enchantment. However, these diamondbacks are a saltwater turtle and do not do very well when kept as pets the way the common red-eared slider turtle does. They really do need to live in saltwater to stay healthy, and they do grow to a very large size. The diamondbacks live in the bays and ocean where they are not restricted by any boundary, and only the females come out of water to lay their eggs in a hole that they dig in soft soil.

Some time later, when the eggs hatch, the babies can get lost trying to get back to the water. Another scenario I have personally witnessed is that seagulls will pick up the baby terrapins as soon as they hatch to eat them. Sometimes before one gull gets a chance to swallow the baby turtle the other gulls will mob and chase it and the baby gets dropped in the chase and ends up far from its place of hatching.

The best thing you can do is to turn it loose in a quiet bay or, better yet, a saltwater marsh full of beach grass. Just be sure to put it in the water when the tide is still and the water is calm so that it has a better chance of acclimating to the environment. If the tide and current are very strong, the baby will get swept away before it gets a chance to orient itself.