Throughout the canary breeding world there is much emphasis on the yellow feathered bird. Its importance is recognized in every breed. Most breeds can pair yellow to buff in almost every paring, however with the gloster canary such a luxury is not yet a reality – why ?

If we as gloster fanciers persisted in yellow to buff parings with every mating the result would be a freeness of neck, pinching through the eyes with a loss of back skull and loss of type. So why don’t we just ditch the use of yellow gloster altogether.

The result there would be lack of colour; no quality, feather lumps and infertility the stud would come to an end.

So where is the balance? The careful use of yellow feather is vital in today’s modern gloster, to produce that winning bird. I look carefully at each pair of birds to see what they lack and try to balance the pair. Yellow is introduced every 3 generations as a minimum requirement but there are no rules. Quite often one pair yellow to yellow bred buffs to produce that quality with colour, still with type and with enough feathers on the heads to produce good back skulls and quality coronas and consorts.

The results of using good yellow greens with buff greens produce that self bird with quality throughout, a good nut brown base colour with black striations showing quality and polish – that shine that separates a good bird from an excellent bird.

My good friend Nick Barret told me years ago to pair my best birds to the yellows and not to be afraid to do that. I took on board this advice and that is the single most factor in producing a stud of quality show winning gloster canaries.

I keep a shortened pedigree for each bird consisting of three generations if a bird has one of its parents as a yellow i.e. one out of two is a yellow this is obviously yellow bred. I refer to this a half buff. The other end of the pedigree show 8 birds, if there is only one yellow out of these birds i.e. 1/8 I refer to that as a full buff and needs some yellow feather introduces the following year.

With is method I can quickly see if the bird is in need of yellow, of course visual inspection is also important and the birds will score depending on how many yellow feathered birds appear within these 3 generations.

I apply this rule throughout to all the colours to try and achieve what I believe represents a good type, good quality well coloured and balanced gloster canary.