Breeding the Greenfinch

 

 

 

 

 

 

Colour Variant Greenfinches Click Here

Greenfinches are very easy to breed and an Excellent starter species for the complete novice to gain experience with, they are available in many colours, they can be bred in large cages or aviaries.

 

I personally have started to concentrate on the pied of this species a quality pied should be 50% variegated and the colours should be rich and not washed out the bird should be large and the type should be as the normal, this is very hard to achieve as most Pieds are smaller but with selective breeding we will start to see this improvement.

 

The treatment of the greenfinch is the same for all the colours, although when pairing up this finch it is important to know what colours to pair together as this is a minefield I cannot go into it at this time.
Cinnamon Pied Cock

Normal Pied Cock

Breeding Pairs and trios

Cocks should always be removed once the hen has started to incubate the clutch as they normally cause the hen trouble and just interfere

 

cocks can be used with several hens

Pied Cock left and one of his hens sitting

 
Young pied, not very well marked but this bird may if large enough and of the correct type produce better marked birds next season especially if paired to another  marked pied bird.

Far Left:

Young pied at

18 days old

 

 

Left: Hen sitting,

 2nd hen from trio above with lightly marked pied cock
Young birds off the pied cock, these youngster show no Pied markings but if they have white toe nails they are definitely Pieds

Young at 11 days old
Young at 15 days old
 
 
 

2010 Nest of 5 Pied Greenfinches

 

To breed the Pied Greenfinch you will only require 1 pied bird and 1 normal coloured bird this should give you 50% pieds and 50% Normals as the mutation is form of  Dominant,

The youngsters will be visual there is no such thing as a carrier in Dominant pieds, the bird is either pied or not if you use this rule you will almost always breed pieds, don't trust to birds with no visual markings. some pieds look normal but will have some or all white toenails these birds will breed pieds of varying variegation when either paired to a Normal or pied.
Same nest as above the adult pair to these youngsters would not breed in my indoor cages, so midway through the season they were removed to an aviary within 2 weeks they had 6 eggs and reared 5 good sized youngsters in their first round, the same pair also went on to produced the same again in the last round, so moving them had he desired effect, sometimes just changing there cage or partner has the desired effect.

Just leaving a pair together all season will not work if after 4 to 6 weeks your pair show no interest to nest swap them around or move the pair sometimes just split the pair for a week has the desired effect.

Variety of pied in one nest

 

As you can see this nest of  youngsters show a variety of pied also it shows that all the birds you breed will not have the same amount of variegation, Here you see from the left a very pale 50/50 pied, a Cinnamon pied, a 50/50 bright yellow pied, and a pied with just a few ticks and the odd light feather, the last bird was 80% clear and can be seen in the picture below.

 

These youngsters were bred from a normal split for Cinnamon pied cock and a normal pied hen.
Youngsters during moult 2010

I have not gone fully into the Pied Inheritance as this section is only to give a brief insight into this newish variety and is only to help newcomers. has a website just on this species alone could not cover everything.

 

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