Hatch & Hue: Bird Genetics

Two birds on a perch. Somewhere between them is next season's colour — and Hatch & Hue shows you what it is before the first egg is laid.

Set the cock and the hen, visible mutations and the splits you know or only suspect, and the young appear as a tray of eggs. Each egg is one possible chick, sized by how often it should turn up. Press and hold an egg like you would under a candling lamp: the shell glows, and inside you see the chick's colour, sex and what it carries hidden.

It thinks the way a breeder does. Sex-linked genes follow the hen's single Z chromosome. Lacewings and type I or type II dark greens respect the genes that travel together — drag a gene from one chromosome strand to the other and watch the percentages shift. Dominant white canaries come with a warning about the eggs that won't develop. Opaline hidden under lutino is named, not forgotten.

Budgerigars, colour canaries and peach-faced lovebirds are all covered, from cobalt and greywing to agate, isabel, aqua, seagreen and pallid-ino.

Your birds live in a ring register: closed ring, hatch date, sire and dam. Link the parents and the app works out what each youngster must carry — the son of a lutino hen is split ino, a green from two blue-split birds is /blue at 66%. Three generations of pedigree sit on every bird, and every planned pair shows how related the parents are before you put them together.

Nests run on their own calendar. Log each egg as it's laid, mark it fertile or clear, and the hatch countdown and ringing days follow your own incubation times. When a chick hatches, pick its colour straight from the forecast and the ring goes on with the pedigree already filled in. If a chick arrives in a colour its parents shouldn't produce, you'll know — a parent carries something unrecorded, or the father isn't who you think.

Chasing a particular colour? Tell Hatch & Hue what you're after and it ranks every pair in your aviary by how likely they are to produce it. At the end of the season, look back at eggs laid, hatched and ringed for each pair, and every colour you bred.

For budgie keepers planning their first opalines, canary breeders working agate and isabel lines, lovebird fanciers sorting aqua from turquoise, and show breeders who keep their ring books immaculate.

Pair them on paper first. Then let them nest.