Cinnamon
Sex-linked Mutation
Cinnamon is another mutation that is sex-linked recessive. I have already discussed this in detail on the Lutino page so I won’t go through it all again. Briefly it means that if a hen carries a cinnamon gene she will be visually that colour. A male can be split to these mutations and if his mate is not a cinnamon then you will still get visual chicks that is this colour but they will all be hens. A male must get a cinnamon gene from each parent to be cinnamon.
The Cinnamon Cockatiels gene effects the melanin pigment by actually stopping the brown pigment being changed to grey or black. The amount of pigment doesn’t change at all just the colour of it. The brown colouring that remains should show no shades of grey or black in any form. This brown colour also extends to the eyes, beak, feet and legs as well as just the feathers. A chick in the nest will have obvious plum coloured eyes when compared to those of a normal grey bird but they will darken and be less noticeable by about 2 weeks of age. The beak, feet and legs will however fail to change to the dark grey/black colour as in a normal bird and will remain a pale fawn/beige colour.
Another obvious difference apart from the brown colouring is the extra yellow that is visible. It seems that the cinnamon allows more of the underlying yellow suffusion to show through and thus even the hens have a yellower face than in non-cinnamon birds. The males have the same yellow face as their grey counterparts but the hens don’t have a cinnamon face as would be expected when compared to grey hens. There is a very marked increase of yellow in the feathers of the face and chest of hens as well as the chest of the males.
The Cinnamon Cockatiels tones will vary too, even within the same family of birds. It appears to be altered by health, sunlight and age as well. A cock bird in particular will be at his darkest and best colouring when he is fully mature and just completed a moult. As new feathers grow through from a moult the colour difference between the old and new can be very apparent. Because the old feathers may be lightened by sunlight the new ones will appear much darker and solid coloured in contrast to the paler and washed-out looking old ones.
As most people know in humans, each person basically contains pairs of chromosomes that hold all the information that make us what we look like. To determine the sex of a human child each baby has a pair of chromosomes that are either XX (female) or XY (male). In birds this is the opposite way around so it is the female that has the XY combination and thus it is her that determines what sex each chick will be. So basically it gets down to the point that the cock bird carries two ‘X’ chromosomes while the hen has only one.
The cinnamon gene is one that is carried on the sex chromosome or X. The Y that the hen contains as her second one is too short to carry any wild-type genes that would suppress or oppose those carried on the X. Thus if the X chromosome contains the cinnamon gene in a hen, she will be a visual cinnamon bird because she has no gene on her Y chromosome to dominate over the cinnamon. In a cock bird though because he has two ‘X’ chromosomes if he has only a cinnamon gene on one of them then he will have a wild-type or normal gene on the other that would prohibit the cinnamon from being visible. If he had a cinnamon gene on both X’s then there is nothing to prohibit it from being visible and the bird would thus be cinnamon.
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