A silver surprise

In my June 11th post I talked about the laissez-faire approach that I'm using in my aviary this year. One thing that I didn't mention is that I have all of the nest boxes hung so high that it's impossible for me to do nest checks without bringing in a ladder and totally disrupting the birds. So, I don't check them. Each day I spend some time sitting in the aviary, observing the activity. I listen for peeping chicks, ensure that the peeping grows louder each day as the babies grow, try to guess how many are in each nest, and wait for them to fledge.
So, the first time that I saw this little one sitting on the floor of the aviary, it was quite a surprise. Green is the normal body color for gouldian finches. There are also yellow and blue mutations. This white gouldian (actually called "silver") is a fairly rare mutation with 2 blue genes and a yellow gene. Her mom is green, split to blue. Her dad is yellow, and apparently is also split to blue (I had no idea).