Crossbreed eclectus health?

[danbrah]

Hello, there is an Eclectus I am possibly getting however he is a crossbreed; I wont be making any children with him but is their any health concerns I should know of / or anything?

 

[weco]

Genetic difficulties in bird species is often a greater possibility in hybrids & mutations than normal birds, but unless you know the breeder well and can trust their word, you will likely never know of any problems until they occur.....

 

[Mike17]

A great many of the eclectuses in this country, especially in the eastern states, are "cross-bred" as they came from stock at Taronga Park Zoo in Sydney. They are PNG (Red-sided) crossed with Solomon Is. I don't like the term "hybrid" when it comes to sub-species because in the wild, they will mate and create a mix of the two where the ranges overlap. This is very common in Oz, with rosellas, corellas and the Pt Lincoln/Mallee Ringneck/28 parrot all having "mixed" birds where ranges overlap.

Our first Eccy was said to have been a PNG sub-species, while our current guy is 50g lighter and more like Solomon Is sub-species.

I'm very glad to hear that you won't be mating with your eccy, danbrah, but even if you were to find him an eccy girl, I hardly think it's the end of the world if he bred with another subspecies. AS I mentioned, many of the birds here are "hybrids" as we don't have any choice given the ban on imports of new stock.

 

[MonicaMc]

Hybrids are more likely to be healthier than their parent species as long as the parent species are closely related. As is the case with eclectus, since they are considered separate subspecies rather than separate species, hybrids within them should be just as healthy, if not healthier (genetically speaking) than their parent species.

Honestly, the only health problems that I have heard about are from hybrids between large conures and Pyrrhura conures and some multigeneration/multispecies macaw hybrids. I have yet to hear of health problems in lorikeets, conures of the same genera, poicephalus, pionus, ringnecks/psittacula, rosellas, barnardius, grass parakeets/neophema, polytelini tribe, cockatoos, amazons, large conure/macaw hybrids and large conure/amazon hybrids... although the last one is one of the lesser known hybrids to occur so not as much is known about them.

I suspect we still have a lot to learn about hybrids and species!