omg this is not caused by inbreeding... what happened

i hope the pics show up but i rescued a normal male pigeon of the street who is not releasable. i bought a frillback pigeon a few months later who turned out to be female. they have had a few young since then and one of the babies ended up with an extra talon and toe protrusion on his hin toe.... what happened my two female breeders and my male are completly unrelated. i seperate all my young by gender to avoid inbreeding and i keep them away from my male. so far all my young are female, my male young have all died.

sorry about the semi blurry pictures. my little girl lucky wouldnt cooperate. lucky is a creasted frillback who needed help hatching. she got stuck sideways half in and half out of her egg. she was stuck for an hour. i kept a close eye on her and i new if i didnt get her out she would have died. i never noticed that toe until this morning

One generation of inbreeding rarely causes significant genetic defects. We inbreed all the time, but disguise it with the term "line-breeding". Whenever someone talks about a specific line of animals, it is because they have selected offspring to breed back to the parents to emphasize a desirable trait. Inbreeding isn't "bad" so long as you outcross to unrelated individuals every once in a while.

I freely admit I know absolutely nothing about pigeon genetics, so I honestly don't know why you're having issues with male offspring deaths and the double talon. I do know that polydactyly (multiple digits) is extremely common in virtually all animal species, from cats to humans. I'm not sure of it's genetic origin, but this particular defect isn't harmful except in extreme cases. Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it from that single animal's health perspective, but I don't think I'd breed the animal in the future.

I'm fairly clueless with your male deaths, but it's hard to determine if it's coincidence or not with the information you gave us. How many babies have you had so far this year? If it's just one or two deaths, that's not a big enough sample to determine if there is truly a problem here. However, as with any animal taken from the wild, there could be other issues, such as introduced disease or parasites. Did you get the pigeon checked by a vet before you introduced him to your females? The issue may not be genetic at all... but a weakness in your female due to exposure to illness.

they have had five babies that lived, lucky-female- single egg, other egg went bad, snowdrift-laying female, unnamed female, crasher male-decessed, unnamed male-decessed, and two squabs a male and female both doing fine. the males died after they fledged perfectly healthy looking. they died within a day of each other. i have never bred babies with parents. i have a frillback female and a russian tumble female that breed with my male. the russian tumbler female has never produced offspring

i have had my wild male taken to my vet in woodland ca. he was on a IV for dehydration and needed alot of food to combat near starvation but he was given a clean bill of health. except for being blind in one eye

I found this article on polydactyl pigeons, hope this helps!
http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/cgi...ract/33/11/391

well she has two toes/ two claws on one foot and one toe/two claws on the other food. idk what is happening but i also lost one of my recent babies... it was a very tiny creasted frillback much smaller then the other... it had like splayed legs and i have no clue as to what caused that... he looked fine until like a week or two ago... he died two days ago. could this mean something is genetically deficiant about one hatchlinjg than another?

I doubt it. I think you're placing too big an emphasis on genetics here. Honestly, I think genetics has very little to do with all the problems you're seeing. Splayed legs can be a sign of calcium deficiency. In addition, it's not uncommon for any egg laying animal to put more energy into the yolk of one egg over another, hence the size differences in the babies. Whenever I see siblings of different sizes, the immediate conclusion I typically jump to is that the female, for whatever reason, didn't have enough energy at the time the eggs were developing to put an equal amount of energy into each egg.

If it was genetics, your babies would most likely be deformed or dead right out of the egg. This sounds like a husbandry issue with the hen and/or chicks.

all my birds are fed on a special pigeon diet created by a pigeon breeder in roseville Ca. i have not been having this issue until recently and i have always provided my birds with the proper feed, caging, and vitamines for calcium etc. this has only been happening to one baby at a time... the other sibling is perfectly healthy and my pigeons are as healthy as ever.

what i mean by my pigeons are as healthy as ever.... i mean the surviving ones... my mom, dad, and the other 6 or 7 babies are all florishing and all very happy