male and female is always a good place to start. However for many species the sexes are identical and in a number of circumstances DNA sexing is not available, I have yet to understand exactly why not. Be that as it may, I have at least three species that fall into this category and it means a certain amount of guesswork is required which one of my old colleagues would say is “less than satisfactory”. I have 12 birds which cannot be DNA sexed because there is no existing record of the DNA profile. In the not too distant past birds were available from the wild and meant there


08 BIRD SCENE


was a good chance of breeding from unrelated birds. You only have to look at the first breeding records to see results were quite spectacular but they were not necessarily maintained for one reason or another. All of us without exception years ago will have bred from birds that come from the wild including of course Zoological establishments as admitted by the very much liked and revered David Attenborough who collected for them. No one could possibly justify the importation of wild birds on the scale it was carried out in the past. Totally unsustainable and moraly wrong. To a


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