pointed to a few parrots that flew past them, "See them? Those are peach-faced lovebirds, the opaline lovebirds."
Zhang Zian and Guo Dongyue looked along the direction pointed by Wei Kang, and they saw a few small parrots with green feathers, white heads and necks, and yellow beaks landed on the leaves arranged artificially, and tweeted non-stop.
"Ah, their whole heads are white, probably not suitable to illustrate the differences between masked and peach-faced lovebirds." Wei Kang said and looked around, "Look at the blue and gold macaw parrot. It would be easier for you to understand."
The parrot he referred to had a light blue color; its neck was white and its forehead was golden. Just like Wei Kang had said, it had no white feather circles around its eyes, so it was a peach-faced lovebird.
Guo Dongyue tried to remember what the lovebirds looked like in his memory. That pair of lovebirds didn’t have white circles, so they should be peach-faced lovebirds.
"Professor Wei, I'm looking for peach-faced lovebirds," he said.
Wei Kang nodded slowly, "I’d guess so. In our country, most families keep peach-faced lovebirds, while overseas families prefer masked lovebirds. I guess it’s because we share different aesthetic standards."
Zhang Zian followed Wei Kang and looked around. He could learn about a lot of things from this expert, and he was also intrigued by another thing.
"Professor Wei, you keep these parrots out of the cages. Don’t you worry that they might produce lots of hybrids?" He pointed to the flying parrots in all kinds of colors.
This spectacular and wonderful scene had made him wonder since he entered the gate, and he finally caught the opportunity to say his doubt. If adult cats or dogs were kept free-range, they would definitely mate randomly and give birth to a variety of hybrids. Free-ranging would be a problem for parrots too then, right?
Wei Kang seemed to have guessed that Zhang Zian would ask such a question, and he replied immediately, "I heard that your shop only has cats and dogs, and you probably don’t know much about parrots."
"Temporarily, only cats and dogs." Zhang Zian corrected him, pretending there would be more animals in the future.
Wei Kang was surprised by his answer. "I didn’t mean to derogate you. In fact, you and I specialize in different areas, and there’s nothing wrong with the fact that your specialty lies in cats and dogs. Back to what we were saying earlier, parrots are different from cats and dogs. Generally, when there are more parrots of the same variety in the environment, they will choose to mate with the ones who share the same variety—though there are a few exceptions. When there are little or no parrots of the same variety in the environment, they will choose to mate with parrots of other varieties.
"Oh, that explains so much."
That was quite a strange property, which was unlike that of cats or dogs. Having learned something new, Zhang Zian tried to sum it all up in a simple and easy way, "So, if I use cats as an example, it means that provided there are enough numbers of same types of cats, black cats tend to mate with black cats, and white cats tend to mate with white ones?"
Wei Kang was dumbfounded by his analogy. "Your example is vivid, and it makes sense. But birds are not cats. Birds are more… fastidious."
Hearing that Wei Kang was appraising birds while belittling cats, Fina stared at him disgruntledly.
Zhang Zian was just joking. But parrots seemed to be honor their principles when it came to mating behaviors.
"But I heard that, as their name implies, lovebirds are more difficult to make into couples than other parrots?" he asked.
"It is true." Wei Kang nodded, "So raising them cage-free can let them choose who they like, and they can mate freely."
Zhang Zian felt that compared with other animals, parrots’ attitudes towards relationships were more similar to those of humans.