If I was in your position WRT the finches, I would likely have just
labelled
them as finches and been done with it, unless the kind of finch was
unambiguously clear. After all, does being able to call it a Zebra Blue
rather than just another finch add significantly to the value of the bird
that is greater than the cost of paying someone to do a thorough taxonomic
analysis? I guess, if someone wanted to pay me to do it, I would, but I
probably wouldn't pay someone else to do it.
Cheers,
Ted
I sure wouldn't pay anybody to do it! This was in the mid-80's, during that
brief, weird period when exotic finches and reptiles and aquarium fish were
middle-class status symbols in Southern California. The wholesaler got it
(temporarily correctly) into her head that calling something "Zebra Bleu"
and changing its order-form text to, "The hardiness of a Zebra with the
delicate shades of a Cordon Bleu" somehow DID make it more monetarily
valuable than calling it a "probable cross between a Zebra and a Bleu and
maybe some others, what we pulled out of the Big Cage". I really enjoyed the
job, because I got paid to catch a small bird, put it in a cage with some
food and water and sometimes a member of the (probably) opposite sex (can't
always tell), and sit in the sun observing it for anything I could pull out
that might make a tentative and no-doubt simplistic trait
identification--one yellow-edged primary, for example, or a tendency to
iridescence. A blue fleck behind the eye, high nares. Yellow under the
wings. Jumping a lot, or hanging upside down a lot. Behaviors like
singing--and, if it did sing, did it sound like anything purebred that was
out there? Usually I was able to make a semi-convincing "diagnosis", really
the best I think anyone could have done under the circumstances. "Luckily",
these bad old trendy days are gone, and we're back to "Gimme a brown one
that chirps pretty--do I gotta feed it every day?"
I no longer work in this industry.
--Katrina
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