I have just come back and this year's Budgerigar Society Club Show ( I will always refer to it as that). Again a marvellous event and a credit to the Society these days. It was my pleasure to judge the light greens this year, but as the higher specials came into play I naturally became involved with the full range of the colours.

All fanciers will know that Vic Smith's super grey green cock was best in show and Charlie Bowman's classic grey green cock took the best breeder in Show award. I am told on good authority that the latter bird has every possibility of having BA23 blood in it, Charlie Bowman having brought a good number of birds of this colour from Geoff Flood in Beccles. It would be nice to think so and a bird looked very like our stock in his features a.

While at the show, someone remarked to me at lunch, " Is it the age of the Grey Green". I smiled at that because the age has lasted for 10 years already, perhaps starting in 1982 with the Pilkington grey green line that now seems to have been lost in that colour series. There stood now seems mainly Grey's, were winning CC's is concerned.

As breeders will no, Craig and I have done really well with this grey-green series and a good number have been featured on the video series I did, along with that super interviewer Jeff Attwood (he leaves Peter Sissons in the cold!). I realised in the early 80's we had to get into the grey greens or continue to be beaten regularly. The problem at champion level is to win you have to win the class first, and with so many good grey green against you, that is not at all easy. A glance at the B.S. grey green adults will have told you that it immediately.

So in 1983/4 we decide to concentrate solely on the colour to the exclusion of everything else. We decided if we got the grey greens up to standard, then and the only then would we take on the greys, blues and light greens. So far all goes well and these other colour series are now coming into play since 1989, following our successes with that we call our line 16 birds in grey green.

What is the significance of line 16? Well in 1986 we paired together two birds. One a grey green cock BA23- 259 - 85 and another and Opaline grey-green hen BA23- 135 - 85. They were paired in Cage 16. They produce 19 chicks (red rings) in 1986 and another 12 in 1987, all of them in a class vastly superior to anything we possessed. From the 1986 chicks, we crossbred them with other relatives and out came BA23- 43 - 87 best breeder at the B.S. Club Show and best in show at the BW show in 1988. As well as a host of very good grey greens 1989 and 1990 produce more high quality birds and again this year, out has come a grey green cock of quite superb quality, but born in May. At the time of writing, it beats the 1987 winner easily, so provided it stays alive we hope to get it out on the bench next year.

It is rare, in fact this is a first, for me to blow our own trumpet, but since I have now stepped aside as editor of BW I feel I can safely do so in completing this picture.

In two other parts of the UK, there are two other fanciers who have already kicked out Super birds from the '16' line stock they have bought, though I am the first to admit their winning birds on not 100% BA23. Jim Laurie in Scotland has won all in the North and George James of Bristol has a grey-green cock of magnificent quality that Eric Lane phoned me about as soon as he judged it for the first. I myself saw the bird at the B.S. in class 51, number 36, what a bird! But on this occasion out of the cards. It drew the crowds though, but in fairness to the judge it never seemed to get up and display itself across the whole weekend. Perhaps it was all too much for it, because it had previously won many of the major awards in the West Country against the stiffest competition.

So trumpeting over, perhaps my few words of wisdom may help some beginners or novices to put all their eggs into one grey-green basket, just as we did. Get this colour right and you can do anything thereafter, but you can't breed up every colour properly at one go unless you have a great big pocket and plenty of time.

Think about it, but remember it is "The Age of the Grey Green”.