Gender and genetics of yellow lovebirds

In general, you can not tell with certainty what gender is your lovebird without a DNA test, or a confirmation through breeding (you have a couple, they get eggs and they hatch. Only when all these three conditions are fullfilled, you know the gender for sure). Except for some cases in yellow lovebirds.

Three types of yellow lovebirds are: Ino (also known as lutino), pallid and cinnamon. All of the three are sex-linked genes. In order to know the gender of the yellow lovebird, you need to know the colours of the parents, otherwise you can not tell the gender of you birds. And, unfortunately, it works only in some cases.


In birds, males have two ZZ sex chromosomes, while females have ZW (which is the opposite to humans). In order for the bird to show yellow, all of the Z's must carry yellow. In males, yellow gene must be present on both chromosomes. If it is present on only one, a lovebird will not be visually yellow, but is still able to pass the yellow gene (it's called split for lutino / cinnamon / pallid). In females, there is only one Z present, so if a female has a yellow gene, she will be yellow, and otherwise she will not be yellow and you are certain she is not the carrier either (she cannot be split for a yellow gene).

Now, the working examples:

A lutino female with a lutino male will have only lutino offspring, so you can not tell which one is male or female.

A lutino female and a non-lutino male, but who is a carrier of a yellow gene, will also have both male and female lutino birds.

A lutino female and a non-lutino male, who is not a carrier of a yellow gene, will get only females lutino lovebirds.

A non-lutino female and a non-lutino male, but who is a carrier of a yellow gene, will get only female lovebirds.

So if you have a couple like the Example 3 and 4, you know for sure that if you get a lutino lovebird, it is 100% a female.

The same works for pallid or cinnamon birds.

Still with me? Now the more complicated part.

Males, because they have two ZZ chromosomes, can carry two different yellow genes (out of three, ino, pallid and cinnamon). For example, pallid-ino male will have both brown and red eyes at the same time - eyes will look brown, but at a certain angle of light, you will see red shining through. Juju is a pallid-ino. Pallid-cinnamon will look more like pallid, but will have brown flight feathers. You get yellow combinations by breeding two different yellow birds (like a pallid with an ino, or pallid and cinnamon, etc). In case male lovebird has two yellow genes, he will pass only one of them with a probability of 50-50%.

Sometimes it is hard to tell which colour mutations the birds are carrying and sometimes you need them to get babies so that you know the colour mutation they have by observing in the babies which colours get passed to them. Like me, when I got babies who looked like Juju and they were both males, I was certain that this is a pallid-ino mutation that Juju is carrying.

So, the genetics of my couple are like that:

A pallid-ino male with a lutino female will have lutino boys and girls, but only pallid girls. Pallid-ino's will always be boys, because girls cannot carry two different yellow genes. So that is good news for me, because I need to test the DNA only of lutino babies :).

This stuff is really complicated and I hope I could clarify some of them. Feel free to comment below if you have any questions or you have another example for me to work out. I will gladly help!