These are some of the more common terms you will hear when discussing the colors of parrots. However, these only scratch the surface.

Split: When a lovebird is said to be split to a certain color, the lovebird carries the color genetically but does not express it visually. It can pass this color to its young, depending on the mode of inheritance of the particular color. If you have two green birds split blue, they both look green but can have blue progeny. this gets more complicated when you have lovebirds split for sex-linked or sex-lined recessive colors. Splits are commonly written as the visual color, followed by a slash, then the split color. For example, green/blue denotes a visually green lovebird split blue. This convention will be used throughout this chapter. Because of splits, two lovebirds can be the same phenotype (they look the same) but be different genotypes (they carry different genetic information). This is why people are sometimes surprised by a baby in their clutches of peachfaced lovebirds. If you have two green lovebirds and lutino hatches in a clutch, you can be sure this baby is a hen because only a male can be split lutino and he can pass it only to his daughters.