Knowing what specie

[HeartHaze]

Hope I posted in the right section.

Recently I have joined this sun conure group in FB. The members come from different countries. There have been questions asking if they had a sun or jenday. There have been posts too that state that they bought a jenday but after a few years turned out to be a sun.

Aren't pet shops and breeders supposed to know what specie of birds they're selling?

Don't suns come from suns, and jendays come from jendays? Or is this a hybrid thing?

Really sorry if this is a stupid question. I honestly don't know anything about breeding. I only know how to take care of them.

[Pajarita]

Well, Jendays and Sunnies look almost the same when they are babies because the Sun Conure only gets the distinctive yellow/orange on the top of the wings after they go through the juvenile molt (while the Jenday retains the green plumage there) but this happens when they are about six months old so it's not possible to have what looks like a Jenday and for the bird to molt into a Sun Conure years later.

There are also Sundays, which are a Sun and Jenday hybrid and which would, sometimes, come out looking more like one species than the other or half and half but it's always the amount of green on the wings that gives them away.

As to breeders.... well, they don't know as much as people think they do to begin with but, also, the Sun Conures are slightly more expensive than the Jendays so the dishonest ones would sell you a Jenday baby and tell you it's a Sunnie. My Jenday, Nando, was advertised as a Sun Conure on Craig's list so I emailed the owner telling him that the bird was a Jenday and not a Sun Conure (he had bought him from a Pennsylvania breeder as a Sunnie), we started corresponding and he told me that he would let me have him real cheap because he was "completely unmanageable and screams ALL THE TIME" so I took him - and I ended up with the sweetest bird ever!

[HeartHaze]

My bad. It was supposed to be months not years :p Anyway, thank you. I just got confused because here in our country (as far as I know) there hadn't been confusions about what specie/breed of conures people buy. I was surprised that sellers mislabel what they sell. One even stated that it was petco (I've read it's a big pet company) where she bought her bird.

In the end, it's probably dishonesty or lack of knowledge of the sellers then.

This has been bugging me for a while. Thank you for enlightening me.

[Pajarita]

Yes, Petco is a big chain of petstores but their employees are not knowledgeable in birds (or anything else, usually) and they go by what the shipping papers says - they buy from bird mills where the birds are very cheap and have them shipped to them in boxes. They are so ignorant, they even argued with me that a canary sitting on a nest with eggs was a male!!!!