Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Falconry Friday! Your DNA is no excuse!

Anyhow, we were starting to question whether Luna was actually a male, partly due to her smallish size for a female (1400g) but mostly due to her general male-ish lack of aggression. She fits right into that large male / small female range and the only way to know for sure is to either see an egg laid or do a DNA test. Avian genetics can do this fairly cheaply on a blood or plucked feather sample --obtaining either of which on an awake ferrugi certainly counts as a "ballsy move" !

I'm sure you are familiar with the mammalian sex chromosome scheme of female = XX and male = XY. Well, birds are completely different. They evolved in parallel and have a ZW system, where the male is actually ZZ and the female is ZW, hence it's the female who donates the chromosome that determines the sex of the zygote. This system is also found in some fish, Komodo dragons, and most moths and butterflies.

At any rate, no she is indeed a female (ZW) and we can't blame her timidity around jackrabbits on her DNA

She has gotten hair twice now, so I think it's only a matter of time!