Budgies are one of the most common types of pet bird kept in North America and Europe and after publishing our article going over if you can breed a cockatiel budgie hybrid, we started to see people reaching out and asking about a lovebird budgie hybrid.
Although lovebirds are still more of a niche pet bird to keep, they are increasing in popularity and combined with the existing popularity of budgies, it’s only natural that people would be curious.
Lovebirds and budgies are not able to crossbreed with each other due to lovebirds being from the Agapornis genus and budgies being from the Melopsittacus genus making them incompatible breeding partners.
This can work to your advantage if you are looking to keep a lovebird in the same cage as a budgie as there is no chance of the two successfully mating with each other.
Since the hybrid birds started being sold around five years back, it is a very common misconception that all bird species are able to breed with each other to crate a wide range of hybrids but this is not correct at all.
Although all birds are part of the aves family, they quickly separate as you work your way down to order, family, genus, and species and in most cases, a breeding pair have to at least share the same genus to successfully breed with each other.
Can You Keep Lovebirds And Budgies In The Same Cage?
The name of lovebirds often give people an incorrect impression of how they will behave due to having love in their name but lovebirds can be surprisingly aggressive to other birds.
In larger cages you can sometimes keep lovebirds with other birds like budgies but we would never recommend it for someone brand new to keeping birds and even experienced bird keepers can end up having problems.
We would never recommend that you keep a budgie in a cage with multiple lovebirds either as it becomes more likely that more than one lovebird will end up seeing the budgie as a potential threat and attack it.
We have seen people posting on social media talking about how their pet lovebirds always seemed calm and then one day the woke up to find their budgie had been attacked during the night by their lovebirds.
This unpredictable nature that can seemingly switch at random even after months of being in the same cage as another bird is why many experienced bird keepers will straight up refuse to keep lovebirds in cages with other birds.
Although the risk is low with a budgie, we have seen some people who keep larger birds say that their lovebird still attacked much larger birds in its cage only for the larger birds to deal serious damage to the lovebird in self-defense.
Can Lovebirds Mate With Budgies?
Although lovebirds and budgies can go through the act of mating with each other, they are not able to create a fertilized egg due to their chromosome count being different.
This is due to lovebirds being from the Agapornis genus and budgies being from the Melopsittacus genus making them unable to produce offspring if they do end up mating with each other.
If you are able to train your lovebird to accept other birds, especially other species of bird in their cage then the birds may go through the act of mating and there are videos on YouTube of different species of birds doing this.
This can worry a large number of people who keep birds as they don’t want fertilized eggs and potential chicks to have to care for.
As we covered earlier in the article though, just because birds are from the aves family does not mean that all birds are able to successfully mate with each other and produce fertilized eggs.
In fact, out of all bird species, the number of bird types that can successfully crossbreed with each other is tiny and this is why bird hybrids are so rare or often based around a small pool of parent species.
But I Saw Photographs Of A Lovebird Budgie Hybrid On Social Media!
We are fully aware of the photograph that apparently show a lovebird budgie hybrid that went viral on social media recently but they appear to have been faked.
We have also seen subsequent photographs claiming to be a lovebird budgie hybrid but it seems more like a regular budgie with similar coloration to a lovebird.
The second set of photographs that were released could have just been an honest mistake where someone new to keeping birds was told that they were purchasing a lovebird budgie hybrid when in actual fact, all they were purchasing was a regular budgie with slightly irregular coloring on it.
The more well known photograph that initially set the full budgie lovebird hybrid trend off does look more like a photoshop than a bird with unique coloring though.
As we covered earlier, it is biologically impossible for a budgie and a lovebird to successfully mate and create a fertilized egg never mind the egg developing to a stage where it can hatch into a healthy chick.
This is science, this is the facts, ignore what people on social media say, they are just joking around or trying to get people to overpay for a bird that has unique color patterns.
Will There Ever Be Lovebird Budgie Hybrids?
There will never be natural lovebird budgie hybrids due to both types of birds being from different genus’ making it impossible for them to naturally mate and create a hybrid.
We have seen some people suggest that in the future, people will be able to tinker with the genetics of various species of bird to create hybrids but we feel that this is unlikely but not impossible.
We say this due to the firefly axolotl as well as the various other tweaks people have made to axolotls over the years such as the glow in the dark axolotl.
The thing is, axolotls tend to be able to take genetic manipulation much easier than other species due to their natural ability to rapidly heal and regenerate.
Birds don’t have this ability and are more fragile to genetic manipulation so we doubt that it is likley that people will create lovebird budgie hybrids in a lab.
It is doubtful that it would even be cost effective either and the majority of people are far more likley to just stick with the budgie or lovebird as their pets rather than a hybrid, just look at how many dog hybrids there are such as the labradoodle.
Although some have proven to be very successful, the majority of them tend to fail after a couple of years as their popularity drops off.
Conclusion
That brings our article going over the lovebird budgie hybrid to an end. We hope that we have been able to help as many of our readers as possible avoid any potential issues with overpaying for birds that people are claiming to be lovebird budgie hybrids. We are hoping that the photographs showing what is claimed to be a hybrid of the two species starts to drop off soon as we have seen a huge increase in the number of people reaching out about this recently.
