I’m not a wood person. Are these AYA butt stocks actually walnut? The first image is from a AYA Yeoman. Their inexpensive non ejector double in 12ga. The second butt is an AYA No. 3 non ejector. And the the third pic is AYA No.4 ejector.

I will stick my neck out and save “Yes”.

The third picture, the AYA No. 4, is clearly a better grade of wood.

Looks like nice Cottonwood or Sweet Gum

There are many types of walnut and certain species grow in varied environments that affect the quality of the grain. There are some really good stains on the market too. The second one looks like walnut to me. The other two could be examples of good stains.

Just plain walnut ,I have a matador and a #4 both have utility grade walnut

I was just curious maybe they used birch or something for the less expensive guns.

Thanks!

A&A entry-level guns have always had pallet-grade walnut, but it's walnut. Every Matador/Matador II I've ever seen, and I've seen dozens over the years, all have stocks that look exactly alike as far as grain and color.
JR

AyA were never noted for good stocks and even some of their higher grades such as the Number 1 are plain by the standards of other guns of a similar grade. Those will be walnut but not selected other than for grain strength. Lagopus.....

I have four AYA's, well six I suppose as two more are in transit. A 2, a 3 and four 4"s and they all have the same grade of straight grained, plain walnut. On the plus side, I can not recall ever seeing a AYA with a cracked stock, so plain is good in some regards. Cetainly there are some but not a known thing like on a Smith. I have been thinking about doing a butt splice on a couple of them and think it ought to dress them up a lot. If I start shooting them more, I might even get around to it once I retire. Be a lot cheaper and easier than restocking them. The in-letting is decent for a factory job. But that wood is shelf level beautiful or paint grade as they use to say.

https://www.marklarsongunart.com/gallery
JR

Mark does a beautiful upgrade on stocks. His "inking grain", the British term, takes a extension or plain grained stock and makes the entire gun stock look better and work better. His art work goes well above that. A hundred times better, than simple adding a recoil pad and a thousand times better than adding a white line recoil pad. I was looking for a reason to buy a small milling machine from Grizzly. I just ordered a small DRO Metal lathe from them to play with when I retire. Right now I could do it with a drill press and a milling table setup I have. But as a friend once said, you can never have too many 220 volt tools. And with a small milling machine I might make a couple hit and miss engines or a few stationary engines. Not going to retire soon, but I better have things to do once I do, because the sofa has not hold for me. I'd rather be making things, fixing things or breaking things.

I think John Roberts nailed it with the "pallet grade walnut" tag. But if someone said the first one was walnut stained beech, I'd hesitate to argue without a DNA test or a closer look. It isn't super hard to ID walnut in a good close up pic, but we've seen some "experts" here who couldn't tell a feather-crotch black walnut blank from a finished thin shell walnut stock that had totally different figure and grain.

I've never been a fan of the fake grain painting process for guns. Sometimes it looks OK for hiding a wood buttstock extension or a repaired area. But it is often very overdone, almost like a Liberace costume, or a woman with too much makeup. Some are gaudy enough to gag a maggot in a gut pile. And the process is quite expensive, especially for a surface treatment that would be totally ruined with any future refinishing attempt. I like KYJon's idea of doing butt transplants instead. I think one could still buy short butt blanks with nice grain and figure at a reasonable enough price, that a few butt transplants would quickly pay for that Grizzly mill to cut the mortices.

For quite a few years now AYA have had decent wood upgrades available.
I have a #2 with wood that is well above what I’d expect to see on a gun in that price range.