Best Books and Resources for Breeding Poultry and Genetics

[RememberTheWay]

Would love to hear what everyones favorite resources and books are on gaining knowledge about breeding poultry and their genetics. I am in interested in several breeds and would like to learn about breeding to the SOP,, for production, and how all the genetics work and interact with each other. Thanks in advance

 

[Andrew Gordon]

Are these books easy to understand for a beginner? I understand some foundational things but not everything and I am by no means an intermediate or advanced

From my perspective, Sigrid van Dort has a very accessible style of writing combined with a serious scientific-based approached.
On the other hand, I would say her books suffer somewhat from problems concerning spelling and grammar. At least, this goes for her books on "Chicken Extremes" and the "Crested Breeds". The book on "Chicken Colours" I only know in its german version, which was pretty badly translated.

Nevertheless, well researched, superbly ilustraed, very useful, and higly recommendable.

P.S.: You might want to check out her website
https://www.chickencolours.com/
which offers quite a number of articles for free, in order to get an impression of her writing style.

 

[Rock17]

Bantams and small poultry is a great book for beginners and the experienced at breeding bantams to the SOP and making your own bantams.

PS. It is by joseph batty and is now out of print

 

[Andrew Gordon]

By far the most helpful book on chicken genetics I use would be
Sigrid van Dort, The Genetics of Chicken Colours
https://www.chickencolours.com/index.php/genetics-of-chicken-colours/
The author offers an incredible amount of details and takes an analytical, scientific approach, while always prepared to think out of the box.

Much broader and sweeping in approach is
Genetics of the Chicken Extremes by the same author.
https://www.chickencolours.com/index.php/genetics-of-chicken-extremes-book/

 

[Rock17]

Poultry colour guide by dr. J batty and C francis is a great book for understanding colours. It is expensive and out of print

 

[RememberTheWay]

Blue and splash are caused by the same gene as each other. One blue gene dilutes black to a gray shade, two blue genes dilute black to splash. Blue is considered incompletely dominant because one copy of the gene has a visible effect (blue) and two copies have a stronger effect (splash).

For any chicken that can show black, then you can tell if the chicken has blue or splash because the blue gene is dominant. That goes for chickens that are black all over, and chickens that are black in just some places (like black lacing or a black tail.)

But white chickens are a bit of a special case. The genes that turn a chicken white can hide the effects of many other genes, including blue.

One gene called Dominant White turns all black into white. If that black was diluted to black or splash, it still turns white when the chicken has Dominant White. If the black was diluted to chocolate or lavender, it also turns white. This doesn't really make Blue a recessive gene, more that Dominant White hides the effect.

A gene called recessive white is recessive (obviously), and when a chicken has two copies of this gene it is white all over. No matter what other color genes it has, the chicken still looks white. Again, you can't tell if the chicken has the blue gene, or the genes for any other specific color or pattern.

The Silver gene turns gold into white, and is the only "white" gene I can think of that has no effect on blue (because the only color it affects is one where blue would not be anyway.)

This is very interesting. So how does mottling play into all this if a bird also has the chocolate or blue gene because doesn't mottling include a black barr separating the white feather tip from the other feather color?

Do you know what genes play out with silver laced sebrights? I'm assuming silver and lacing but if I introduced that to a separate pen of Cochins and then introduced the chocolate or blue how would that play out?

Yes, it is often possible for large fowl roosters to mate with bantam hens without injuring or killing the hens. Artificial Insemination is also possible.


You can do it either way. Overall, I don't think it will make much difference in how long the whole project takes.


I would expect that to work reasonably well.

If you can get black Cochin Bantams, and a chocolate large-fowl Orpington, you can cross them and just keep breeding back to Black Cochin Bantams until you get the other traits right (including size).

A simple two-generation alternating plan would be:

Breed a chocolate female to a black male. All chicks will look black, but sons will carry chocolate. Choose one of the males to use for the next step.

Breed a male who carries chocolate (but looks black) to a black female. Half of daughters will show chocolate, the other half will show black. All sons will show black, with half carrying chocolate and half not. Choose one or more of the chocolate females, and repeat the previous step (breed her to a black male.)


For the first generation, you can either start with a chocolate female, or you can use a chocolate male. Using a pure chocolate male with black hens will give sex-linked chicks, with all daughters showing chocolate, and all sons showing black (but carrying chocolate.) You can use either a chocolate daughter, or a chocolate-carrying son, in the next generation (basically, start at either point in the two-generation alternation.)

Once you have birds that show all the correct traits for Bantam Cochins, breed chocolate females to males that carry chocolate, and you should get a 50/50 mix of black and chocolate chicks, with both males and females of each color.



Orpington sounds like a reasonable choice to me, but I don't have any personal experience with any of the breeds you are discussing.


Silver Mille fleur is definitely possible (in a genetics sense), although I don't know what Cochin varieties might be available to start with. Yes, the blue gene or the chocolate gene or both could be combined with normal Mille Fleur and with Silver Mille Fleur.

Because I intend to create some variants of chocolate/silver and blue/silver, mainly on MF and Mottled patterns, shouldn't I begin by crossing a mottled bird to a chocolate bird? Is that not eliminating a step? Or will doing that mess things up? I thought I understood mottled to be on a black base, so can't I use that as my black bird instead of an actual black bird? What about the MF pattern? I've also considered trying to bring in a double lacing pattern like what's on a silver laced barnevelder or a gold laced into a Cochin line. Those would be some show stopping birds!

What I would love to be able to do is create a millefleur patterned bird that had shades of blue, silver, and black on it no red/gold. Not certain I could keep the black though because blue changes black to grey. I purchased my chocolate Orpington stock yesterday. They are chicks though so I've got time to think about all this. Maybe I. The meantime I will find a bantam Orpington in chocolate and then I don't have to worry about size. Do you happen to know how long it takes to bred large fowl out of a bantam line once it's introduced? What happens when you cross LF with bantam hens? Do end up with something in the middle? Wouldn't they have to be smaller coming out of bantam sized egg?

 

[RememberTheWay]

If you do a cross of chocolate (solid) to black mottled, then take a son and cross him back to the black mottled line, you should get:
--half of chicks are male. You can't tell which of them carry chocolate, so don't use them for breeding.
--half of chicks are female. Of them, half are chocolate. Of the chocolate ones, half will show mottling and the other half will not. (So chocolate mottled females are about 1 in 8 of the chicks you hatched.)

I'm trying to keep this all straight in my brain here, lol. When you say this are we talking about a chocolate male or chocolate female?

 

[RememberTheWay]

Yes, they would be beautiful! Genetically speaking, it is much easier to breed solid-colored chickens than to breed good quality laced ones.

I'm not sure if there are a different number of genes involved, or if the real difference is that solid colors do fine if you go to extremes (there is no such thing as "too much black" on a solid black chicken, or "too much white" on a solid white chicken.) Laced chickens only look good with the right amount of black in the right places, so they have to strike a balance between "too much black" and "too little black," plus having the black in the right places with the right shapes.

I am sure it could be done, just a bit more difficult than some other ideas.


You should be able to get Millefleur patterned chickens with Silver, and they can have black markings or blue markings but not both on the same chicken. Due to how the blue gene works, it would be easy to have both versions in the same flock.


It will partly depend on how many chicks you hatch in each generation. Two generations is the absolute minimum, but it could easily take three or four or more generations if you are working on many traits at once and hatch small numbers of chicks. Hatching large numbers of chicks in the second and third generation will speed things up quite a bit, because the smallest of 4 chicks is likely to be bigger than the smallest of 100 chicks (you see more different re-combinations of the size genes in the bigger group of chicks.)


If you cross a large rooster with bantam hens, the chicks will be small at hatch, because they have grown in a bantam-size egg. They will probably grow to be middle-sized at maturity, because half of their genes come from a large chicken and half come from a bantam.

When you breed one of those mixed chicks back to a bantam, for each gene that affects size, the mixed chicken can give either the large size or the bantam size one to a chick, and it can give the same gene or the other gene to the next chick. This happens for each of several genes controlling size. I do not know how many genes are actually involved, but the more chicks you hatch, the more chance you have of getting a few that have just "small" genes and no "large" genes. It is quite similar to how the chocolate, mottling, mille fleur pattern genes work: to get all the right genes in one chicken is rather unlikely, but if you hatch a large number of chicks you might get lucky.

As a practical matter, I would probably do something like this:
--cross the chocolate large fowl with a Mille Fleur Bantam
--Either breed a son to a Mille Fleur and keep chocolate daughters (1/4 of the chicks hatched)
--Or breed a daughter to a Mille Fleur and keep any son (1/2 of chicks hatched)

Among those "chocolate daughters" or "any son," look for small size, mottling, and the Mille Fleur pattern rather than mottling on black. Pick the best comination you can, and breed back to the Mille Fleur Bantam again. (This is the other half of the male/female alternating pattern for getting chocolate in the bantams.) Each generation you should be able to get a few more traits right. Once you have the mottling, every later generation will have mottling. Once you have the Mille Fleur pattern (instead of mottling on black or chocolate), you will have that pattern in all later generations. Once you are free of a specific gene for large size, that gene will not pop up to bother you again later.

So you certainly can work on everything at once. There are times when it is easier to hatch more chicks and try to pick one with a better set of traits. There are other times when it is easier and overall faster to raise up a chick with some of the right traits and go on to the next generation. You can change up strategies along the way, too: raise a chick that has chocolate but no mottling, while hatching more of the same cross to see if you do get one with chocolate and mottling. Or raise a big chick with chocolate and mottling, while hatching more to see if you get a smaller one with chocoalte and mottling. Or whatever other trait combinations you have.

Of course you will also be trying to get the right amount of leg feathering, correct body shape, and so forth. Repeatedly breeding back to the existing bantams, if they are good quality, will gradually "fix" most of those isssues, because each time you elminate a wrong gene from your breeding group, that gene will stay gone unless you re-introduce it. So you might get rid of non-mottling or big size or non-feathered feet in various different generations.

I was using Mille Fleur Bantam as the example here, meaning Mille Fleur color of Cochin Bantam. If you do not have access to them, the breeding plan shifts a little bit, depending on what you do have access to. I have been assuming Bantam Cochins of one color or another (solid black, or black with white mottling, or Mille Fleur color.) That means you are mostly dealing with color genes (which are easy to see and talk about), rather than large changes in body shape (like if you use d'Uccles to get the Mille Fleur color.)

Actually, if you want smaller size, and don't have access to Mille Fleur Cochins, you could use some Mille Fleur d'Uccles in your project. Muff/beard is caused by just one gene (can be gone in two generations), but you would probably have a lot of work to do on the body type and I don't know how many genes are involved in that.

I'm going to come back to all of this, as I am definitely interested in continuing this conversation but I have a ton of chores to do at the moment. Will be back later this evening. So- IF I have the ability to work from several pens at once and could source any bird I needed to what would you suggest as game plan to make things as simple and as quick as they can be. Meaning if I have to bring in colors/patterns from other breeds. Obviously it would be much faster to just find birds that were already these colors or close to it. At this point I am growing out a clutch of 16 cochin bantams. Their rooster was mottled, no hen was mottled, so they should be carrying it recessively. So far I have blue, black, and some splash (black and blue splash) chicks. As well as one odd ball that I think may be partridge but I'm not sure. The adults that I have here now are a blue/red roo, a splash roo, and a lighter MF roo. I have access to MF d'uccle hatching eggs, and MF bantam Cochin chicks. I probably could also get a chocolate silkie rooster, maybe a hen or st run chicks. I have 20 st run LF chocolate Orpington now. The goal right now is create blue/silver MF, chocolate/silver MF, and some mottled birds in chocolate and blue. Seriously considering a project on the double lacing from silver barnevelders on a Cochin Bantam too.

I would like put together a clear plan for my project and set it up in a way that I am working on several aspects at once to shorten the overall length of time it takes to complete.

I'm sure I'm forgetting things...so I will return to this later this evening. Btw really appreciate the input and all your time! I'm thrilled to learn so much and so grateful for your help thank you!

 

[NatJ]

I'm trying to keep this all straight in my brain here, lol. When you say this are we talking about a chocolate male or chocolate female?

For that exact example, it does not matter whether the original chocolate chicken is male or female.

If you are crossing a chicken that shows chocolate (male or female) to a non-chocolate bird, all the sons will carry chocolate, no matter which direction you make the cross. Whether the daughters have chocolate is determined by whether their father has chocolate, but the sons will always inherit chocolate from one parent and not-chocolate from the other parent.

I'm going to come back to all of this, as I am definitely interested in continuing this conversation but I have a ton of chores to do at the moment.

That sounds familiar. Discussions like this can be great fun, but sometimes other parts of life get in the way

 

[RememberTheWay]

Hmm, interesting puzzle.


Is that MF roo a Cochin or a d'Uccle?

A cochin