You don't say what color you're looking for, but if I read the rest of your post correctly your goal is Blue Mottled? If so, mottled is recessive and requires two copies to express. Of course Blue is incompletely dominant with one copy making blue, two copies making splash, and zero copies...
So I'm kind of going to go with a meta answer here...something my mentors taught me growing up and is now more true than ever as more and more flavor of the month trendy "rare" breeds are promoted and now people/hatcheries even doing designer "breeds"
The rarest chicken there is, is a well...
Yes it does not matter if the lavender is the cock/cockerel or the hen/pullet. Both can have zero, one, or two copies of lav since it is not sexlinked like barring or gold/silver
I mean, that is how you do it. Perhaps whatever a sapphire gem is it isn’t homozygous for blue egg gene, so it didn’t pass it on to all offspring?
Blue egg layer to a brown egg layer. That simple. You want darker olive, use darker brown egg layer like Marans.
You will spend thousands more dollars, and at least a decade of time breeding ANY hatchery birds anywhere close to the Standard. Take the money to travel to a show and buy from a breeder. Heck go to the Ohio National this fall, if you can't find it there, it probably doesn't exist in quality...
Lavender will also cover blue (and splash) if the bird has two copies, just thought that was worth noting, but introducing lav into a blue program or vice versa is a headache.
Side note: Do you know how it interacts with recessive white out of curiosity? Like if both birds are homozygous for...
I know it’s not a recommendation thread but check out Blue Hour Poultry in Oregon for Brahmas, only have Darks and Lights but they are absolutely gorgeous birds. I’m always envious when I see them.
If you have hatchery/feed store brahmas they will fit just fine through most. If you get purebred breeder stock from a good show breeder, you will need a larger door like the Run Chicken XL.
This works well, especially with the skyrocketing cost of lumber since the pandemic. I convert the resin sheds into coops. Lot of them already have a window and a vent or two, but you can add a chicken door and a quick run (those metal tube and canopy carports work great with wire on outside)...
You can think whatever you want. But if you test an egg you’ll end up with what I posted. Just because people are scared of big chemically sounding words doesn’t make the words are evil or incorrect or an agenda.
It’s just a scientific breakdown of what actually makes up an egg. No misdirection at all, just textbook, verifiable data. How you choose to interpret it I suppose is up to you.
There’s an old adage “start where you are with what you’ve got” so if you have a male with leakage and for whatever reason don’t want to cull him or find another one, the best course to correct it in your line would be to breed to black or even lavender without any leakage. Then cull heavy from...
I would suspect the toes issue is most likely due to the humidity issue during incubation.
As far as difference between the varieties, there is no genetic reason the silver would be worse off, so maybe just not as popular and perfected?
I would advise against purr tossing all Willy nilly...