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- #11
lilwanderer
Crowing
If i were to end up starting a mottled project I would probably end up getting a blue or black mottled bird-You could! The mottling gene is recessive, so a first generation cross of mottled to non-mottled will make mottled carriers. That means that all of the birds from the crosses I described in my last post also carry the gene for mottling since Calico is a mottled variety, they just don't express it because it's recessive. So crossing birds expressing mottling to each other will make more mottled birds, and crossing the leaky blacks or blues from my previous post to the ones that are mottled should make roughly equal numbers of mottled and mottled-carriers to work from as well.
Sibling to sibling crosses are fine if done occasionally, but from my understanding it's better to cross them either back to a parent or to an unrelated mottled individual. Line breeding is crossing back to a parent, not crossing sibling to sibling.
I would pick your breeders for less leakage primarily and better mottling secondarily. Both, in other words, but weighted toward getting rid of leakage because that tends to be difficult.
And huh- I didn't know the exact details on line breeding but I'll keep that in mind.
Since Calico carries mottling, would it be better to take a mottled bird from the second generation and cross them to a calico instead of sibling to sibling?
If I did do sibling to sibling it wouldn't be often, especially since I would get my own mottled bird from a different line in the future.