Full Mottle(d) Jacket.. - my journey to a colorful coop...

[AbL]

4 years ago I fell for mottled bantams, the tiny colorful Japanese mille-fleur bantam to be precise...

I saw them sold in a near village but I arrived too late and all mottled ones were already sold. I went home with a wheaten rooster (apparently offspring of the mottled one - and yeah, I was young and naive...) and two of his buff blacktailed sisters.

In my amateur mind I thought, maybe they will hatch some mottled later on. Yeah... I was naive I got a lot of buff black-tailed, buff blue tailed, red spangled and A LOT OF ROOS... although they very adorable, not what I wanted..

2 years forward, no mottled bird ever hatched in m

y coop and I decided to get serious... searching for mottled birds in the region. It turned out, there were non... up to 200km around, zero, nada, nothing. After one and a half year of despairing search I found a "breeder" who had a flock of colorful millefleurs and I bought finally 5 young chicks.

Enthusiastically I got them home and waited for them to grow, and boy they were beautiful...so colorful... and this little feathers on the legs... one moment, Japanese Bantams should not have feathered legs.
After some inquiry I learned that they might be a crossing between sabelpoots ( a feather legged bantam breed) and maybe Japaneses... maybe. They didn't looked at all how they should, besides the color.


While I was searching for a solution and Mr Fox took advantage and feed already three of them to their offspring... and I was back to square one with now two wheaten roosters , one buff blacktail and two millefleur hens (one feather legged) this spring.

Finally I bought a brooder and got a lot of eggs via postal service from Germany and French, hoping to build a base for somme colorful little Japanese bantam like critters. Didn't turn out as planed (does anything?) A lot of eggs not fertile or too shaken by the transport, chicks stuck and shrink-wrapped while hatching, one microscopic chick not thriving and finally dying, an emotional week) .

I got 53 eggs in total, 4 different colors (mille fleur, grey mottled, splash/black mottled) and ended up with now 6 chicks hatched (5-6 still in the brooder) - not quite the results I expected. But I have 5 tiny millefleurs (who show no signes of mottling so far by the way, but I keep fingers crossed.) And a blue mottled (although I'm not sure because it's rather yellowish for the moment).

In the meantime the wheaten roo and his two hens offered me nine tiny little chicks by nature and half of them are somewhat mottled. (Meaning that my roo IS mottled offspring). I'm fascinated (some would say obsessed) with the mottled color and keep track of the color changing. It's fascinating and I would provide a "grow-along" of my colorful chicken experiment (I defer to call it breeding, as nothing is going as planned).
Hope you enjoy my little adventure.

 

[AbL]

So these are my "somewhat mottled" chicks, out of Mr Buff-blacktail (wheaten too, he's split for mottled, has also blue genes) and a slightly salmon colored black-tail hen and a mille-fleur(porcelaine red)
Out of nine chicks (I don't know which hen layed how many eggs, they brooded together)
Some of them were rather reddish, the others yellow, one or two slightly grey/silver (maybe blue) - I sold half of them an kept 4 who seemed to have mottled feather tips and one reddish for comparison. They are now 3 weeks old and are distinctly mottled.

 

[AbL]

IC01 - With lots of black in the primary wings, I can't sort the pictures in the right order, but the black seems to dissolve in to a peppered pattern over time.

 

[AbL]

IC03 - This one might have the black diluted by blue, it seems to be very light in comparison, and the little black has already faded:

 

[AbL]

Finally theses are my millefleur chicks, without any mottling... keep being zen about it, it's a capricious color and hard to breed. They are now about a week old, updates coming soon.

 

[Amer]

I wouldn’t say you were being naive. Perhaps the pullets weren’t his full sisters so it took a few generations for the mottling gene to express?

 

[AbL]

I think at least his mother was mottled, so he was split and now when I bred him to another mottled it appears as it needs to genes from the parent birds. The only suspicious offspring in the past years with the sisters was a red rooster with a black spangled chest which I gave away.

 

[Farmgirl283420]

This is so cool! Hope you can get the right color! Very pretty pictures and chickens! Also the little chicks are so cute I love the little tails!

 

[AbL]

This is JC the express-chicken - I put some eggs under my brooding hen and two days before hatching at at 9 o'clock I saw the hen leaving the nest, everything was fine, no egg picked.
By lunchtime I found him, still wet far outside the nest where she was sitting. I thought him already dead and when I touched him, it opened its eyes and made a noise. I grabbed him and took him home into the brooder for warming up and drying. 4 hours later he was up and already making a racket in the brooder.
I took him out and under the heating plate. In the evening he ran around on the table and we showed him how to pick and eat. Everything is accelerated with him For two days he lived in my sleeve keeping him company during the day until the others hatched. Since then he's the big brother who teach the little ones everything need to know.
Theoretically he (or she after last inspection) should be a pearl-gray mottled offspring, but it's wings stay an odd yellowish color. We'll see. Egg surprise

 

[Farmgirl283420]

View attachment 3808469
This is JC the express-chicken - I put some eggs under my brooding hen and two days before hatching at at 9 o'clock I saw the hen leaving the nest, everything was fine, no egg picked.
By lunchtime I found him, still wet far outside the nest where she was sitting. I thought him already dead and when I touched him, it opened its eyes and made a noise. I grabbed him and took him home into the brooder for warming up and drying. 4 hours later he was up and already making a racket in the brooder.
I took him out and under the heating plate. In the evening he ran around on the table and we showed him how to pick and eat. Everything is accelerated with him For two days he lived in my sleeve keeping him company during the day until the others hatched. Since then he's the big brother who teach the little ones everything need to know.
Theoretically he (or she after last inspection) should be a pearl-gray mottled offspring, but it's wings stay an odd yellowish color. We'll see. Egg surprise

So cute!