Mottling appears on black just as easily as it does on red and buff. The only color that has "resisted" my attempts to mottle it has been Buff-tailed Buff - breeds like Buff Orpington and Buff Rock. I read somewhere that even the most knowledgeable of chicken genetic experts does not know exactly what gene or genes cause the tail to go buff in solid buff colored breeds. My theory - and this is only a theory mind you based on *extensive* attempts to breed buff chickens with spots - is that somehow the genes that create the buff tail also interfere with the genes for spotting.Oh, keep, or I wouldn't have kept Snape on as main flock rooster. I don't give a diddly do about what a judge might think - as if I would ever show my NNs.
My only dilemma is how may separate groups I would try to keep separate, while trying to add the S&Gs, the GNHs, and the Alohas...
Speaking of Alohas, @Kev and @alohachickens , what would happen if the Aloha NN pullets were crossed with Goodwin, the Lavender Ameraucana with lots of red leakage? Would I have hope for eventual pasteling of the aloha effect (Kev, did you call that porcelain?) or would the black cover up all the mottling/"spots"?
- Ant Farm
In horses, there is a spotted white pattern called Sabino, and it has been noted that for some reason Chestnut (solid red) seems to "set free" the spotting gene in that breed - as in you can take two black horses with more minimal white on the legs that are Sabino carriers, and then they have a recessive red baby, and suddenly the baby has extensive white all over the face, up the front of the back legs, even spotting on the belly. So it seems like the color black kind of restrains the white, sometimes, in horse breeds? And red appears to amplify the white spotting? Color breeding is very complex, so this is hard to prove scientifically, and DNA tests for color in horses have only been around since the 90's. Horses also breed very slowly, only 1 foal per year, so studying color on them takes much longer than say, studying color on mice.
Sadly with chickens, we don't have the advantage of DNA color testing. But we do have the ability to produce many chicks to get the color we want, and to do it ethically, as the chicks that are the wrong color for my breeding program still find homes easily, as egg layers for people who don't give a flying fig what color the chicken is. LOL.
So anyway, remember with Porcelain it is, at its core, a Mille Fluer (Gold, black and white) mottled chicken, whose black areas were turned to Self Blue, or Lavender.
To get Porcelain in a Turken, you would need to start with a Mille - but breeding to a mostly black chicken with some red chicken is going to probably destroy the nice Mille colors for a long time. (Remember what a Lavender with leakage is - it may look gray but at the core, it is a black chicken, with Lavender fading out the black to a pale gray.)
I also wanted an effect similar to Porcelain, but what I wanted to avoid, is the "hidden" factor of Lavender - you know, how you can have hidden carriers of the color, that appear black, because the Self Blue / Lavender color, is two Recessive genes. "Blue" is a dominant color - that can not hide - but it creates Splash. Splash looks like Mottled and that can make things confusing when I'm growing out chicks. How could I tell a Splash chick from a really heavily Mottled chick? I need to know how much white spotting is there, so I need to be able to "see" the white at all times. So I also wanted to avoid Blue for that reason.
What I decided to do is work with Dun. Dun is a dominant gene like Blue, which means it can not hide like Lavender. It also turns black feathers gray, but it's a more brownish gray. In two copies, Dun makes a color called "Khaki" which is like buff, but less yellow and more light tan - it's exactly the color of Khaki pants, basically. I have never seen it paired with Mottling, but my guess is when it does appear on one of my chickens, it will appear to be more extensively mottled at first glance.
ANYWAY - it only took me ummm, like four or five years since I started? But I am proud to announce my first fully expressed Dun Mille Large Fowl. While this color has appeared on Seramas, to my knowledge, I may be the first one to create this color on a standard size chicken?
If I were to cross her with Robin the NN rooster, the chicks should be 100% Mille, half NN, and half Dun Mottled with the other half being black mottled:
Imagine the black areas on this guy changing to the same brownish gray as the above hen and that would be the effect. Dun doesn't change red or gold colors.
I was going to do a general post on BYC about this color project later, which is why I just took the photos of the hen.
