That one might get more red/brown as it grows older, especially if it is a male.
I'll be curious to see pictures of it in another month or two, assuming it survives that long.
Genetically, green is yellow (recessive to white) and dark (sex-linked, recessive to light.)
The possible pairings of the two genes are:
white/light (=white)
white/dark (=slate/blue)
yellow/light (=yellow)
yellow/dark (=willow/green)
If you don't actually care about leg color, then of course...
If you want to check, you can collect eggs from different hens and see if the hatch rate is different.
Collecting eggs from the original hens, sired by grandsons of your original rooster, might be a way to get non-inbred chicks-- unless the remaining original hens are also the ones that your...
It is at least partly true.
At a very basic level, it is easy to demonstrate. If you breed two chickens with the ear tuft gene (Araucana) or the short legs gene (Japanese Bantam or Dorking), then 1/4 of their chicks will die before hatching. For the short legs, you could breed one Japanese...
That's a good point.
The most obvious check: if these eggs came from the same parents as previous batches, the genes are probably not an issue (so the incubator, or the egg handling, or the diet, or something else might be going on.)
But if these eggs are a generation later, or from a set of...
I'm a little surprised by the chick color, since it looks like a typical chick from all-black breeds. You've been showing so many brown ones recently, I didn't realize you had the all-black pattern at all. It's dominant over any of the black/gold or black/silver patterns, so it should not appear...
So C is chickens, D would be ducks, G would be goats, I assume F in a pond is fish.
But B would have to be... (looks at signature).... oh, "Bunnies." I was thinking of them as "Rabbits." :lau
That would make sense. But if you do, please post a link here when you make the new thread, so it's...
The wethered ones are not affecting the gene pool, so it doesn't much matter whether they stay or go.
Other than that, I don't know much about goats, but what you propose sounds sensible for any species if you want to avoid inbreeding any further.
You probably already thought of this, but:
when you cull the first one, butcher it out far enough to look for male gonads before you kill the second one.
That way, if you really have a bunch of fat-legged pullets, at least you don't kill ALL of them before you discover the error. And of course...
I assume you're trying to eliminate Silver, but are you aware that they can produce gold daughters?
Gold rooster x silver hen = sexlinks. The daughters are gold (no silver at all), and the sons show silver but also carry gold.
So if you wanted the patterning but not the silver, you could hatch...
Two levels, one above the other?
I assume you will have something in between, to catch or deflect the waste from the upper cages so the lower ones stay clean & dry. Personally, I would go with something angled, so the waste falls down behind or to the side, rather than a flat tray that requires...
It's pretty easy to buy a set of tattoo pliers meant for rabbit ears, but that would mean you have to buy it, use it, store it between uses, not lose it, etc.
If you know anyone who raises rabbits (especially purebreds for shows), you could ask if they're willing to tattoo a few for you. The...
If you're ordering from Ideal, and you just want a few to provide some eggs and work into your breeding program, you could order the right number to meet the minimum order (currently $30.) At the current price of Partridge Rocks, that would be 8 females, or 10 straight run, or 12 males. Or 6...
Your previous post commented on the males, but now you're showing pictures of females?
I agree, those females have quite a bit of black on their backs.
But adding the Columbian gene (probably already in your stock, tracing back to the red sexlinks) would clear out a bunch of the black on their...