2025 and Beyond Breeding Plan

[tolmema]

We are almost moved up to the homestead where I'll have full control over my flock and my breeding pens. I'm really excited for my breeding plans this year.

One of my long-term projects is an auto-sex zombie. I'm building from scratch using my current flock: Paint Ameraucana, Cream Legbar, Ayam Cemani, and some generic black hens (Austros & Orps I think).

>> The fibro gene ONLY affects skin and organs and has nothing to do with feather color.

>> The Cambar gene does not affect skin color OR adult feather color, only the down color.

>> Breeding two paints is the only way I know how to visually see a dominant white II bird without having to test breed.


Genotype: II FMFM Cb/Cb

• II → White feathers (masks all color)
• FMFM → Guaranteed black skin
• Cb/Cb → Homozygous Cambar (autosexing chipmunk stripes in males)

Outcome:

• 100% of chicks will autosex (males = stripe, females = solid)
• 100% of chicks will have black skin
• 100% of chicks will have white feathers

The splits will show varieties of paint, lavender, lemon-cream, + whatever hidden genetics pop out until I can stabilize.

I am really excited to see the BYC hatchlings and to see if all of my research and planning aligns with what I am expecting.

 

[Amer]

It is impossible to create autosexing zombies.
First, there is no cambar gene.
Cb stands for champagne blond, a completely different gene:

Spoiler: Cb

https://birdgenetics.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F763369445846614016

Second, the crele pattern found on white Legbar chicks is incompatible with both Dominant White and the Fibro gene.
Dominant white does not allow a pattern show up on the chick down like recessive white does. Dominant white chicks are always yellow.
Barring, which is found in all autosexing breeds, is very difficult to combine with fibromelanism, which is why many barred Silkies have white skin. This is because the Dermal Melanin gene (which enables a bird to produce melanin in the dermis) is linked with the Non-barring gene. Crossover is rare.
Third, typically in autosexing breeds females have stronger striping than males.

 

[NatJ]

>> The Cambar gene does not affect skin color OR adult feather color, only the down color.

Can you point me to a source for this statement?

According to everything I have read, Campbars used the normal barring gene, inherited from Barred Rocks, to make them autosexing. That gene affects the adult feather color (white bars) and the down color and the skin color.

So if Cambars have some other gene, I'd really like to learn more about it.

Cb/Cb → Homozygous Cambar (autosexing chipmunk stripes in males)

• 100% of chicks will autosex (males = stripe, females = solid)

Cambars and other autosexing breeds have chipmunk stripes in the females, with males having a lighter color pattern and a light colored dot on the head.

Sources for that include https://greenfirefarms.com/auto-sexing-chicken-breeds.html
"Male chicks had the telltale white spot behind their heads and female chicks had well-defined stripes in the down on their backs."

And any page about Cream Legbars or Bielefelders or any similar autosexing breeds will tell you that obvious stripey ones are the females, while the males are more pale and have less obvious stripes.

 

[NatJ]

I missed a few points when I first responded:

Genotype: II FMFM Cb/Cb

• II → White feathers (masks all color)

II (Dominant White) does not mask ALL color. It changes black to white, but has little or no effect on shades of red/gold/cream.

Examples of breeds that show II (homozygous Dominant White) with red or gold:
--White Laced Red Cornish (white lacing on red)
--Buff Laced Polish (white lacing on buff)
--Chamois Spitzhauben (white spangled on gold)
--Red Pyle Old English Game Bantam (Black Breasted Red, with black turned to white)
For each of them, a pattern that would be in black has been turned to white, leaving the red/gold base visible. This extends to the chick down, where black has been replaced by white but the red/gold areas are still present.

The common types of Red Sexlink layers, with their white tails and red bodies, are generally Ii (heterozygous Dominant White.) That turns their tails to white instead of the black found in Rhode Island Reds, but again the red color is still visible in chicks and adults.

So if you want an autosexing pattern like Cambars, the chicks and adults will show some red or gold in their feathers.

Or if you want Dominant White to turn all the feathers white, your chickens need to othewise have the genes to be solid black. At that point, they will be much like White Leghorns (genetically black, sometimes with blue and/or barring, all turned white with Dominant White.) And that makes the chicks white/yellow too, so you can't see different coloring in males vs. females.

I'm building from scratch using my current flock: Paint Ameraucana, Cream Legbar, Ayam Cemani, and some generic black hens (Austros & Orps I think)....

>> The Cambar gene does not affect skin color OR adult feather color, only the down color.

I'm still puzzled about this "Cambar" gene, but I realized that doesn't matter, because it is not present in your starting flock.

You have a bunch of solid black chickens, with Dominant White in the Paint Ameraucanas, and you have Cream Legbars.

The genetics of Cream Legbars are well known. They have e+/e+ wild-type at the e-locus (different than E/E Extended Black that's in your other starting birds). And they have the barring gene B. Those are the genes that make them autosexing. And if you are getting your autosexing traits from them, your chicks will be colored like Cream Legbars. Females have one barring gene and show stripes, males have two barring genes and show a lighter coloring.

Add Dominant White (from the Paint Ameraucanas) and you'll have something like Barred Red Pyle, probably with gold or cream instead of actual red. They will have white barring (like Legbars) and white in each place the Legbars have black, but they will still have the cream color in all the usual places. In the chick down, once Dominant White takes out all the black, I don't know if you will be able to tell which chicks are lighter (two barring genes) and which are darker (one barring gene). I would be curious to see them, if you breed some like that.

 

[tolmema]

I missed a few points when I first responded:



II (Dominant White) does not mask ALL color. It changes black to white, but has little or no effect on shades of red/gold/cream.

Examples of breeds that show II (homozygous Dominant White) with red or gold:
--White Laced Red Cornish (white lacing on red)
--Buff Laced Polish (white lacing on buff)
--Chamois Spitzhauben (white spangled on gold)
--Red Pyle Old English Game Bantam (Black Breasted Red, with black turned to white)
For each of them, a pattern that would be in black has been turned to white, leaving the red/gold base visible. This extends to the chick down, where black has been replaced by white but the red/gold areas are still present.

The common types of Red Sexlink layers, with their white tails and red bodies, are generally Ii (heterozygous Dominant White.) That turns their tails to white instead of the black found in Rhode Island Reds, but again the red color is still visible in chicks and adults.

So if you want an autosexing pattern like Cambars, the chicks and adults will show some red or gold in their feathers.

Or if you want Dominant White to turn all the feathers white, your chickens need to othewise have the genes to be solid black. At that point, they will be much like White Leghorns (genetically black, sometimes with blue and/or barring, all turned white with Dominant White.) And that makes the chicks white/yellow too, so you can't see different coloring in males vs. females.


I'm still puzzled about this "Cambar" gene, but I realized that doesn't matter, because it is not present in your starting flock.

You have a bunch of solid black chickens, with Dominant White in the Paint Ameraucanas, and you have Cream Legbars.

The genetics of Cream Legbars are well known. They have e+/e+ wild-type at the e-locus (different than E/E Extended Black that's in your other starting birds). And they have the barring gene B. Those are the genes that make them autosexing. And if you are getting your autosexing traits from them, your chicks will be colored like Cream Legbars. Females have one barring gene and show stripes, males have two barring genes and show a lighter coloring.

Add Dominant White (from the Paint Ameraucanas) and you'll have something like Barred Red Pyle, probably with gold or cream instead of actual red. They will have white barring (like Legbars) and white in each place the Legbars have black, but they will still have the cream color in all the usual places. In the chick down, once Dominant White takes out all the black, I don't know if you will be able to tell which chicks are lighter (two barring genes) and which are darker (one barring gene). I would be curious to see them, if you breed some like that.

thanks for clarifying. when i was doing my research i was given some info that led me down an odd path:

"the Cream Legbar breed originally used the B gene from Barred Plymouth Rocks but later incorporated the cb gene through crosses with Araucanas. However, if a chicken has both B and cb, the B gene's effects (like barred feathers and sex-linked patterns) would dominate because B is sex-linked and affects both down and adult feathers, whereas cb is autosomal and only affects down color."

The person called it the cambar gene (cb). However, they may have been referring to the cr gene which enhances the contrast between male and female down?

so i thought i could separate the cb from the barring over time, and work with just down color.

 

[tolmema]

so i guess i'm just working on zombie parentage for now then, and watching the legbar traits over time.

my paint rooster hatched out as a weird color, like a pearl color with a khaki? chipmunk stripe of sorts. i don't know if all paints look like that at hatch but i'd never seen one before him.

Barred Red Pyle

--White Laced Red Cornish (white lacing on red)
--Buff Laced Polish (white lacing on buff)
--Chamois Spitzhauben (white spangled on gold)
--Red Pyle Old English Game Bantam (Black Breasted Red, with black turned to white)

i'm really excited to see different varieties like this from the flock. once i can visually see something it makes so much more sense to me.

 

[Amer]

so i guess i'm just working on zombie parentage for now then, and watching the legbar traits over time.

my paint rooster hatched out as a weird color, like a pearl color with a khaki? chipmunk stripe of sorts. i don't know if all paints look like that at hatch but i'd never seen one before him.





i'm really excited to see different varieties like this from the flock. once i can visually see something it makes so much more sense to me.

Heterozygous dominant whites often have a khaki coloration, especially if the birds have genetics for gold (making it a type of gold leakage.)

 

[Amer]

thanks for clarifying. when i was doing my research i was given some info that led me down an odd path:

"the Cream Legbar breed originally used the B gene from Barred Plymouth Rocks but later incorporated the cb gene through crosses with Araucanas. However, if a chicken has both B and cb, the B gene's effects (like barred feathers and sex-linked patterns) would dominate because B is sex-linked and affects both down and adult feathers, whereas cb is autosomal and only affects down color."

The person called it the cambar gene (cb). However, they may have been referring to the cr gene which enhances the contrast between male and female down?

so i thought i could separate the cb from the barring over time, and work with just down color.

Hm. Legbars do have the Cream gene (ig) but it affects both chicks and adults. I don't know where you read that but I'm thinking maybe the poster got Cream and Champagne Blond mixed up.

 

[tolmema]

Hm. Legbars do have the Cream gene (ig) but it affects both chicks and adults. I don't know where you read that but I'm thinking maybe the poster got Cream and Champagne Blond mixed up.

yeah i'm thinking you are right. thanks again for clarifying!

 

[NatJ]

thanks for clarifying. when i was doing my research i was given some info that led me down an odd path:

"the Cream Legbar breed originally used the B gene from Barred Plymouth Rocks but later incorporated the cb gene through crosses with Araucanas. However, if a chicken has both B and cb, the B gene's effects (like barred feathers and sex-linked patterns) would dominate because B is sex-linked and affects both down and adult feathers, whereas cb is autosomal and only affects down color."

That is very interesting.

The things I usually see attributed to Araucana ancestry are the blue egg gene, and the crest (found in Araucanas in some countries but not in the USA.)

Cream Legbars definitely have "cream" from somewhere, so I agree with @Amer that the cb gene (champagne blond) might be what the person meant.

The person called it the cambar gene (cb). However, they may have been referring to the cr gene which enhances the contrast between male and female down?

I thought cr was crest?

These abbreviations get confusing sometimes!

so i thought i could separate the cb from the barring over time, and work with just down color.

If that would work it would be nice, but I don't think it will. The part you quoted said that cb was autosomal. That means it is not on the sex chromosomes. I can't see any way to have color-sexable chicks with just autosomal genes. You certainly might use autosomal genes to make it easier to see the effects of the sex-linked traits that are used for sexing (obvious examples, autosexing chicks with the barring gene are only practical with certain colors of chick down so you can see the effects.)

The basis of autosexing is that males and females have a different number of the genes. With the sex chromosomes, male birds have ZZ and female birds have ZW, so the males have more white (two barring genes on the two Z sex chromosomes) while the females have less white (only one barring gene because they only have one Z sex chromosome.)

Sexlinks use the sex chromosomes a little differently: because a female inherits Z from her father and W from her mother, she shows whatever trait the father gave her. Because a male inherits Z from his father and from his mother, he has two of each gene on the Z chromosome. If he's got a dominant and a recessive trait, he will show the dominant one. So breeding a rooster with the recessive gene (gold or chocolate or not-barred) will give daughtes that show that recessive trait. If the mother has a dominant trait, the sons will show that dominant trait (silver or not-chocolate or barring).

i'm really excited to see different varieties like this from the flock. once i can visually see something it makes so much more sense to me.

With your starting colors you will have lots of black, white, and paint chicks. But yes, I would expect some really interesting other colors at some points in your breeding project. It's fun to see chicks in lots of colors!