Buff Orpington on breed x = sex link cross?

[Eliselove]

Howdy folks! The rooster circus continues . . . I wasn't able to keep the welsummer, he got kung-fu frisky with my elderly mother, so we had to rehome him. Now considering having her hand raise a Buff Orpington roo to make sure he is calm around her -- because the gals are suddenly INSANE with no man. I did try to look at the chicken genetics calculators but bless me I don't know enough to understand them yet. If I want to have sex linked cross, what breeds could I put with Mr. Buff-Butt, and is Black Copper Maran one of them? With the Black Copper Marans what would their chicks be like in first generation? Many thanks to anyone who can help me with this!

 

[Eliselove]

@NatJ maybe?

 

[NatJ]

Howdy folks! The rooster circus continues . . . I wasn't able to keep the welsummer, he got kung-fu frisky with my elderly mother, so we had to rehome him. Now considering having her hand raise a Buff Orpington roo to make sure he is calm around her -- because the gals are suddenly INSANE with no man. I did try to look at the chicken genetics calculators but bless me I don't know enough to understand them yet. If I want to have sex linked cross, what breeds could I put with Mr. Buff-Butt, and is Black Copper Maran one of them? With the Black Copper Marans what would their chicks be like in first generation? Many thanks to anyone who can help me with this!

I haven't been paying attention to what is in your flock, so I can't be sure of all the options.

If you want to get sexlink chicks with a Buff Orpington rooster, you can probably use black hens with white barring (Barred Rock, Delaware, Cuckoo Marans, etc.) That should produce sons that are black with white barring (light spot on top of the head when they hatch) and daughters that are black with no white barring (no light spot on top of the head when they hatch.)

The possible flaw with this: some Buff Orpingtons have a gene that turns black into white. If all your "black" chicks are turned into white chicks, you are not going to have much luck seeing light headspots on the males, or white barring on white feathers. Since Buff Orpingtons are not supposed to show any black or white feathers, just buff, there is no easy way to check whether they have the genes to allow black or the one to turn black into white.


You can use Silver hens, and get gold/silver sexlinks. Daughters will be gold, sons will be Silver. Silver hens would include any with a Silver Columbian pattern (Columbian Rock, Columbian Wyandotte, Light Brahma, etc) Also Delawares, and any breed in Silver Laced, Silver Spangled, Silver Pencilled, Black Tailed White. Some all-white hens can be used to produce this kind of sexlink and some cannot, but there is no quick & easy way to tell them apart (if you try hatching chicks from white hens, you will eventually know whether you can identify the sons and daughters of that particular hen.) White Leghorns and White Jersey Giants will typically NOT work for this.

The possible flaw with gold/silver sexlinks: some chicks have so much black or gray in their down, that you cannot see the gold/silver difference. One way to make an educated guess: look at what color the hens are as chicks. If they show lots of black or gray, their chicks might also. The amount of black or gray will also be affected by the genes they inherit from their father, but Buff Orpingtons tend not to have much of that, which should help a little with any of the possible crosses.

Crossing a Buff Orpington rooster with Black Copper Marans hens will not give sexlinks. The chicks should grow up to look a fair bit like Black Copper Marans, but the "copper" may look closer to "buff," and there will probably be more of the copper/buff and less black than what pure BCM have. Daughters from that cross will probably lay eggs of an in-between shade of brown, darker than is normal for Buff Orpingtons but lighter than the color laid by the Marans mother.