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One way to reduce the feathering, increase the meat, and maintain the pea comb: add hatchery-quality Dark Cornish. Not Cornish Cross that grow so fast, not the show-quality Cornish that are wider than they are tall. The Dark Cornish I've had were from McMurray Hatchery and Ideal Poultry. They had pea combs, enough feathers for warmth but not a lot of extra fluff, clean legs, feather patterns that I liked, were fairly good layers-- basically a dual-purpose bird that was a little more compact than most and has the pea comb.
I had considered the dark Cornish but 50 cent Cornish rocks at the feed store were too much to resistThose Liege chicks look nice! And I see they have many of the same qualities that I found in Dark Cornish (pea comb, close feathering, compact body, patterned feathers. Looks like they feathered out fast, too.) So I can see why you've decided to cross them in to your mix!
I’ve got a Turken-Langshan/Jubilee Orpington cockrell that I’d like to add the color from. He’s kind of a mahogany-red-black color with the jubilee pattern. Much darker than his mom but beautiful.
And honestly, the liege are solid blocks of muscle themselves so I may just use them. They have a lot of the “look” that I want with the dark eyes and beetle brow.
As for the slow feathering, I noticed something yesterday that kind of changed my mind. The very slow feathering chicks were noticeably bigger than their faster feathering siblings. This is something I noticed with my turkens vs other breeds. I assume that the protein consumed goes into bone and muscle instead of feathers for the first few months.
My number one problem now is getting rid of feathered legs and maintaining good egg production as body size increases. I want to end up with a really tall, muscled up breed that’s really versatile as far as uses go. Today’s dual purpose breeds are almost entirely useless as far as genuine meat qualities. And those that are really meaty aren’t good layers.
The finished product need to be pea combed, clean legged (preferably yellow colored), and I’m trying to get that jubilee color in for aesthetic qualities. How will I go about cleaning up the legs and keeping the jubilee color in the line for several generations?
This is the young rooster. He’s 2.5 months old at the moment. He doesn’t have a lot of the white speckling at the moment but the older he gets the more it comes in. The hen below him is his mom. She’s pure jubilee Orpington. The dad is pictured in my original post...he’s half black langshan and half cuckoo turken. He throws chicks of all different colors but it normally skews in the direction of the hen’s colors more than half the time. All chicks of his have a really pretty metallic green in the darker feathers though like his sire did.Do you have a picture? Because there are several different "Jubilee" patterns, in various different breeds.
Project roo 5 months old:View attachment 2338480
Project roos 4 months old:
View attachment 2338481View attachment 2338478
That helps a lot!! Thank you for helping me out on this so much! I keep track of both parents of each chick I breed and I have family records of each parent going back to the beginning. If I don’t know the parentage of a chicken I won’t breed it. I’m very careful about knowing what’s what so regulating genes in the bloodline should be pretty easy.If you crossed him to a Dark Cornish (black double-lacing on red), you would get chicks with some kind of lacing, and no visible mottling. Crossing them back to the Jubilee would produce about 50% mottled chicks. (Similar for just about anything else you cross him with--that was just an example.)
Do you mean black tailed red?That kind of jubilee is mottled (recessive gene) on a base of black laced red (red, brown, gold--whatever name you like to call it.)
Crossing to other Jubilees of course works.
If you crossed him to a Dark Cornish (black double-lacing on red), you would get chicks with some kind of lacing, and no visible mottling. Crossing them back to the Jubilee would produce about 50% mottled chicks. (Similar for just about anything else you cross him with--that was just an example.)
If you want to see mottling on other base patterns/colors, you can look for pictures of Speckled Sussex, Spangled Russian Orloff, Millie Fleur, Ancona, Houdan. I'm guessing that even on black, the mottling will provide reasonably good camouflage.
It looks like the Dominant White is a bigger problem than the Extended Black, so you might breed away from it first.
I don't know how carefully you control which male mates with which female, but if at least one bird in each pairing has no Dominant White, you should see a lot less white in the next round of chicks. If you let them all run together, it would probably be easier to select enough males without Dominant White, rather than trying to find enough females that lack it.
To identify birds without Dominant White, look for black in the plumage. Not just a few feathers, but black lacing or black tail or black all over or something like that. (For this purpose, blue is just as good as black.)
For these project-males you posted pictures of, the first and second have Dominant White, the last two in a photo together do not:
The Jubilee Orpington and her son do not have Dominant White--you can tell because they have a good amount of black in their tails, and a fair bit in other places as well.
Do you mean black tailed red?
I keep track of both parents of each chick I breed and I have family records of each parent going back to the beginning. If I don’t know the parentage of a chicken I won’t breed it. I’m very careful about knowing what’s what so regulating genes in the bloodline should be pretty easy.
I have a notebook of all the past and present breeders on the farm and their progeny. Each has a name (if they’re more of a pet) or an ID (F1 BL/CT #1, F1 BL/CT #2, etc.). Underneath each name is a list of known traits, traits they’ve passed on to their offspring, behavior notes, ancestry, health history, and several other things. It makes it so much easier to keep track of everything about the current flock but also help me predict what a certain pairing will produce in their offspring.Oh, that's really nice! It makes it much easier to work with the colors! (And the other traits as well, of course.)