My eggs arrived! My plan if I get both silkied and split chicks is to breed the silkied to a regular ameraucana to increase the gene pool, and breed the splits to a silkied. I hadn't thought about trading but it sounds like a good idea rather then breeding them to a half sibling. I'm still not even halfway through this thread but had a question about the original pair. Is all of their offspring out of both of them or have they been bred to regular ameracaunas too?
Happy hatching! I hope you get 100%!
For some time we had a good accounting of nearly every bird resulting from this project- you'll see all of that as you keep reading. Julie, the originator of this line (and thread) had one original pair and everything comes from them with outcrosses to various other lines of Ameraucana, but not too diversely. There is definitely room for more genetic diversity, but it is important to band all of your stock so you can keep careful track of the splits and bloodlines for clarity and to avoid moving backward toward the genetic bottleneck we started from.
Moving into Ameraucanas from a breeder is a great way to go, and I'm doing that as well as keeping multiple lines. That's really one of the best way for us to strengthen them.
I'm just glad we have more folks in the project!