It is the nature of human beings to guess or
speculate about things we are not sure of. That is
part of the fun of being human.

We have an incubator full of F2 progeny from our
blue egg project just now hatching. And, as
always.... the genetics are not entirely what one
thinks they are.... But, the surprises often hold a lot
of joy and excitement. For me, every chick that
hatches is like a Christmas present. Watching
them grow up is another Christmas present.

Our blue egg project started with Ameraucana and
Araucana males over Leghorn females (the P
generation). Therefore, all the F1s are
heterozygous for dominant white and homozygous
for extended black. So, most of them are white, but
we have two that are black. ("Dominant" white is
actually incompletely dominant... among other
genes, White Leghorns are E/E with eumelanin
supressing genes, I and B.)

So chicks that happen along that are not yellow (or
white-ish) catch our attention. Once before we got
a 'blue' chick which is really a silvery - grey. But,
that chick was crippled and had to be culled. Now
we have another one of these 'silvery-grey' babies
(F2 generation as was the other one that was
culled). In this batch of F2 chicks, the sires are
Araucana x Leghorn males and the dams are
Ameraucana x Leghorn pullets. We know we have
lav in our Ameraucana line, and the genetics of our
Araucanas are largely unknown.

Obvioulsy the alleles of the E-locus influence chick
down color (see Smyth's Chapter 5 in Crawford's
volume, page 117). So E, e^Wh, e^y, e^b and so
on do influence chick down color as do Co and Db.

Engaging in the sport of speculation, I am
wondering what genes we have in our blue egg
project that give us these (relatively rare) silver-grey
chicks. (I estimate that we get them at a frequency
of 0.5%.)

The first place to look is toward the eumelanin
diluters....

lav DOES dilute chick down color. For example, a
chick with wild-type, e+, and lav will be grey (but,
supposedly the eye-stripe will still be visible). This
new grey chick hatched this morning so she's still
in the incubator and I can't inspect her face all that
closely. But, she may well have some eye-stripe,
or so it seems to me.

Autosomal grey is not well studied.

The blue gene, Bl, is known to be carried by some
White Leghorn lines, with the expression
suppressed by the influence of dominant white on
extended black. I don't have any personal
experience with Bl genetics and don't know what
the baby chicks look like if Bl is expressed either
homozygously or heterozygously.

Anyway, this is a lot of fun seeing the babies hatch
out ... in a number of ways these events are
revealing information about the genetics that are
present and it is always fun to see how the birds
grow up.

I may post a picture in a few of this baby in a few
days when they all come out of the incubator.

Blue has variable expression in the chicks, one copy is all you need, but some Blbl+ chicks are nearly black and others are a light gray. You can tell you have blue by looking at the down under a microscope. I've done this and it works, but you have to fix the down first which takes a few days and you have to have access to the proper solvents and a microscope. Blue down has melosomes that are more spherical in shape and normal black down has rod shaped melanosomes. Even the dark downed blue chicks have the different shaped melanosomes but they seem to have more of them than the lighter downed chicks. I haven't looked at the down of lav birds, but an allele of dominant white that I looked at that gave gray down produced the round melanosomes too, so we couldn't tell the two types of gray apart by the down.

Could be lav. You expect quite a few black downed chicks in the F2 and lav would turn the black down gray.

Hi you two, what is lav? Do you mean lavender? (Hope ya'll don't go "duh" too much when reading my posts!!)

I do mean well, ;^}
Hannah

HannahH, you are delightful ... I'm certain that no
one is thinkng "duh" , rather everyone is
appreciating your contributions. I hope you
continue to participate!

Yes, the "lav" is the usual way to say "recessive
lavender" ... In addition to diluting pigments, it
also influences feather structure ... it is associated
with feather abnormalities ... I have some pics on
my photopoint.com album that illustrate this aspect
of lav.

Rokimoto ... The F1s are all at least heterozygous
for dominant white.... this means that 25% of the
F2s will be homos for dominant white, 50% will be
heteros, and 25% will not have dominant white at
all. Those without dominant white should be
expected to be black because (the P generation)
White Leghorns are homozygous for E as are the
Araucana sires. Then there is the additional
consideration of the sex-linked barring ... which the
White Leghorn dams have in the hemizygous
state.

The surprise this time around is the grey / silver
chick ... as I mentioned before, we had one in our
first batch of F2s but had to be culled. This time,
the baby is fine and I expect will do well.... I am
very much looking forward to seeing how she
grows up.

If this is lav then I have to reconsider the genetics
of the Araucanas we have. It would be fun if this is
a blue gene because blue eggs from blue
chickens would be a nice aspect.

Rokimoto, several years ago, I made an
experiment with feathers and mineral spirits (paint
thinner). I read somewhere that you could extract
the pigment from feathers with 'mineral oil'. So I
bought a can of paint thinner and borrowed a
"mortar and pestil" from a lab with which I crushed
a feather. Putting the crushed feather into the
mineral oil (paint thinner), for four days did in fact
extract much of the color from the feather. This is
an easy experiment to do and the children love it.

I do have a microscope (and numerous other
instruments that are just fun for me that I probably
can't justify having). I haven't looked at
melanosomes under the (75 x) microscope, but I
should try it. The mineral oil extraction works very
well..... if anyone is interested, I can send more
detailed instructions.

Me, me, I'm interested! That sounds pretty neat. I've got a young fellow that comes around who would probably like to see that. In fact, this past weekend I had 8 chicks hatch out of 9 eggs. I knew all the eggs had been viable, as I'd candled them and they all looked fertile.

After all the eggs had hatched (the silkie served as incubator and will brood them) on Friday and finished on Saturday, one egg was left over. I told Josh (the young fellow, 11) we'd open the egg and see what was in it. These eggs were sultan roo to sultans, a silkie, and a barred cochin bantam. Six of the eggs were the cochin, but I'm not sure about the other 3. Either the sultan hen or the silkie.

Anyway, we opened the egg and low and behold, there was the tiny chick. For some reason it had died before it could absorb the yolk. It and the yolk only took up half the inside of the egg, which was tiny to begin with, being from the cochin pullet and all. I put the chick and still attached yolk into a tiny glass jar with alcohol, and am waiting for Josh to let me know if one of his teachers wants it. I hope so!

I know this sounds away from your subject of this thread, but I'm getting there. My cochin pullet is black and barred with white. Six of the eggs were hers and I was expecting dark chicks out of them. Instead I have six tiny yellow chicks with a spot here and there of black. The other three eggs were the sultan roo to a sultan hen I have, and a white silkie.

These three chicks were born with a crest, totally yellow, and all the chicks have heavily feathered legs and feet. I know the feathering on the legs and feet are normal as all the parents have it also. What surprised me was the predominance of the yellow. I know these chicks will probably end up the almost white of the sultan, but was surprised by the amount of yellow.

I am tickled with my new chicks. I mainly let them hatch to make sure my sultan roo is fertile. I can't wait to see if at least one of the chicks is a full sultan. Those are the birds I'm most interested in. I really like the vulture hocks and the look of these birds.

I know the sultan is a rare bird, so was not expecting any of their traits to be dominate, but I guess the white of their color is. Will see what the sultan and cochin babies turn out to look like. Can't wait.

Thanks for your time and interest Anonymous...
Hannah

Thank you for your post, HannahH. If I understand
you correctly, you have babies from a black cochin
female and they are yellow chicks (?) with some
black spots here and there. If this is the case, the
babies have likely inherited a single gene for
dominant white from the sire (father of the chicks).
These black spots in an otherwise white bird are
characteristic of the I / i+ genotype (one gene for
dominant white and one 'wild-type' gene). That's
the thing about dominant white ... it is leaky in that it
will let some black spots through and also, it isn't
entirely dominant.... rather it is incompletely
dominant which means that there are unknown
other factors that can keep it from being expressed
even though the dominant white gene is present.

I have thought about using silkies as broodies. I
had an RIR hen go broody recently but she killed
her baby. She was a good mother for two days
then she killed her baby. I may get a few silkie
dams just for broodies, but we are not really
interested in bantams ... I don't know if they will
incubate standard eggs or not, but we wouldn't
have to put jumbo sized eggs under them.

I'll probably take one of our incubators down to the
elementary school where my nephews go to
school and let the fourth grade class there hatch a
batch of eggs for me. I know the kids will have a lot
of fun with that, but then they want to take the
babies home with them, which is OK but a lot of
the time they aren't aware that the cute fuzzball will
grow up to be a chicken. So, we have to talk to the
parents of any kid that wants to keep a chick from
the hatch.

I have a poultry genetics webite if you are
interested. A good way to get there is to go to Pete
Theer's rockingTranch website and follow the
genetics buttons and links. You'll get to an e-mail
address from which you can get the URL. I'm just
trying to assess the value of that effort to the fancy.
There is a small group of about 20 of us who use
that site.

To Anonymous above...I sent an email to you requesting the link but have never received a response. I will try again. Thanks in advance!

Paint thinner may work. We used xylene. You don't have to grind up the feather. The organic solvent infuses the feather and turns it transparent so that you can look at the down under the microscope and see the black melanin granules inside. Soak the down in the orgainic solvent for a few days and that is all you usually have to do. If you don't let the down dry out and look at it in a drop of the solvent under a cover slip you should be able to see a few specks. Clip a little down from the gray and a black chick for comparison. The down can be stored dry at room temp for years before you do anything with it.

I was using oil emersion to clearly see the shape of the granules, but you may only see a pattern of tiny spots without the high power lens. I think that our oil emersion lens was 40X coupled with the 10X occular would have given me 400X mag.

Hi Anonymous, yes the daddy of these chicks is a white Sultan. I highly recommend getting some silkies for incubating and raising chicks. My tiny little silkie sat on 9 standard eggs this past spring, and I got 6 chicks. She was an excellent mother (emphasis on the excellent!) All I had to do was feed and water and enjoy them. She did everything else.

Since this past February she went broody and hatched one set of chicks. Then after about 2 months with them it was obvious she was ready to go back in with the other birds. She even started pecking at her (bigger than her) "children."

I went ahead and put her back in with the others. She promptly started laying again and laid about 25 eggs (that's a close estimate) when she went broody again. I didn't give her any eggs then. She stayed broody on the nest till I finally put her in with the rest of my new bantam pullets and the sultan roo. She wasn't happy about being moved, but it did break her being broody. She laid another 20 eggs or so and decided to get broody again! That's when I went ahead and let her sit on this batch of 9 eggs again. She hatched 8 out of 9, so I guess that's pretty good.

From what I understand a silkie will sit and hatch any egg you place under them. I've read that silkies were used to hatch endangered birds like eagles and condoors (not sure about the spelling of that.)

By the way, silkies are supposed to be true bantams, but I have seen some rather large ones. CJR has written here about seeing standard silkies in Europe.

If you want birds that will sit more than lay, and take care of babies for you (you won't have to fool with the lights and teaching them to eat and drink and all that) get those silkies!!

I will check out your genetics pages as soon as I can.
I'm also going to try to post a pic of those chicks in this thread tonight. Thanks Anonymous for your responses!!

Here's a pic of some of the chicks. It's really hard to get a good shot, the way they run around. They're now six days old. Also included a pic of the roo and pullet (parents of the spotted ones.)Hope this works.

Thank you for your pics, HannahH! your babies
look like they are several days old!

The black spots you see on your yellow chicks are
characteristic of a bird that is heterozygous for
dominant white (I / i+). They will grow up to be
essentially white with black spots here and there.

I have a pullet (we call her 'ink spot' ) that had a big
black patch on her wing. She was white
everywhere else except for this black patch on her
right wing. I was all excited that I had a live
example of 'bi-paternalism' (two fathers ... if you're
interested I could go into this in more detail). To
make a long story short, when she grew into her
adult plumage, she became white with lots and
lots of small black spots and flecs all over her.
She is really pretty....she looks like someone
spilled the pepper shaker on her. But she isn't
bi-paternal.... She is just heterozygous for
dominant white. And, as a heterozygote (a bird
with only one gene for a trait) she shows a lot of
black spotting ... as your birds will do when they
grow up!

So where does "splash" fall into this? I've seen cochins and silkies and any number of birds called splash. I've heard if you take a black and white silkie (which I now have) and mix them you'll get percentages of white, black, blue and splash.

Reminds me of "party" poodles. I remember from childhood when I had a black poodle and then got a Party poodle. The party poodle was predominately white with apricot spots on him here and there. I guess it works the same way in dogs as in chickens?

Silkies are usually recessive white. The original recessive white allele that Punnett studied came from Silkies. They can have just about any color genes under recessive white. If they have Andalusian blue (Bl) you can get something like you describe if you cross blacks with whites. You won't get splashes in the hybrids, and you won't get white unless the blacks are segregating for recessive white. You will get black or blue.

Silkies do not usually have dominant white because dominant white dilutes the black color of the skin. I've seen some Silkies with dominant white. If you cross these to blacks you can get some whites with the black spots. These would not be splash whites.

Thanks Rokimoto. I've had a white silkie for a year now, and bought a trio at the show in Richmond. I got the 3 black ones for only 10 dollars, which I thought was good for a roo and two hens. I've had them since the 17th, and the two tiny girls each started laying today.

Question... The rooster has a green sheen in his biggest feathers. This color is showing on his neck some, mainly on the tail feathers. Is he supposed to be showing this green sheen?

The "beetle green sheen" is caused by the feather
structure and is not due to a pigment. The
structure of the feather acts like a diffraction grating
causing the green sheen....sometimes it is purple.
Old timers around here call them 'oil feathers'.... I
guess because a layer of oil on water will cause a
rainbow effect that has some of the same colors....
or maybe because the feathers look oily.

In the Andalusian blues, the Bl gene (dilutes black)
is (another) incompletely dominant gene like
dominant white. If a (normally black) bird has one
gene for blue, Bl, that bird is likely going to be blue.
When the bird has two genes, the bird is usually
'splash'. The birds that are blue due to the Bl gene
are heterozygous (one copy of the gene) and
therefore don't breed true. Birds that are blue
because they have lav (lav is recessive and
requires two genes to express) will breed true and
this is what people refer to as 'self-blue'.

One can sometimes encounter confused
statements regarding Bl and lav. lav is an
independent gene from Bl. Some of this confusion
arises because Bl is incompletely dominant.
Fanciers sometimes see a blue bird come about
from a mating of two black birds. This can happen
if one of the black birds is carrying an unexpressed
Bl gene (because Bl is incompletely dominant and
doesn't always express).

P.S. HannahH, I understood you to say that the
sire
of the chicks in the picture is Sultan and not Silkie
... is that correct?

Yes, the parents of the spotted chicks is in the pic under the chick's pic. The father is a sultan and the mom is the barred cochin also shown in the pic. The silkie is playing surrogate mother for me again. I mainly let these eggs hatch because I wanted to see if the sultan was good and firtile. I guess he is since all 9 eggs did develope, and 8 hatched. The 9th chick died in the shell before the yolk was absorbed.

Thanks for answering my question about the green sheen to the black silkie roos feathers.

You know, talking about the green and blue sheen to the birds feathers...I've seen some dutch bantams with the dark blue sheen and I think it's a gorgeous color. I also had light brahma and ameraucana mixed chicks this spring. The 2 roos out of that hatch had a purple sheen to their feathers that was really colorful.

I'm really kind of surprised noone has tried to really "exploit" (I hate that word but can't think of another that fits here)those colors. I've seen the really beautiful greens and blues on tropical birds. I've wondered why we don't have those colors on chickens. Imagine a purple or green chicken! Blue too, and I don't mean the light grey blue, I mean a true dark blue. I bet regular folks would go nuts over those colors in a chicken!

Oh, by "regular" folks, I mean people who haven't discovered the fun and enjoyment of raising poultry like we have!

It seems that this proves that Sultans are carrying Dominant white. Am I correct?