Several people have e-mailed me over the last few
Without sex-linked barring you get a dirty white using dominant white. II bb or II bW birds are often a dusty grayish white. If you look at their feathers they look like very small grains of pepper have been sprinkled on the feather. In some birds this can be so dark as to make the birds look lavendar.
Thank you for your post, Rokimoto. This young
P.S. ... so, are these the only ways to get "dirty
Have you ever seen mottled barred birds? BB momo males look like poorly colored splash whites. If you add autosomal barring even the females come out mostly white. Auto sexing breeds are sometimes autosomal barred, mottled, and sex-linked barred. Cambars are this color. Silver Cambars are mostly white.
I have not seen B / B mo / mo that I knew of. But,
Blue might be responsible for the aberrant barring, but you can't rule out other modifiers. You are probably right about having only one copy of barring.
months and now we have our own "dirty white"
pullet....
Our "dirty white" is a little bit odd in that she is
everywhere a dirty white color but her face is dark.
After you get used to her appearance, she actually
looks pretty very unique..... This pullet is an F2
pullet in our blue egg project.
I have read that one way to get dirty white is to have
both autosomal and sex-linked barring in the
same bird.
What other genotypes give the "dirty white"
phenotype?
By Rokimoto on Saturday, December 15, 2001 - 03:59 pm:
Autosomal blue and mottling will clean up some of this gray, but sex-linked barring does the best job.
Sometimes Leghorns show some red in their plumage. To get rid of this you have to make the bird as black as possible under the white. The whitest Leghorns are black barred birds some with blue and mottling.
If you cross this pullet to a nonbarred male you will find that she is probably missing sex-linked barring.
By Infomaniac on Saturday, December 15, 2001 - 07:25 pm:
pullet (she's about 6-8 weeks old now ... I would
have to check my records to be certain) looks like
she has been living all her life under a tractor in the
machine shed. Her feathers are so dirty looking
that she looks like she got oil on her and someone
did their best to wash it off. The reason I thought
that she was probably different from just leaky
dominant white was because her dirtiness isn't
specks or granular in appearance.... but more
smudgy... she's kinda funny - she looks really dirty!
By Infomaniac on Saturday, December 15, 2001 - 07:51 pm:
white", namely a bird having both autosomal and
sex-linked barring, and then dominant white sans
helpers?
Some months ago someone e-mailed me
wondering about a dirty white pullet that he had
bred to a solid-black male and the much of the
progeny turned out barred. I had read some place
that sex-linked barring plus autosomal barring,
without dominant white, will give a dirty white bird
(that may have been in Crawford somewhere, but I
haven't run across that passage since then). I
suggested to him that he had one of these
"double- barred" pullets and that explained the
barring in this F1s.
My dirty white pullet has really pretty green shanks
and feet. This is strong evidence that she is
lacking sex-linked barring. Although she is an F2
baby, she is still genetically 1/2 Leghorn. In the F1
generation (P = Araucana (b+ / b+) and Leghorn (B
/ W) so only males get sex-linked barring (we
spoke about this "shank sexing" once before). In
the F2s, the 50% of the females should have B and
50% will be b+ / W. The F2 males will be 50% B /
b+ and 50% b+ / b+. One might just say that 50%
of the F2 population have sex-linked barring and
50% are wild-type with respect to barring.
So, it seems to me that your idea that she is
dominant white without sex-linked barring to help
clean her up is probably spot-on.
By Rokimoto on Saturday, December 15, 2001 - 10:22 pm:
Splash (BlBl) barred birds are mostly white, and would produce fuzzy barred birds when crossed to a black male, but the female progeny would have been blue. Blue doesn't dilute the color of the black bars very much, but it does fuzz them out and make them less distinct.
Ron Okimoto
By Infomaniac on Saturday, December 15, 2001 - 11:39 pm:
there seems to be a pattern emerging here.
I think of the set of genes: {sex-linked barring,
mottle, autosomal barring, dominant white, blue}
as have a common characteristic, namely the abiliy
to modify areas of black (to white). It seems to me
that you've pointed out cases in which
combinations of these black modifyers can give a
"dirty white" phenotype. It makes some sense if
one presumes that the phenotypic effects of these
genes are cumulative.
We have now segregating in our Dakota Black
Barred line a new 'barring' pattern that we haven't
seen before this last batch of chicks came out in
that project about 8 weeks ago. Their barring is
very wide, diffuse (fuzzy) at the edges and the black
is not very black but more a grey than black. Their
barring is full body and doesn't demonstrate the
silver hackle that has been characteristic of the
males in that line. It is clear that there must be a
black modifyer acting (perhaps Bl) that we were
unaware was present in that line. The barring is
very wide and the white of the barring isn't very
white, either ... the pattern looks more like
alternating shades of grey. I didn't hatch more than
50 Black Barreds and wasn't intending to hatch any
more until I could evaluate these. We have 5 or 6
of these 'grey barreds' (for lack of a better term)
which was really unexpected (10%). we were
actually hoping for more gypsy-face.
I'm speculating that these grey barreds are
probably Bl / bl+, B / b or B , B / W
It would be fun to see mottle come out of our
Leghorn line in some of the 25% our F2s that are
lacking dominant white.
The one grey chick I mentioned some time ago
has barring. Have you seen lav / lav, B / B or W?
Is lavender capable of supporting a barring
pattern?
By Rokimoto on Sunday, December 16, 2001 - 08:52 pm:
I have a pullet that is a cross between broilers and my Ameraucanas that is barred, but she is pretty dark and her barring is not very good at all. Her white bars are smudgy and even look wider in the middle of the feather than at the edges. This is probably just something funky. Like your birds the dark bars tend to bleed into each other.