I personally have only dealt with it in males, working with the stock I have here. I have not personally seen the trait manifest itself in a female of any color--split or lavender, but I may not have hatched enough chicks for that genetic occurrence to pop up, either. I do know that the two female splits I raised out of Paul Smith pure blacks that were sired by the slow lavender cock have grown their feathers normally. I did not raise a male from the cross, but another member has one, and from the picture I saw, his tail looks perfect. I have crossed those two girls on the lav cockerel with what I think is a normal tail (it didn\'t grow slowly, but the feathers are thinner) and I have week old chicks from that cross that I\'ll take a closer look at after the holidays. I am seeing some tails already in the brooder, so I think that\'s a good sign. But then again, maybe those are all the females. Perhaps I should be banding those birds now and keep only those? I guess I was not expecting females to be carriers since it was a sex-linked trait.
It sounds to me like there\'s a couple of different things going on with these lavs. I know it\'s hard to talk about our trash birds, but we have to in order to figure this out and eliminate it! Beth, thank you for posting those pics of the naked birds! I have not hatched one like that, but maybe you have a double copy of something and perhaps my birds have been homozygous only and my stock does have the potential to produce one that looks exactly like that. This is precisely why I want a better understanding of the genetics behind the flaw.