The Official Forum of the Ameraucana Breeders Club > Breeding
Genetic discussion of slow Feather (K) and tardy feather (t)
Beth C:
I\'d say if you got a male with no brassiness or barring you\'re headed in the right direction. Every male I hatched was brassy, every male split I hatched had leakage, although one very little, and the females weren\'t much better. I kept 2 pullets & there\'s a 3rd I\'m debating using. I only hatched 2 fast-feathering birds and, unfortunately, lost one of them. The remaining pullet has a single comb but I\'m rolling the dice anyway.
I don\'t know what other people are getting, but I\'m wondering if I\'m dealing with Kn. I got quite a few that looked like this:
http://ameraucana.org/abcforum/index.php?a=topic&t=1560
ALL of mine were very slow to feather, but the worst ones appeared to be male.
I destroyed the majority of them, but kept a couple to observe, and they did eventually feather in fully. But they were literally naked for the first few months. And didn\'t look much better with feathers than they did without.
To be honest, I\'m getting pretty discouraged with the lavenders. My only contribution to the variety this past season was killing about 100 really ugly ones before they could reproduce...
grisaboy:
The K genes are used a lot in the commercial poultry industry. This allows them to feather sex day old chicks. The male parent line would be pure for fast feather (kk) and the female parent line is pure for slow feather (KK). Because this is a sex linked gene, all of the female chicks will be fast feathered (k-) and all of the males will be slow feathered because the slow feather is dominant (Kk). This can be seen on the wings of the day old chicks because the females will already have longer primary feathers starting to grow and the males will have little stubby primary feathers. Probably 98% of your commercial layers and broilers in this country use this method to sex day old chicks. The difference is not really apparent in the plumage of the adult birds. Especially in the white commercial birds. It would be apparent in barred birds as slow feathering produces the nice even bars in barred rocks while fast feathering gives the less even barring in cuckoo colored birds.
Curtis
grisaboy:
There are special considerations that have to be taken into account with the lavender variety. There are several plumage flaws associated with this variety. One flaw associated with the lavender color is poor tail formation. By this I mean that the tail feathers are thin and twisted and never quite develop into the proper full tail of the breed. I have not seen this too much in the lavender Ameraucanas but it is fairly common in Self Blue Old English Game Bantams. If you cross these lavender birds with poor tails to blacks, the resulting black splits do not have the bad tails. When the splits are bred back together the resulting lavenders often will have the bad tails. It does not seem to be expressed in the female lavenders either. This means that even if you cull your males ruthlessly for bad tails, the trait can reappear from your females or your black splits.
Another feather flaw associated with lavender males is a patch that appears on the wingbar. This patch will look like the feathers have started to molt and new feathers are coming in but the new feathers never quite fully develop. This trait is like the twisted tails (and may be related) and is not expressed in females or splits.
We do not want to have these flaws showing up in our lavender Ameraucanas because they are very hard to eliminate. Lavender breeders should take special precautions and select hard for good feather quality.
Curtis
crystalcreek:
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.
crystalcreek:
So, back to the question. Let\'s assume it is K, as Jean has said. How do we eliminate it?
Can males who exhibit the trait be used if they are crossed on normal females? I have gotten some lovely females from this cross, but if they are all carriers, we\'re back at square one, which leads me to the next question--
Can females who are daughters of slow males carry the gene hidden? Does it pass to only their male offspring, female offspring, or both?
I don\'t understand sex chromosomes in chickens, and therefore sex-linked traits are confusing to me. I really want to, I just can\'t seem to wrap my brain around it.
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