Blue Birchen Amer project

[Guest]

Hi,
I\'ve been working on making Birchen and Blue Silvers Standard Ameraucanas. I\'ve started off with SilverXblack/blue birds. These are some of my breeders. What do ya think? I know the hackles on the blue boy need to be lightened up a bit more, and the blue hen has no lacing(she has silver genes in her though).
Ok, here I go:
Salvador, all my young birds are from him

Steel, Salvadors son(and no, he is not beardless, the girl plucked him)

Bleurette, Salvadors Daughter and Steels full sister

Tara, one of my first hens, a BlueXSilver and mother of both Steel and Bleurette


Do you think SteelXTara will make roosters with lighter hackles ? Will BleuretteXSalvador, will the pullets have better lacing??

I would be happy about any advice, sadly I am only working with a very small flock and gene pool here and can\'t locate any new birds close enough to me......

Have a wonderful day,
Anna

[Mike Gilbert]

You may need to introduce the E>R (birchen gene).    I\'m thinking you have E (extended black) and e (wild type) genes at the e-locus.     I had the same problem with my large fowl brown reds for years until it finally dawned on me what the problem was.   The way I went about it was to cross a large fowl male on a bantam brown red hen.   Otherwise your birds look pretty nice.   Keep working at it.   By the way, when you get bluish hens with salmon color on the breast, that is a blue silver, not a silver blue.    Silver blue, I believe, is basically the same as blue birchen.    Somebody correct me if that is wrong, as I didn\'t check my ABA bantam standard where
these colors are described.

Mike Gilbert

[Guest]

You are correct Sir....

[Guest]

Ooops, I meant Silver Blue/Blue Birchen. Dunno why I always write blue silver.......

I use the blueXsilver hen to improve the hackles of my males(at least thats what I hope it\'ll do).

Wouldn\'t crossing with brown reds give me a problem with red genes??? I know the person i got them from took over 5 year to get the red gene OUT of her flock of blacks, blue and silvers.

Also, like I wrote before I cannot locate any breeders in a reasonable distance to get live birds from and since I only kill chicks/eggs even try spending the money on hatching eggs(also all the breeders I know have green eggs, not blusih turqouise).
Only birds I have to work with are 1 birchen and 1 silver blue rooster and a blue and blueXsilver hen and later this year with a pair of white ones....
Not a lot, I know.

Anna

[Guest]

Anna,
Not all reds are created equally. All chickens are based on either gold (red) or silver genetically, or a combination of the two. That is different than red \'bleeding\' through on black or solid based varieties. Even a genetically \"homozygous sexlinked silver\" bird can have red bleeding (visible) in their eyebrows, hackle, shoulders and saddles.

Crossing to true \"brown reds\" will give you a sexlinked gold, E^R-birchen  heterozygous F1 generation. Mating these F1s to each other will give you approximately 12.5% of the chicks that are \"homozygous\" for both sexlinked gold and the E^R birchen alleles. In other words, E^R//E^R, s//s, true brown reds.

The difficulties you would be faced with come from the recessive nature of \"other\" E-locus alleles contained in the females from the line of birds that produced the one in the photo. If your E-locus allele(s) are other than E or E^R, and you mate an E^R bird to them, it isn\'t always easy to separate out which F2 chicks are E^R//E^R or E^R//e^b or E^R//e^wh as the E^R allele over powers them in expression in the chick down stages as well as in adulthood. Some times the heterozygotes (splits) are way obvious, but not always.

Getting back to your initial question, crossing in a brown red will not necessarily give you red bleed through. It really depends on what other genes the bird has.

Regards,
Dan

Wouldn\'t crossing with brown reds give me a problem with red genes??? I know the person i got them from took over 5 year to get the red gene OUT of her flock of blacks, blue and silvers.
Anna