Question about breeding

[Guest]

My family and I would like to buy some pure Bantam Ameraucanas.  
I was wondering if I should only breed black with black, silver with silver, and so on for the birds to meet the ABA standards.  No matter what they would only be bred with other standard Ameraucana\'s; I just didn\'t know if mixing the colors would be ok.
Thanks!

[jwoodhaven]

It is best if you breed like colors together. The only colors that you should cross would be black to either blueto keep the nice lacing in the blues, or splash to get all blues. Splashed is from the blue x blue which you should get 50% blue, 25% black, and 25% splach.

Jerry

[Mike Gilbert]

One more possibility is breeding wheaten to blue wheaten.
That cross gives you 50% of each color, and they would not be considered hybrids.   And black to blue or splash is fine, like Jerry says.    When you start making other crosses you are creating chickens that do not breed true in subsequent generations, thereby regressing to easter egg fowl as opposed to the pure lines of Ameraucanas.

[grisaboy]

I can speak from experience to this.
I crossed a white male to black females and got all blue chicks.  I kept a blue rooster with white hackles and crossed him to silver hens.  What a mess.  It looked like I had bought an assortment of Easter Eggers from a commercial hatchery.
The moral to this story is don\'t cross colors if you want to keep raising show quality stock.
(Except perhaps the vareties mentioned above by other posters)

Curtis

[John]

don\'t cross colors if you want to keep raising show quality stock.

Or if you are working toward a goal to improve a variety and have a specific long term breeding program in mind.
Even so, sometimes these projects don\'t give the expected results and we have to start over with \"plan B\".

[bantamhill]

I made the same cross as Curtis did about five years ago and regretted it for about 3 years.

Michael

[Guest]

Thank you so much for all the replies.  I had done an internet search beforehand and just couldn\'t find an answer.  I\'m not even sure yet if I\'ll show any of them, I just really would like to keep them as purebred as I can.  Thanks again!