Crosses coming out.

Oh I know thanks again

muddywaterducks said:

Oh I know thanks again

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No problem!

Muddywaterducks if I offended you, and it seems I did, I’m sorry. The first part was kind of serious, it really helps when responding to a technical question to have an idea what technical knowledge the person has. The second part about sleeping through class was meant as a joke. Obviously it did not go over well.

There is a lot more to breed than just color/pattern. A good poultry judge can pretty well determine the breed of a bird that meets the standards just by looking at a black and white silhouette. No colors needed. Other things like comb, skin color, eye color, egg shell color, egg size, and many other things go into what makes a breed. For some breeds the color of the sole of their feet makes a difference. The list just goes on and on. I suspect when you say the Marans coming out of the RIR coming out, you are really talking about color and pattern and not all this other stuff. But I’m guessing.

When you cross two purebred birds with different colors/patterns you can pretty well determine what the colors/patterns will be in the offspring. Sometimes the offspring looks like one or the other parent, sometimes they are a mix or in some cases can look a lot different than either. With chickens genetics you can have dominant, recessive, partially dominant, or sex linked genes, plus some genes only have an effect if certain other genes are present. With sex linked genes it can be important which breed is the mother or father. With all this said, if the parents are pure for the genes they are supposed to have, you can predict what the offspring will look like.

Just saying Marans dos not tell me much about the color/pattern of the Marans that was a parent of your crosses. There are many different recognized colors and patterns of Marans. The genetics of some of those colors/patterns will dominate the colors/patterns of RIR so if the parent was one of those, the offspring will be colored a lot like the Marans. With some other patterns, that would not be the case. The genes from the RIR are on the DNA and can be passed down to any offspring, just like the genes from the Marans.

When these genes are passed down it is purely random which get passed down. We are talking about a lot of different genes so many different combinations of genes are possible. It just depends on which genes are there from the original grandparents. Reading between the lines of your original post, I assume the Marans had a color/pattern that completely dominated the genetics of the RIR so the original cross looked a lot like the Marans in color and maybe pattern. But when you cross the offspring, the dominate genes get passed down sometimes and the recessive genes get passed down sometimes. It sounds like in those seven chicks the recessive genes for base color happened to pair up twice. It also sounds like the down color of those two chicks is different from the down color you get with RIR. Again I’m kind of reading between the lines. What that means is that although the recessive genes for base color paired up, there or other genes involved, probably from the Marans side, that changed the down color.

Hope that explains a little bit what you are seeing. It sounds really normal to me.

ok thank you

I'm a newbie & totally clueless on the genetics end...I've tried to do some research online but ended up more confused than ever. My 1 year old chicks turned out to be 2 male BLRW, 1 Buff Orp Roo, & the rest were all supposedly pure Australorp & Buff Orp hens.. Now they were all together, & I let one of the broody Australorp hens hatch out 9 of their eggs. Out of that batch, I ended up with 2 buff orps (both likely roos), 1 light blue/grey roo with long black cape/hackles, 2 med blue/grey roos, with long black cape/hackles, 2 large, very bright colored golden-orange & black speckled beauties, (that are both looking/acting like roos?), and one small female mostly black with a little gold speckling on her breast. At the same time I also had a pair of sebrights that I let her hatch 2 eggs & both ended up being roos. 1st of all, how in the heck do you get only 1 hen out of 11 eggs??? I must have the worst luck in the world or be doing something wrong??

According to one of the sites I visited, I was told that any of the grey/black colored chicks would all be male & any with the gold colorings would be female. But to me the 2 orange speckled ones are looking (larger & long cape) & acting (rather aggressive) more like roo? The little black & Gold speckled one is the only one I'm sure is female. The other day I had someone allot more experienced come by to take some of the more certain roos (as breed stock) off my hands but he didn't believe that their sex could be determined by their color? I know you can't trust everything on the internet, but how else can we learn this when there's so many out there with different experience or knowledge levels & so many opinions that are so darned conflictive? Heck, I have a friend who's been raising chickens for over 50 years but they don't even know the names of their various breeds & don't even seem to care so long as they lay their eggs..

Anyway, I sure would appreciate some help with this, & I don't plan to give any more away, or hatch more out, til I can at least figure out for certain what these are, & what any future chicks might be. Thanks.