Chicken Color Calculator Question

Chickanmanfromarkansas

Songster
10 Years
Jan 18, 2010
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What color does Black patterned redshouldered/cream-necked/birchen, translate into? Just courious been playing around with the calculator and came up with this color and it sounds pretty. Also, will it breed true?
 
(silver) birchen with red enhancers. The silver would be creamy on the hens and the males could get orange to red shoulders instead of white.
The "necked" part means that there is no garantee for lacing on the breast.
 
Hi, I'm not trying to hijack your thread... but I didn't want to start a new one with the same title to keep the forum less cluttered. I've been playing with that chicken calculator too. I've got some Blue Cochins that I wanted to cross with a silver laced cochin and it shows that if I take a male offspring and breed it back to a full silver laced that I should end up with a Blue laced cochin... my question is that it says the minimum number of animals to breed is 64 to get a male blue laced or blue laced female. So I'm thinking that I have to have a total of 64 eggs layed? To get the 2 out of 64? So I'm really breeding only 3 chickens, but have to have that many offspring from the second set to come out with the blue laced? Is that right?
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Kprlt: I don't look at it as hijacking really, You're welcome to it. Especially as your question pertains to the thread.
I don't know the answer to your question, but someone should be along in a while that can answer it for you. I'm still trying to understand it myself.
 
@Clint... in the top post there is a link to the calculator(I think)... what it does is allow you to do pretend breeding and crossing. It gives you a wide variety of color variations to choose from for either male or female. You can even select specific offspring to be bred. With each breeding it will show you what type(approximately) the chicks will look like. It's actually kind of fun, although since I haven't tested it yet I don't know how accurate, but I'm willing to bet it's pretty accurate.

@Chickanman... can't you use the calculator to figure out if it will breed true? I had to google "Breed true"(A phenotype for a simply-inherited trait is said to breed true if two parents with that phenotype produce offspring of that same phenotype exclusively.) to make sure I wasn't thinking of something else. If this is what you are talking about... then I don't think they would. In regards to the variety you created with the calculator. I'm thinking the offspring could look like any of the chickens used to create the specific color variation you came up with.

Like I said I want to make a blue laced cochin. I have to take a pure male blue and mate it to a pure female silver laced. Then I have to take a male blue offspring(which I have a 1 in 4 chance of getting by crossing the original pure blue and silver laced) with a female pure silver laced to get a blue laced cochin. But to get this blue laced I've figured out I have an 8 in 64 chance. If I look at male vs. female I have a 4 in 64 chance of getting a male... and 4 in 64 chance to get a male(4 + 4 = 8)

So I guess I could get lucky and the first 8 eggs that hatch could all be the blue laced which I want to get... but in reality my luck is not that good... I say that cause the last two times I ordered straight run White brahmas I've ended up with all females out of 25 chicks... how odd is that?

Well using the calculator I took a male and female of the blue laced and bred them together. What I found was that I got a total of 4 blue laced out of 16(2 male/2 female). So I've increased the desire color pattern that I'm looking for. So now out of 64 chicks I should end up with 16 of the desired color. So I guess I've doubled my chances of getting the chicks I want. The problem though, which is all in theory is that I'm breeding brother and sister chicks to get this to happen. I'm not too sure how safe it is and whether or not it would be detrimental and cause weak offspring. I read somewhere that some chickens used as layers have lost up to 90% of their genes which basically means they've been inbred constantly which is a scary thought.

So to keep rambling lol... I took(in the calculator) two more offspring of the blue laced(brother and sister) again and bred them and came up with a 2 out of 6 ratio(1 out of 6 - male/1 out of 6 female). This level gave me basically about 20+ out of 64 chicks so I got a little over double the first cross. This is where the calculator stopped... well it didn't stop, but if I kept breeding blue laced offspring siblings together I kept getting 2 out of 6. It never got any better. Out of 6 I was always left with 4 "other" color variations.

What's interesting is I found that if I took one of the male blue laced created from the second inbreeding of the blue laced and used a silver laced that I ended up with a 2 out of 4 ratio. So After um... 4 sets of parents I get a 50/50 chance of getting my blue laced... I'll keep playing around and see if I can't get it to breed true...

This dang calculator is addicting lol...
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Hi,

The "minimum of animals to breed"-bit is derived from the percentage.
For instance if your percentage means 2 out of 175, that means 1 out of 87.5,
then the minimum would be (1 out of) 88.
So if you need both a cockerel and a pullet you would need to breed 2*88=176

The problem is that chance only works for big numbers.
Take a blue and a black and you would get 50% blue chicks.
But if you have bad luck you could breed 20 black chicks instead!
If you have good luck 20 blue ones...
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Hope that helps.
 

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