Breeding the perfect mongrel

[400constantne]

Does anyone have any experience cross breeding chickens? This spring, I think that I will breed a Welsummer bantum (roo) , and an Ideal 236 (hen).

Also a Golden Laced Wyndotte bantam with an Ideal 236 rooster. A Japanese rooster with a Milli De Uccle.

What were the results of your cross breeding experiments?

 

[OldChurchEggery1]

Last year I let one of my hatchery Easter Eggers go broody with a jumble of eggs. One that hatched as a result was an EE x Rhode Island Red. She's now laying brown eggs that are almost globe shaped. She has the pattern gene, so she has some white partridge-like markings on a red base. Her skin is yellow and her comb an S-shaped single. I'm going to see if her eggs become more normal shaped or not. If they do, I might cross her with either my buff or wheaten Ameraucana. The wheaten has got what I've seen on the forum called "over-colored" where he's got far too much red in him. Everywhere he should have black is red, almost like a mahogany influence. I might put him over my two remaining bastions of hatchery birds, a couple of buff orpingtons. We'll see...

 

[flyingmonkeypoop]

What color is the Japanese? The Ideal 236 birds I think are a dominant white, leghorn type but I am not 100% sure. If they are, you will get mostly white birds with some color leaking through

 

[Illia]

I've done a lot of crossbreeding and still am working on "mutts" with goals, the question is, what is YOUR goal?

If you just breed whatever ya got and whatever ya want with no true goal in mind, it will end up like humans today - Anything and everything, bad and good.

Many of mine are still a work in progress but some are just about there, yet, like purebreds I'm still working on tweaking and perfecting. Often though as history shows, some of the best results of strictly-purpose birds (meat or eggs, no "and") are either from serious line/inbreeding or serious line/inbreeding then a sudden cross to make F1 hybrids, those hybrids being the final perfect result.

 

[v.cyr]

we have been working on our "Barnyard mutt" chickens... the tradition around here among farmers is usually to just add whatever they can get at auction to the flock every few years, from LF to bantams, which results in some pretty interesting( read: geneticist's nightmare) birds after a few decades( like my GF's uncles birds... hens have beards and muffs, roos don't, and the combs on a lot of them are something like a pea come, but the size of a large single comb)... we are sort of doing the same thing, but we are being more careful about what breeds we add, and trying to select for dual purposeness... we are also trying to keep track of what goes into our mutts... I think in a few years, we will have some nifty mutts

 

[400constantne]

I've done a lot of crossbreeding and still am working on "mutts" with goals, the question is, what is YOUR goal?

If you just breed whatever ya got and whatever ya want with no true goal in mind, it will end up like humans today - Anything and everything, bad and good.

Many of mine are still a work in progress but some are just about there, yet, like purebreds I'm still working on tweaking and perfecting. Often though as history shows, some of the best results of strictly-purpose birds (meat or eggs, no "and") are either from serious line/inbreeding or serious line/inbreeding then a sudden cross to make F1 hybrids, those hybrids being the final perfect result.

Are you trying to tell me that I need to know where I am going in order to get there?

I have two different goals... which are the same two goals of most everyone who breeds chickens.
1) To create a chicken who lays many good eggs for less feed. 2) (a separate goal, and chicken from #1) To breed an interesting looking chicken