Discussion of Legbar Standard of Perfection for -Alternative- Legbars - SOP discussion

[ChicKat]

FWIW - here is my vision of 'true cream'




IMO it is closest to OAC900, maybe a tad lighter. Remember how the SOP says 'tipped with Cream'? -- I read someplace that barred birds always have their feathers tipped with the dark color.
This is from the saddles of a pelt of 'Heart' who was one of the first roosters that I ever hatched from 'Robin' & 'Ice'. The background white is an envelope of course for comparison....

In a lot of his youth he had a floppy comb, then it got upright. He fathered a few chicks - including a line breeding experiment to 'Robin'. I never considered him for a breeder because his comb was set at a diagonal across his forehead. He was kind of messily feathered - But the pelt doesn't look too bad. and he got meaner than sin. Thus far his offspring don't seem particularly flighty or mean and the daughter lays very very very big and saturated eggs - every other day-- then she lays a normal pullet sized egg on the other day-- weird isn't it? She is the one that had feathered shanks, but she is a very pretty pullet...wouldn't you know? -- so I just put a couple of her eggs in the incubator to see if any of the chicks with her brother will have feathered shanks. If he has a recessive feather shank gene - then some should -- if none do -- he may have gotten the non-feathered shank gene from both Robin and Heart...if feathered shank genes are the cause of her feathers. TBD

Another reason that he wouldn't be a good flock sire is because he had the squirreliest of squirrel tails -- infact it probably was an acute angle -- and once he got mean his nick-name became Mr. Ugly. He got the name 'Heart' because his forehead had the little white splotch in the shape of a heart. He is one of the two malechicks on the Tri-Fold Brochure in the Club house titled 'The ABCs of Cream Legbars' His brother 'Arrow' - you guessed it - had the white splotch shaped like a forward pointing arrow. -- he was unfortunately sold - all back in 2012....when raccoons devastated my chickens.

ETA aww look I found the picture of the first baby Cream Legbar cockerels that I had hatched:


2012

That hatch had 4 females and these two males.

 

[BuffyBugSlayer]

That is great Chickat! You have been very helpful to me and generous with your time. There are several CL enthusiasts that go above and beyond in my opinion.

I hate to admit it but, I have just recently figured out what ovations are and how they work (I am bit slow

) and have been really bad about giving them out. But whenever I receive one it makes me feel good so I need to share the love more!

 

[ChicKat]

I will read them! FYI, I don't know if it is of interest to any of you but there is also a Crele Legbar FB page. Where people are actually shopping for, sharing eggs, etc.. https://www.facebook.com/groups/623592941106420/

LOL -- I am one of those people who don't use facebook -- so it isn't something I would access.

There is an outstanding question though -- I am curious about what you are considering to be a crele as different from the Cream Legbar that won at this year's British shows...and the one picutured in the article from Fancy Fowl magazine...

If you read Classroom in the Coop -- were the world Class chicken genetics experts hang out -- Henk Meijers, Grant Brereton, Sigrid Von Dort - others KazJaps and Wieslaw taht weigh in at Class room in the Coop -- really are Giants in chicken genetics. Henk developed the chicken calculator and opens it for all of our use....they are also, each of them - very generous with their knowledge!

Can you tell that I am kind of in awe of them?

Another question that I have -- is if the goal is the plumage of a Gold Legbar -- why not just go with a gold legbar?

Is this the coloration that you and the other 'crele' people are aiming for?

used with permission of BYC member racinchickens

It is a gorgeous bird that is for certain -- and the golden wing triangle may indicate that his gold would be very much lightened by his barring -- otherwise the wing triangle would be brown, as shown in this diagram -- where the 100% gold crele rooster shown has brown wing triangle.




Please help me out here, I'm trying to understand two things - hope that you can help -- one is where the differentation comes between what your group has identified as crele - and the other one is -- if the bright plumage color is the draw, then why not just go with the already established breed the gold Legbar?

Thanks!

 

[BuffyBugSlayer]

Okay, we have determined many people don't have FB, I was just making a joke, to keep the conversation light.

If I understand your point correctly Buffy, you are saying I just have a Creme Legbar which does not meet the SOP? and that I can continue to breed away from the SOP if I like? (which I am doing anyway) I don't have the SOP in front of me, but I think not only his hackle feathers are incorrect, but so is his saddle, and his wings. Which by the time I breed all of that out he will be a more perfect "Creme Legbar".

Let me put it like this... Many of us have colorful imperfect "Creme Legbars" which originated from GFF, and then spread. Many of us like these more colorful birds regardless of their name, and don't wish to breed to the colors of the SOP. So, we are asking if once the "Legbars" are accepted by the APA, can we/should we have another color distinction as many other breeds do. The "Crele" brids obviously breed and reproduce with the same colors because most of the flocks I have seen are those colors, with a few breeders having some success at moving towards "Creme". I fell in love with the breed based on the color of birds I saw and purchased for the color and the blue eggs. I did not fall in love with their name "Creme Legbar". Now if I was the only one, it would be just fine to have a hobby flock and not worry about it. However, all over Ebay, hatcheries, and in backyard flocks everywhere, people are breeding and selling these more colorful birds as Creme Legbars. So, the question is being asked and debated. Should their be another color?

I think I need to clarify my position because people aren't psychic and don't know what I am thinking. So here goes. I have come full circle on the subject of creating an alternative SOP. At first I thought it seemed like a good idea and then with more reading and discussion, I decided it wasn't necessary. There is nothing that prevents you from breeding and selling your chickens as Cream Legbars. In my opinion if they are cream, crested, autosexing and lay blue/green eggs you have a "real" Cream Legbar (and it is Cream, not Creme).

No animal ever meets every aspect of the Standard as there is no such thing as perfection. So you decide what your interpretation is and go from there. Your birds may never win a show. That depends on the judges and ultimately what the people that are involved in Cream Legbars decide is the correct interpretation of the Standard. For Cream Legbars in the US that is still down the road. Years down the road most likely.

Since there are no registries for chickens like there are for dogs, you will never be able to prove the lineage and heritage of your Cream Legbars. Only one Labrador Retriever wins Westminster every year. Thousands? A million? of Labrador Retrievers are bred and sold every year. They would never win at Westminster because many don't come close to meeting their Standard but they are still Labradors!

So I have apparently missed all the name calling and brouhaha and happy that I did! I am sorry that you and others were treated so poorly. I think you should just continue enjoying your Cream Legbars!

 

[dretd]

I think the legbar is going through what the leghorns went through. There was at one time just a basic brown leghorn but people started breeding lighter females and darker males based on wording and how theu interpreted it. Pretty soon they had a split because there was such a variance in color of the two which caused light brown and dark brown. Legbars seem the same way in a sense- good colored females can have poor colored males and vice-versa.

Hi FMP. I am glad you showed up and think you can contribute a lot to the discussion since you have Cream Legbars, are experienced at showing and have birds that are most probably split for Cream.

I think that back in the day, the folks that had Brown Leghorns really didn't appreciate that there was an e+ and an eb genetics going on and they were both combined into one breed**. After a time they came to realize that e+ produces a salmon colored breast in females and eb produces a breast the same color as the back in the females--the boys pretty much look the same. Brown Leghorns were accepted into the APA SOP in 1874 and split into Light Brown and Dark Brown in1923. The APA was formed in 1873 so the Leghorns were in the first Standard they published. I don't have that reference so I don't know how the original Brown variety description varied before and after the split. FMP--Do you have that reference by any chance?

The way I see it is the Cream Legbar as it was admitted in Britain, was a variety based on the Genetic Variant ig that was discovered. The genotype is ig/ig, the phenotype is Cream. The Silver Legbar was based on the genotype S/S (S/-) and the Gold was based on Ig/Ig. For me I think it is pretty straightforward that Cream is referring to the genetic state of the bird. Punnett in one of his papers (http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/48/327.pdf and the paragraph about the secondaries is found just above the entry "Rhode Island Red Cross" on page 329) describes how red doesn't show up in the wing triangle, only gold. So looking to see if there is gold in that location is the best way for a breeder to get an idea if their bird is ig/ig or Ig/?. It is a tool in the tool box to decide what you have. The breed standard (original British) allows for chestnut in 4 places--the back. shoulders, coverts (qualified as some chestnut smudges permissible) and crest. I think they left it off the secondaries because there is no red there and because the gold gets diluted by cream in that location. Otherwise the standard would read as it did for the gold variety: "primaries and secondaries dark grey barred, intermixed with white, upper web of secondaries also intermixed with chestnut"*

So for me, I am using that gold or lack of gold in the secondaries as my litmus test help me understand the underlying genetics I am dealing with in my flock. Having gold in the wing triangle alerts me that there may be an issue with dilution genetics piece to the puzzle, but for me it doesn't mean I need to cull that bird or that they are not a Cream Legbar. The problem as I see it though, is that if I ignore the gold there and turn down the chestnut, turn down the barring, turn down the melanizers in my bird to achieve a phenotype that matches the standard (except for the gold in the wing triangle) then I am setting myself up for problems down the road with getting too light of a bird when I hatch the ig/ig version of the Ig/ig father. I think to a certain extent this is how we end up getting lighter and lighter birds.

SO the big question I have for you FMP, and also for anyone else who cares to answer--and this is the crux of the conflict between folks about color in the Cream Legbar--

Does the Cream Legbar mean to you:
a) The Cream is a genetic designation for this variety of Legbar and the ideal bird should be ig/ig
b) The Cream is color of bird and can be diluted with 2 copies of ig/ig or can be Ig/? and the ideal bird just needs to match the standard

How does the APA view the variety Cream? Is it a color or a genetic state? Can I show a bird that is white under a traditionally silver if they look the same or would that be viewed as wrong? A BYCer once suggested that he could recreate the Cream Legbar by introducing silver as a substitute for Cream. I was not happy by this suggestion, but if look at Cream as a phenotype and the following reference seems to indicate that Cream and Silver look the same in the males (also referenced in the Punnett Cream Paper) then why would that be wrong as long as the bird looks cream in appearance?

In Sex-Linkage in Poultry Breeding Bulletin No.38 - Punnett & Pease say- 'An interesting new autosexing variety is the Cream Legbar.The cream colour is undistinguishable to the eye from the silver : but cream is none the less a form of gold. It may be thought of as an extremely diluted gold .The Cream Legbar has a crest, which distinguishes it readily from the Silver Legbar.Its most striking peculiarity is that it lays blue eggs. The sex-distinction in the downs is the same as that in the Gold Legbar'***

(from: http://www.the-coop.org/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=109450 )

I realize the judges don't have a genetic test kit (or wouldn't if there was one available) so what do they think about this issue? Should the birds be ig/ig or just look Cream? It all comes down to Phenotype vs Genotype.

Second Question:
Knowing that the Light and Dark Varieties were split because of underlying genetic differences (have a different e locus) and given that you think the Cream Legbar may need to go down that path because of underlying genetics (homo vs hetrozygous for ig) would it be better to wait until after the Cream Legbar is accepted into the APA and has a track record with them, or would it be better to split them into Dilute Crele and Crele before that event so that the coloration has more uniformity and therefor increases the odds for acceptance? Maybe @fowlman01 will be able to enlighten us on that point if you don't know?

* The gold Legbar standard was admitted into the PCGB in 1945 a more detailed history is http://blue-eggs.co.uk/#/history-of-cream-legbars/4554275782 Obviously, the chestnut referred to in the Gold Standard is genetic gold, not red.
**For those of you reading the post that are not up on genetics, e+ is wild type and often referred to as duckwing (the wing triangle matches the hackles and saddle) where eb is often referred to as partridge (although to confuse matters, partridge in Europe means duckwing--they are not the same!)
***the British downs description now reads Cream, as for Silver. When I look at the two down descriptions they are almost identical with very few minor changes--I am not sure of the date on the above reference--it may have come out about the time the Silver Legbar was accepted and thus not well known.

 

[ChicKat]

To clear up some things from the APA perspective: Ranges in color in the descriptions are not usually permitted and when permitted are very narrow. There is no way to keep everyone happy when the description is finally agreed on. The type of the bird is the most important but this is also a complex color pattern that will need constant attention while working on type. The type should be the British version of the Leghorn not the APA version.....so we have a different looking bird that will need some education of the judges. If the education is not done correctly judges that don't know the breed will assume.... as I initially did, that the type is like the APA Leghorn.

I haven't read your written version of the type. Does it describe it correctly?

The APA does not get into the genetic makeup of the birds. Some of the reasons why are: most people don't know what genes their birds are really carrying and as noted here ...there is usually more than one way to arrive at the color. We just require that they breed 50% true. In this color pattern you will always have a range in color with very few hitting it close to the mark. You may also have to do matings for well marked males and females from different matings. I can see progress.......keep at it!

Walt

Thanks Walt! It was kind of you to say very few hitting close to the mark - rather than say 'almost none' ;o)

Quite some time ago Tadkerson - (who I wish was still on BYC as he is another person with a LOT of genetic expertise, and gave us a lot of good genetic information that was on the mark!!) told us it would be wise to write a standard of a bird that is not unattainable - as that would also drive people from the breed, and that may be another reason that people over these last few years have given up on raising CLs.

Sometimes I get an impression that some are thinking if a bird is not 100% the SOP it isn't a CL -- and actually the SOP is something to strive for -- it is the goal and not the starting point threshold --- We may never get there...and even if we had the perfect CL pair-- the offspring of that possibly wouldn't be perfect. IF someone were to have a pullet-breeding line and a cock-breeding line -- and got a champion from each - after the CL gains APA acceptance, then the two champions paired together would definitely produce non-champions if they come from lines that have widely diverged in what the male and female appearance was OR if they used some 'out crossing' to get to their perfect bird.

And again -- we in reality do not know what the complete genetic package of our birds truly is -- I can think of so much complexity -- and if you are someone who read this whole thread... way back there is a quote of when Punnett crossed in a Rhode Island Red and got cream - if memory serves.

 

[KPenley]

so for those who think that they can see a Legbar that has only 1 copy of the gene to dilute gold.... You are opening up a door to an avenue that hasn't been traveled - and may have some very interesting implications for the breed. 

After seeing the video of the lovely purple haired Dr.giving us the 17 minute genetics lesson -- I can concede that perhaps cream is not completely recessive.  If it were - it would behave exactly as the recessive white genes in SOME lines of CL -- where you will only know it is there when you pair two with recessives white - and each parent give the recessive to the offspring. 

(BTW if someone had the time -- they could take the entire course on line for free!! and just how cool is that?) 

So if cream gene - (gold dilution) -- is not a recessive... that does imply quite a lot that I don't think we have been viewing.  I still tend to think of it more in the behavior as the recessive white-- and I think it is more all or nothing - but the strength of the gene's expression is variable. 

So I come back to the idea that if a chicken had only one Cream Gene it would appear as a gold legbar -- which suddenly includes a lot of Legbars that don't appear as a gold legber in the gene pool for this breed.  I see some non-black and white in the wing triangle as an imperfection equivalent to having the wrong number of points on the comb.  It's interesting that a gold will have a definite brown (aka gold) wing triangle, a silver will have a definite white (aka silver) wing triangle -- and no one wants to start a new variety for those CLs -- and no one squawks about it. 

JMO  :O)

Does look like a cool course! More thoughts on cream...
Please excuse my repetitiveness, but I think the issue is not that cream is not recessive, it is, but that the gold we're dealing with is a mutant dominant gene. When that mutant dominant gene is used in conjunction with wild type pattern it opens the door for offspring having a mix of the two parents colors (mutant autosomal incomplete dominance). I can not look at one bird and tell it's genetics. But if I study it's parents, siblings, and offspring I can make pretty good guesses. And if my flock breeds true, then I see no reason to question it.

Regarding a standard, I agree with you it is always the ideal. Something to strive for and to pick areas to improve year by year. Almost no bird will ever match it exactly and that's fine. In the show world, 10% of birds will be keepers to grow out, and 10% of those will be good enough to show. That's normal. What is encouraging is that more and more birds are easily recognized when reading the standard every year! There has been so much growth over the past few years! Keep up the great work everybody!

 

[fowlman01]

This is just my opinion, but it is based on 50 years of doing this at a level that some would say is successful.


You folks can talk about it, you can teach it and you can argue about it, but the bottom line is that people don't know what they are dealing with in terms of the genetic makeup of their birds. Some have had these for a good while now, but it takes several years to find out what these birds are really carrying. You first need to have your five APA members lined up, then decide on one color Standard. There is some flexibility, so it does not have to match the British Standard exactly...but we would need a compelling reason why it is different. There are many examples of differences in the APA Standard and the country of origins Standard. So, we can be somewhat flexible. Try for one color version first......so you will need to decide that at some point.

At the qualifying meet the birds entered only need to look like the description given to the APA. The APA does not care what genes they are carrying as long as they reproduce 50% correct....with the normal variations that any color pattern would have. There will be a great need for the education of the public and especially the judges. Judges respect breed clubs that promote their breeds. They have no problem learning about a breed from the people that breed them. .....99% of them anyway.....and I can guarantee that whoever the judge is that will do the qualifying meet that they will be easy to work with. If it is somewhere I can get to, it will probably be me doing the judging.

I will help you in any way I can. The timeline is up to you folks and I am glad that you are taking your time and trying to have your Standard correct rather than rush and have problems.

Good job to all who have participated!


Walt

 

[chicken pickin]

Hi KendyF

To my eye, Sunny is a good example of a CL and a better "color" than your first rooster. If I saw Sunny at a poultry show I would know instantly it was a CL. Much more so than even some CLs offered by very prominent Poultry Importers -- which to my eye are not near to 'pale butter' in hackles and saddles.

Factually if you were told he is wrong because of chestnut shoulders - that is not only allowed by the SOP, some of us will not be without it -- and a guarantee as expressed in the chicken calculator article that gold underlies the coloration. His tail barring is very nice, his chest is dark as the SOP requires. So the persons who told you that he wasn't 'cream' are basing this on saddle feathers and wing triangle, I'm guessing. PM me who this person or these persons are please.

As dretd has said, there would have to be a pretty significant difference between the "correct" CL (let's take the one that won in UK 2014 or Applegarth) and yours, and I certainly don't see a difference that would lead me to think that it is a candidate for a different variety, just the opposite. Again-- do you have any images of what these folks are thinking is 'correct'? I'm kind of baffled.

Of course you and everyone knows that I am biased toward just exactly this type of CL to be a fit to the standard.

Perhaps Walt could weigh in with an APA point of view if it is true that the APA requires an exact match of the saddle and hackles. ??

He looks like a Cream colored Cream Legbar to me. ETA - I think that for perfection the hackles would be more the color of pale butter to be cream.

I agree with everything said above. Even to my eye using just the pic provided, the hens look like good Cream candidates as well. I think your male, again going by just the one picture, that Sunny is a good example of a Cream Legbar, depending on your goals I think only a few small things need to be corrected (If he were mine I would try to lessen the amount of chestnut in the saddle and wing triangle just a bit).

You should be proud this flock you have here, not made to feel like they are wrong. They just need a little bit of work just like everyones CL flocks.

 

[flyingmonkeypoop]

Kendy's rooster is the full brother to my male that was posted earlier, his tail was just a little too high for my preference. Their mother is Ingrid, my original GFF hen and their father is also their brother (ingrid is the mother, father was my original rooster), both parents are not cream but should carry it. I am always a firm believer that type comes first! I am building my ideal frame before I worry about color but I do have some better barred non-cream pullets growing out now.
I am in no rush to see the breed in the standard. Sure I am anxious for it to happen but I feel that they have a while to go before they are ready just because the type of all legbars in the US is still all over the place. For a while it seemed like folks had similar birds but then the Rees birds came out and messed it all up.

Here is Ingrid. She is a massive bird.