d'Uccle color genetics

[TheFeatheredTempest]

Hi everyone!
I posted on the main genetics thread a couple days ago but nobody ever responded So I thought I'd come over here and hang out with my fellow d'uccle lovers.
Anyhow, the birds who form the foundation of my little flock are d'uccle mixes and I hope to be adding to them as time goes on. Meanwhile I'm pouring over genetics info and trying to sort out the color genes present in the birds I have.

I'm trying to figure out why some blue-tailed buff hens retain a bit of dark coloring in their hackles and others are completely buff except for their tails. What gene is responsible for that?

Also, trying to understand the blue coloring in the tail feathers since it is often quite light blue, lighter than what you might see in an all blue hen. In my hens even the shafts of the blue tails feathers are light colored, yet they are not lavender because then the hen wouldn't be buff anymore, right? She'd be really washed out in color if I understand lavender correctly....

And is all of this possibly related to why some buffs are different hues? There seems to be quite a range. I've heard buff is a complicated color and not well understood... Are the varying buffs due to genes like cream, champagne, dilute gold??? I've heard of those but I don't really understand what they would look like when added into the mix. idunno

I have a genetics background, but it's all academic and has nothing to do with chickens which are new to me. I might do some breeding next year, but I want to learn as much as I can before I try that. Here's a picture of Yoda, one of my blue-tailed buff d'uccle mix hens and as you can see she is a very light buff. Yoda is a d'uccle Easter egger mix (mutt) and is standing in front of a red star and a New Hampshire red.

Thanks in advance for the help! smile Also, afterthought. Yoda lays a light blue egg. Has anyone else dabbled in colored egg laying d'uccles?

 

[lilcrow]

Hi Tempest, what a great handle. You can play on that all kind of ways, the brooding

tempest...........etc. Well anyway.
Very good question about the buff, I have no idea what causes the variations in the colors. The dark color in the hackles and tail feathers, if it's what I think you're referring to is most likely the Columbian gene. Wonderful stuff, you can do so much with it but it shows up at times you may not want it I think. I just picked up a little pullet at the National that is tauted to be a Milli Fleur Cochin project, but she looks very much like a buff columbian to me. She just may no be very far removed from that cross. Anyway you look at her she's lovely. She's very light buff and it makes me wonder if the columbian gene causes the buff the dilute, I don't think I've heard of a dark red columbian. I'm not saying they don't happen, I'm not experienced enough to say they don't, I've just never heard of it.
You ask if anyone has ever experimented with d'Uccle that lay colored eggs, I'd have to say no to that. If they did, they'd have a "new" breed. The Standard of Perfection that is recognized by the APA does not call for a colored egg. Your little hen, which is adorable, has the distinctive Easter Egger muffs that I can see even from the side.
She is VERY cute.

Nancy

 

[TheFeatheredTempest]

Thanks lilcrow, she is a sweet hen and excellent layer. Her coloring has really grown on me. Someone else told me her muffs looked like classic d'uccle muffs. What is the difference between the d'uccle muffs and EE muffs? It would be helpful if I knew what to look for. BTW, my handle is a line from a poem about the extinct passenger pigeon. *Jan

Here is what henk69 had to say:

Dark hackles? You mean blue striping?
This could be due to the e-locus allele in question.
brown e^b, duckwing e+ and wheaten e^Wh that have the columbian gene (Co) all look about the same but typically have different amounts of hackle pattern and underfluff. e^b has the most hackle pattern and grey underfluff; wheaten has the least hackle pattern and white underfluff.
But there are genes in play that may boost (or inhibit) hackle "black" expression.
Boosters are so called melanizers like melanotic (Ml) or charcoal (cha). There are a few unknown ones.
A possible inhibitor is Db ("Darkbrown", named after a chickdown effect), which is a columbian-like restrictor of black.

Anyhow, the hen in the picture has some dark partial striping on her hackles, more of a black than blue. It doesn't match the rest of her coloring and is annoying... If I remember correctly underfluff is white. I'll double check in the morning.

So is Db how you get black-tailed buff in Japanese bantams?

Blue is often darker on hackle due to melanizers (think blue andalusians)

Our dutch black-tailed buff japs are wheaten and columbian Co. There is selection against hackle striping though.
Db would work too, in theory.​

 

[lilcrow]

Certainly Tempest, anything that Henk tells you, you should take to heart. He is the man. As far as muffs? Well............I would say listen to the people who have seen your bird in person. I was going by one picture, taken from the side, so I don't think you should give that much stock.
Henk is way over my head with the genetics, if I study really hard and think on it for a long time, I can kind of follow along if it's an area that I've been reading about, but otherwise I'm lost.
Oh BTW, I'd love to know the author of the poem and it's title.
Nancy

 

[TheFeatheredTempest]

Nancy - No one else who knows anything about chickens has had the chance to look at any of my flock - except for BYC folks online.
I guess you'd call the poem more of a eulogy, or a poetic essay. It always makes me cry

Here it is:

On a Monument to the Pigeon
By Aldo Leopold, 1947
Published in A Sand County Almanac

1953, Oxford Univ. Press

"We have erected a monument to commemorate the funeral of a species. It symbolizes our sorrow. We grieve because no living man will see again the onrushing phalanx of victorious birds, sweeping a path for spring across the March skies, chasing the defeated winter from all the woods and prairies of Wisconsin.
Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons. Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.
There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. Book-pigeons cannot dive out of a cloud to make the deer run for cover, or clap their wings in thunderous applause of mast-laden woods. Book-pigeons cannot breakfast on new-mown wheat in Minnesota, and dine on blueberries in Canada. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.
Our grandfathers were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of pigeons. Perhaps we now grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts, that we have gained by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of the spring?
It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.
Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.
These things, I say, should have come to us. I fear they have not come to many.
For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of steaks. The sportsman who shot the last pigeon thought only of his prowess. The sailor who clubbed the last auk thought of nothing at all. But we, who have lost our pigeons, mourn the loss. Had the funeral been ours, the pigeons would hardly have mourned us. In this fact, rather than in Mr. Du Pont’s nylons or Mr. Vannevar Bush’s bombs, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts.
* * *
This monument, perched like a duckhawk on this cliff, will scan this wide valley, watching through the days and years. For many a March it will watch the geese go by, telling the river about clearer, colder, lonelier waters on the tundra. For many an April it will see the redbuds come and go, and for many a May the flush of oak-blooms on a thousand hills. Questing wood ducks will search these basswoods for hollow limbs; golden prothonotaries will shake golden pollen from the river willows, Egrets will pose on these sloughs in August; plovers will whistle from September skies. Hickory nuts will plop into October leaves, and hail will rattle in November woods. But no pigeons will pass, for there are no pigeons, save only this flightless one, graven in bronze on this rock. Tourists will read this inscription, but their thoughts will not take wing.
We are told by economic moralists that to mourn the pigeon is mere nostalgia; that if the pigeoners had not done away with him, the farmers would ultimately have been obliged, in self-defense, to do so.
This is one of those peculiar truths that are valid, but not for the reasons alleged.
The pigeon was a biological storm. He was the lightning that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity: the fat of the land and the oxygen fo the air. Yearly the feathered tempest roared up, down, and across the continent, sucking up the laden fruits of forest and prairie, burning them in a traveling blast of life. Like any other chain reaction, the pigeon could survive no diminution of his own furious intensity. When the pigeoners subtracted from his numbers, and the pioneers chopped gaps in the continuity of his fuel, his flame guttered out with hardly a sputter or even a wisp of smoke.
Today the oaks still flaunt their burden at the sky, but the feathered lightning is no more. Worm and weevil must now perform slowly and silently the biological task that once drew thunder from the firmament.
The wonder is not that the pigeon went out, but that he ever survived through all the millennia of pre-Babbittian time.
* * *
The pigeon loved his land: he lived by the intensity of his desire for clustered grape and bursting beechnut, and by his contempt of miles and seasons. Whatever Wisconsin did not offer him gratis today, he sought and found tomorrow in Michigan, or Labrador, or Tennessee. His love was for present things, and these things were present somewhere; to find them required only the free sky, and the will to ply his wings.
To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons. To see America as history, to conceive of destiny as a becoming, to smell a hickory tree through the still lapse of ages – all these things are possible for us, and to achieve them takes only the free sky, and the will to ply our wings. In these things, and not in Mr. Bush’s bombs and Mr. Du Pont’s nylons, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts."
http://faculty.fortlewis.edu/dott_c/bio 250-swecol/Activities/On a Monument to the Pigeon.pdf

 

[lilcrow]

OH......my. Yes, thank you very much for sharing this with me. I defy anyone to read it and not shed at least a tear. Then again I'm sure there are lots of folks that don't know what a Passenger Pigeon was, or have much concern for any of the species headed in the same direction.
I'm running on short time this AM so this has to be short, but I had to respond and say thank you so much.
Nancy

 

[vetgirl00us]

Ok, i tried to read ALL of this and now my head is spinning and I'm more confused than ever. This past summer I had three pullets on the yard- one porcelain and two millie fleur d'uccles. At some point, I put two solid white d'uccle roos on the yard and voila, I get an egg. I hatched that egg along with some pure porcelains that were never let out on the yard or mixed with any other color or breed and I get several as usual porcie chicks and one chick that hatches out cinnamon colored. Well as it grows, it becomes apparent it is a "gold neck" d'uccle pullet. She is just iike I see at the shows and show quality- perfect coloring with white dots only, no black. So my question is, how do I recreate a "gold neck" d'uccle. Do I put my solid whites in with my millies to dilute out the black gene or do I put porcelains with whites to recreate this. I thought I read that white x millie fleur takes out the black coloration and gets the gold neck coloration but I wanted to be sure. Seems like white would just dilute the porcelains out further and these are all show quality birds by the way and are now in seperate pens. I'd llike to get some more gold necks if it wasn't just a fluke thing so I need to know who to put with who out of porcelain, millie fleur and white.

Just as an aside, I bought a d'uccle americauna cross at an auction- he looks columibian with black spots and a bit of brass along with the black and white in the hadkle and tail and I've got him with an americauna (she laid a blue egg) that is either black or dark chocolate just for the fun of it. Going to hatch some chicks and see what comes up.

 

[lilcrow]

Quote:
Good morning

Golden Necks can be a little tricky, it depends on the genetic make up of the bird. A true GN is a Mille Fleur that carries the dominant white gene. The dom. wh. will then wash out all of the black on the bird, making it a GN. The recessive white gene will produce a blue or splash patterned MF. It will/may look like a gold MF, but genotypically it is very different. All of the black is altered to be either blue, white or the white is slightly splashed with the blue color.
As far as what you should put together with what, the best way to try to figure that out is to use the chicken calculator. It works beautifully: http://kippenjungle.nl/kruising.html
Hope this helps.
Nancy

 

[TurtleFeathers]

Quote:
Recessive white has nothing to do with blue.

Its my understanding that GN's are produced two ways: either with dominant white (which covers the black in a MF), or with 2 copies of the Andalusian blue gene (which turns the black in MF to splash). The differences between the two can be subtle, but the splash GN may/may not have streaks of blue in the areas that are supposed to appear clear white.

Someone else with more knowledge of recessive white can fill us in on that gene.

 

[lilcrow]

Quote:
Recessive white has nothing to do with blue.

Its my understanding that GN's are produced two ways: either with dominant white (which covers the black in a MF), or with 2 copies of the Andalusian blue gene (which turns the black in MF to splash). The differences between the two can be subtle, but the splash GN may/may not have streaks of blue in the areas that are supposed to appear clear white.

Someone else with more knowledge of recessive white can fill us in on that gene.

Ahhhh, yup. I stand corrected. Sorry 'bout that. I engaged my mouth before thinking. After I saw that I knew it, but duh............
So sorry Turtle Feathers and Vetgirl. Turtle Feathers I think you're the one that taught me about the dominant white and the GN. I thought for a long time that GNs were from the double Andalusian gene.
Thanks again.