Hatchery Whiting True Blues

[fat brown hen]

If you only keep one or two roosters at a time, they have a very big effect on what color genes are in all the later generations. The hatcheries are probably working with a larger flock size, so this effect would be reduced. Reading about "genetic drift" might give a better explanation, if my way of putting it isn't helping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift (I know that reading explanations from different people is helpful to me if I have trouble understanding something.)

What other colors did you have, that disappeared? You may have lost a few dominant genes. Once a dominant gene is gone from your flock, it will never re-appear unless you re-introduce it. From your description, it sounds like you do not have Silver (a dominant gene that turns brown/red/gold into white) or Dominant White (turns black into white) or Blue (turns black into blue or splash), all of which were definitely present in some Whiting True Blues that I got from McMurray hatchery.

I had white leghorns at the beginning, but that color turned to barred after a single generation of admixture. I also had some wheaten hens that I tried to reproduce, but their offspring always came out brown.

Your info is helpful. I have a full order of 15 WTBs, but only plan to keep half and sell the rest. I suppose that if I want to maintain color diversity within my own flock, I should keep any chicks that are white or blue, correct?

Here is a sample from a batch I hatched last year. The eggs were collected from multiple hens, and there were 3 roosters at the time. The one on the bottom right has some white spots, which is the only remnant from the leghorns I had long ago.

 

[NatJ]

Your info is helpful. I have a full order of 15 WTBs, but only plan to keep half and sell the rest. I suppose that if I want to maintain color diversity within my own flock, I should keep any chicks that are white or blue, correct?

Yes, that would probably help.

I had white leghorns at the beginning, but that color turned to barred after a single generation of admixture.

That is a bit odd. White Leghorns usually produce white chicks in the first generation (sometimes with black dots). Maybe you had some kind of Leghorn-mix instead (some of them are very much like pure Leghorns in many respects.)

White Leghorns, and any black chicken with white barring, tend to be based on the genes that make a chicken solid black. If you remove the barring or the Dominant White (turns black into white), then you do end up with black chickens. That is probably part of what happened to your flock.

I also had some wheaten hens that I tried to reproduce, but their offspring always came out brown.

Did you try keeping a son from one of them, and breeding him back to the Wheaten hens? This is probably a case of the original roosters having genes that are dominant over the ones that make the wheaten color. If you crossed in some new Wheatens, you might get some chicks of that color even now, if the recessive genes happen to still be present in your flock (they might be carried by some of the current birds, hidden by dominant genes.)

Here is a sample from a batch I hatched last year. The eggs were collected from multiple hens, and there were 3 roosters at the time. The one on the bottom right has some white spots, which is the only remnant from the leghorns I had long ago.

The one with the "white spots" looks like it has barring. If you breed from that bird, you will probably get barring in some of the next generation. A male can give barring to both his sons and his daughters, while a female can only give barring to her sons (it's on the Z sex chromosome, so the inheritance is a little more complicated than some other genes.)

 

[fat brown hen]

Yes, that would probably help.


That is a bit odd. White Leghorns usually produce white chicks in the first generation (sometimes with black dots). Maybe you had some kind of Leghorn-mix instead (some of them are very much like pure Leghorns in many respects.)

Yes, you are exactly right! My first white leghorns had black dots! Actually I think they were California White Leghorns, which apparently have something else mixed in.

White Leghorns, and any black chicken with white barring, tend to be based on the genes that make a chicken solid black. If you remove the barring or the Dominant White (turns black into white), then you do end up with black chickens. That is probably part of what happened to your flock.

Did you try keeping a son from one of them, and breeding him back to the Wheaten hens? This is probably a case of the original roosters having genes that are dominant over the ones that make the wheaten color. If you crossed in some new Wheatens, you might get some chicks of that color even now, if the recessive genes happen to still be present in your flock (they might be carried by some of the current birds, hidden by dominant genes.)

The one with the "white spots" looks like it has barring. If you breed from that bird, you will probably get barring in some of the next generation. A male can give barring to both his sons and his daughters, while a female can only give barring to her sons (it's on the Z sex chromosome, so the inheritance is a little more complicated than some other genes.)

Very cool! I still have a couple of barred hens (they look like the one with white spots, but female). Will their offspring be sex-linked, or do I need to cross them with something specific?

 

[NatJ]

Yes, you are exactly right! My first white leghorns had black dots! Actually I think they were California White Leghorns, which apparently have something else mixed in.

Yes, that would certainly explain it

Very cool! I still have a couple of barred hens (they look like the one with white spots, but female). Will their offspring be sex-linked, or do I need to cross them with something specific?

A barred hen and a not-barred rooster will give sex-linked chicks: barred sons and not-barred daughters.

The only real condition is that they need to have a background color that is dark enough for you to see whether they have barring or not. It sounds like your current chickens will be fine for the purpose. (It would be difficult or impossible to see barring on a white chicken, and a light buff color isn't much better.)

 

[fat brown hen]

Yes, that would certainly explain it


A barred hen and a not-barred rooster will give sex-linked chicks: barred sons and not-barred daughters.

The only real condition is that they need to have a background color that is dark enough for you to see whether they have barring or not. It sounds like your current chickens will be fine for the purpose. (It would be difficult or impossible to see barring on a white chicken, and a light buff color isn't much better.)

Awesome. Thank you for your informative posts

 

[TexasBlues]

I'm ordering Whiting True Blues from Murray McMurray. The descriptions say that feather colors vary widely -- do they try to breed for different colors and send a variety, or does every batch look about the same? I'm hoping to get something that looks like the cover photo for Whitings; not sure if that's representative of the breed or something like a rare Pokemon card.
View attachment 3719278

I’ve got one chick that is developing that cream white and red look.

 

[fat brown hen]

I’ve got one chick that is developing that cream white and red look.
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View attachment 3722825

So cute! After I saw your earlier chick videos, I logged into my Murray McMurray account to double the number of WTBs in my order. But they are now sold out of WTBs until summer AHHH why didn't I order more to begin with.

 

[TexasBlues]

That’s too bad you couldn’t add more. They seem to be a hot item.
They’re fun to watch, they have explosive little personalities and seem to be good at flying around. 3 of them follow me around so much that I have to be careful of my steps.

 

[NatJ]

So cute! After I saw your earlier chick videos, I logged into my Murray McMurray account to double the number of WTBs in my order. But they are now sold out of WTBs until summer AHHH why didn't I order more to begin with.

You could check back at intervals, to see if more become available. Someone might cancel their order, or McMurray might decide to set a larger number of eggs of that breed.

Especially check in the last week before the chicks are expected to hatch & ship. I have seen several times that more chicks were available then. I think McMurray makes a prediction of how many chicks will hatch, pre-sells that many, and then adjusts the numbers when they candle the eggs right before hatching.

 

[TexasBlues]

All I know from what I've read about the development of the true blue is that the only things that mattered was the size of the egg, egg color, and general size of the birds. Color of the birds didn't mean anything to Dr. Whiting. I hope that he can be interviewed about what he was trying to do not any secrets or intellectual property that he now owns.

So I emailed the hatchery and immediately got a response saying that Dr. Whiting would be forwarded my email. So that's great, but i never heard back, No problem, I'm sure he is way too busy to deal with random emails. So I joined a WTB facebook group today and found an interview that was exactly what I was looking for.

The History of the Whiting Blue Project -
Q & A
"It has had its own interesting twists and turns." ~Dr. Whiting
1) What was your original intent in creating True Blues? Was it to mainly produce certain feathers for fly tying, or mainly to produce another breed of blue egg layers?
1. The original intent, of what you now know as the Whiting Blue, was to provide a high production and high egg quality line of blue egg layers. This is what a fellow named David Caveny intended and did for maybe 10 years. Dave is a close friend from our days at Colorado State University in the late 1970s, where he was getting his Masters degree, and I my B.S. degree in Avian Sciences. Starting with just Ideal Poultry "ameraucanas," Dave crossed them twice with what were then the top commercial White Leghorn production strains available. Dave sent me some, and I so liked them, he basically said “Fine. Then I will send them to you and you do something with them.” This was in the late 1990s. I have continued to do this basic theme, and have further out crossed them with 3 or 4 of the more recent top Leghorn lines. Then I intercross them to get the dominant white gene out so they will have colored plumage, and similarly strive to tame the single comb enlarged pea comb. All while selecting for blueness of eggs. So really the Whiting Blue is a high production commercial White Leghorn, that happens to lay blue eggs, and has colorful plumage and a pea comb. As a side note, to make sure you know the distinction, these layer and meat lines I work on are NOT part on my fly tying feather breeding and production program and company. They are something I do in concert with the fly tying feather business, but more because I just enjoy it and believe there is worth in doing it.
2) What would you like to see maintained in this breed going forward? Similarly, what key features set this breed apart in your original vision?
2. What I did after acquiring the foundation stock from Dave Caveny, was to make the Caveny/Whiting Blue into a proper commercial breeder line. This entails developing concurrently fast feathering “male lines”, and slow feathering “female lines.” This is necessary so the day old chicks can be “feather sexed” after hatch; the pullet chicks will be “FAST” from their fathers, and the cockerel chicks will be “SLOW” from their mothers. This is a regularly used strategy employing the sex linked trait of fast/slow feathering, whereby the primary wing feathers can be easily examined and the sexes distinguished. Production hatcheries require this. So I sell the breeders as a “package”; FAST males and SLOW females. This also allows for having additional different traits in the male lines and female lines. And further I keep separate the Leghorn lines I cross the male and female lines to to afford some “hybrid vigor” from the dissimilar breeding programs. Also, you can put different color genes into the male and female lines to control some of the terminal cross offspring, which is kind of fun as well.
3) Some argue that the long saddle and hackle feathers weren’t your original intent so maintenance of such isn’t a goal for some breeders. Should it be?
3. You pose in your e-mail something about long hackle and saddle feathers. But these are not even remotely contained in the layer lines I am working with. The programs are completely different. And we hatch the feather lines on Fridays-year around. While the “commercial” egg and meat lines we hatch on Tuesdays, only between about January through July, so the chicks are separate and can’t be confused with one another. I never sell any of the feather lines. Their genetics are proprietary and are tightly guarded. The “commercial” egg and meat line chicks we sell locally (never shipping through the postal system), and then I supply several mail order chick hatcheries with parent stock, as described above.
4) What breeds did you use to create the breed (seems the few articles out there mention Leghorn and Ameraucana), and should any of those breeds be bred back into lines again for improvement of any certain characteristics?
4. The components of the Whiting Blues are a distant foundation of Ameraucanas, and an assortment of top production white Leghorn lines, as described above. The true original South American Araucana was also rumpless. Which is a nightmare. About one out of a thousand chicks are born rumpless, as just an embryonic development abnormality. They are hard to detect at hatch. But when they grow up they are clearly evident. And depending on where the cessation of the pygostyle and vertebrae occurs, they can range from pretty functional to completely incontinent. So I never use any rumpless adult in any breeding program.
5) Is a standard of perfection for this breed even a possibility since they can produces such an array of colors?
5. I need to fess up that I personally have never even been to a proper poultry show. I always really wanted to go to the Ohio National someday-but never made it. So I am not at all oriented towards breeding show stock. Rather I just like creating what looks good to me. I have been given several copies of the Standard of Perfection books-and I peruse them every once in a while. But I am just not inclined to work that way. So when the folks at McMurray Hatchery contacted me years ago, asking about buying breeder stock, I said they are a whole host of colors and patterns. Neither of us knew if that would hurt their sales or what. So we just went with it. I always bred for beautiful feathers and colors, because that is what I like personally. So I was kind of hoping others might like that as well. And apparently they do. So trying to make them conform to a “standard” might not be possible. Or maybe an “open variety” category might be an alternative?
6) We have lots of confusion among group members about True Greens: Are they supposed to breed true? (because on the website some of the other hybrids say “hybrid” in the description. True greens say “breed.”) [This information would be helpful in distinguishing to people between TG and TB when asked.]
6. The Whiting Green was something that came about as an odd experiment. In the process of breeding the Whiting Blue, a rare genetic occurrence happened called a “cross over”. This is when the scaffolding of the chromosome detaches and flips over and then re-attaches, in the process of chromosome replication. And in this particular incident, the breakage occurred somewhere between the “O gene”, which is the gene that creates the blue in the egg shell, and the nearby Pea comb gene. Normally these two genes are what is called “tightly linked”, meaning they are very close to each other on the same chromosome-which is why most all blue egg breeds have pea combs. Well, they rearranged in one of my lines, so the stock no longer had a Pea comb but had a single comb, but was laying fully blue eggs. And that is how new varieties sometimes come about-through random genetic flukes. And like any observant breeder, I recognized it, and endeavored to isolate, stabilize and perpetuate this novel occurrence. Which is now called the “N line”, and happens to be a beautiful BBRed like a Brown Leghorn, which is the “wild type” of the Red Junglefowl from which all chickens were originally derived. So, my principle retail customers here in western Colorado were interested in getting green egg layer chicks as well as the blue eggers. But some of the smaller feed stores wanted to be able to put them in the same selling compartment with the Blues. So to accommodate this I crossed this single combed blue egg line with a light brown egg commercial Rhode Island White line I had (which was also recessive white), so the resultant chicks would all be colored (as the recessive white was disrupted) and all the green egg chicks would be SINGLE combed, so could be distinguished from the pea comb blue egg chicks in the same sales tub. So that is how and why the Whiting Green originally came about. And when this seemed to work at the retail end, I experimented with different brown egg lines, and settled on a light brown egg strain. This works better because many of the commercial brown egg production strains are intentionally bred for a very dark, rich brown egg shell-as that is what consumers prefer. But such dark brown blows away the delicate pastel blue of the O gene, and you don’t get a nice color, but rather various forms of olive shades. So the key to having a consistent nice avocado green egg shell layer is to create it with such a cross. But this strategy also negates the ability of “breeding true,” because the different elements of the blue and brown egg shell lines segregate all over the map in subsequent generations -- and it would be a struggle to ever sort them out again. So, that is why the Whiting Green has a single comb and doesn’t breed true -- but is also why it has exceptional hybrid vigor, due to the un-relatedness of the parental lines. Amongst the smaller commercial egg production companies I supply locally, the Green is even more popular than the Whiting Blue.
Additionally provided information regarding egg color:
One thing you didn’t ask in your e-mail is the subject of persistency of blue. By this I mean how strong the blue color is later in egg production. This is something that actually has to be diligently selected for. Almost all the pullets when they come into lay lay a beautiful Robin’s egg blue color. This is because they are fresh layers and their eggs are relatively small. And because the actual blue pigment is only being deposited on a small egg it is concentrated and therefore quite intensely blue. But as the pullet ages and the eggs naturally get larger, there is a dramatic increase in the quantity of egg shell relative to the limited amount of the blue pigment, and therefore the blueness diminishes. I discovered this early on in the development with the Whiting/Caveny blue. To address this my strategy of selection incorporates a pre-breeder chick keep egg examination. So after 6 or 7 months of production I literally go through all the eggs prior to setting and remove any eggs that aren’t decently blue. This is done on both the male and female lines, and is how the persistency of blue is achieved. And it takes repeated generations of such selection pressure to stabilize this trait. Which is maybe why the Whiting Blues has become so popular.