How do I breed a Silver Pied peafowl?

[Henk69]

What you say seems valid.
When I researched peacock genetics both white and pied where incomplete dominant genes with little white spotting in heterozygote animals.
Can not find the page I used...

Does anyone have a reference of sorts? Was it a recent publication?

I must say that 2 mutations on the same gene is not very common and I wouldn't have missed it mentioned.

So then silver pieds must be combined white/pied plus white-eyed.

 

[Henk69]

http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/84/1/57

 

[Kev]

Ok.. yet another evidence of white and pied really being allelic, thanks for that link.

I have not seen any 'official' references(yours was the first study I'm aware of).. it is just something repeated often by peafowl breeders for quite sometime- became aware of this 20 yrs ago.

It is tempting to think it is pied/white plus white eyed. However I did not get any silver pied out of 2 different silver pied males bred to white eyed split white and white hens out of white eyed stock. The chicks would have been all homozygous for white eyed. White was already available from the hens. So.. why no silver pied?

 

[Henk69]

Bad odds with the w+ gene from the split whites.

 

[Henk69]

White eyed is dominant? or do you need 2 copies most of the time?

Sounds like a mystery recessive ingredient.
Only the backcross would give homozygotes.

But why? You have the pied effect and you have the white eyed effect. Why would they suppress each other without this ingredient.
Just thinking aloud...

 

[Kev]

Yes white eyed is dominant. Cross of white eyed with wild type will give white eyed offspring. Just how white eyed the offspring are varies from bird to bird though.. some show it weakly, some don't look any different from homozygous birds. Not sex linked either, results are same if the parent was male or female.

It's(silver pied) very much a mystery to me too.. I have not set the thinking into stone yet, so far it really does look like there is something else unknown involved for silver pied.

Some breeders charge extra for whites out of their silver pieds. As if those whites are genetically different from other whites. Somehow. But this is not very reliable if they cannot tell exactly why or without proof? I asked one why those whites were extra, the reply was "because they have the silver pied gene".. still ambiguous.

 

[crystalchik]

Thank you all so much, this is actually helping me out a lot!

Though Im not as advanced as you are on here about genetics, but it seems like you need silver pied on both sides to get silver pied. Like that silver pied male to the hen split to silver pied. Guess Im not getting silver pieds any time soon. And the silver pied female that literally walked into my yard probably wouldnt have done me any good either if i needed a male that was at least spilt to silver pied.

It seems like this silver pied gene is one in itself...I thought it was just a dilution of the pied or white-eyed pied gene with white, seems I was clearly mistaken. Do you think one of the birds would have to be dominant silver pied in order to get it, or should the two recessive genes eventually work together?

By the way, I checked out that website...I understand it, but what is a dark pied?

 

[konopswj]

I know this is an old topic, but has anyone found further information on it?

Has this been further discussed in the Peafowl section that anyone knows of?

Thanks,
Walter

 

[Kev]

Walter, I've tried to bring up the topic and get a discussion going a couple times over the years but so far they didn't really get anywhere. Early on, I was told by a couple breeders that silver pied bred with white eyes split white and whites pure for white eyed would give me silver pieds. Didn't happen with two unrelated silver pied males bred with my white eye stock.

Now the current response from breeders is to get silver pied, have to use birds from silver pied breeding. Tune has changed, but still haven't seen anything specific as to what's different about silver pied... some may say it's the white eyed but, read my above experience. If white eyed was really the only difference between silver pied and pied, then why did I not get any from silver pied with white eyed stock?

Wish I knew. I want to add, some of my original white eyed came direct from Ernie West, who discovered this mutation and others came from at least two different breeders. None of my white eyed had any pied breeding in them, but all of them happened to be split white. Anyways, their chicks looked like IB but with a faded look, much like blue jeans after years of washing. Chicks from silver pied crosses look very different to me even if the chick was out of cross with IB, they had almost totally yellow head/necks(not due to pied marking), much lighter wing feathers at hatch.. they looked so light to me I took pics and asked if they were cameo or purples. They ended up looking just slightly different from normal IB in feather color. I suspect that's a hint of sorts as to silver pied having something different..

crystalchik Dark pied as I originally understood it from UPA meant a bird genetically pure for pied. These birds typically don't have much white, some on the flights, maybe a white patch on chin and occasionally one or 2 white feather elsewhere. Often they look the same as split whites though. In recent years, I've started to see pied birds(not pure pied) with not that much white be described as dark pied. I'm not sure, perhaps the usage was with the mind that dark pied meant a pied with less white instead of 'loud pied' which are genetically half white half pied. 'Loud pied' can have little white to lots of white though... the terms originally referred to the genetics, not the visual appearance.

 

[konopswj]

Kev - Thanks for responding.

The white eyes you breed to create the IB'ish chicks with pale leucism (am I using the correct term?), were both male and female white eye? Do you think that because the males were split to white this caused this pale leucism?

I am also gathering that after reading the page on silver pied on Legg's Peafowl page and this post, that it isn't as easy as combining the pied, white eye, and some white and getting the end result. The peafowl world is still missing what exactly creates these beautiful silver pied birds...

Your knowledge of this sort of thing with genetics and peafowl in general far surpasses mine, but I do appreciate you discussing this with me. I appreciate the silver pied look (obviously enough to ask all these questions) and recently bought a couple silver pied chicks. Just poking at this topic to further my understanding and see what might be in store for me in the future with breeding and understanding this color/pattern.