Iowa Blue Chickens - Understanding The Traditional Type

[YgritteChick]

Thanks a lot!

 

[IowaBlueCurt]

Candy definately pointed you in the right direction. The breeders in our club membership have some really nice birds in their flocks and if you are looking to get a good start I would advise you obtain hatching eggs or chicks. Every breeder (Iowas or otherwise) always hang on to their best birds for breeding, but if one obtains chicks, you'll get a few that are just as good or better than the breeder birds from which they decended. Stock is somewhat limited (albeit not near as tight as lastyear!), so those who have interest in the breed, keep in mind that there is usually a waiting list of some sort for every breeder.

Hope that helps to answer some questions.

 

[YgritteChick]

Candy definately pointed you in the right direction. The breeders in our club membership have some really nice birds in their flocks and if you are looking to get a good start I would advise you obtain hatching eggs or chicks. Every breeder (Iowas or otherwise) always hang on to their best birds for breeding, but if one obtains chicks, you'll get a few that are just as good or better than the breeder birds from which they decended. Stock is somewhat limited (albeit not near as tight as lastyear!), so those who have interest in the breed, keep in mind that there is usually a waiting list of some sort for every breeder.

Hope that helps to answer some questions.

Thank you! I would definitely want chicks or hatching eggs anyway and I completely understand breeders keeping their best birds. I just would like good quality specimens to help raise awareness of the breed, not some very off colored or marked ones that would be a bad representation. I am getting my current flock more in order (I got straight run chicks and have too many cockerels that need to be re-homed) so I am not sure about how many Iowa Blues I would be able to get yet. I wouldn't be ready for them until next spring/summer so you give me hope that that might be possible. Thanks for the great tip about getting in touch with breeders soon though since I already know I am interested in them, even though I am not ready for the chicks or hatching eggs yet. I hadn't really considered that.

 

[IowaBlueCurt]

One area of conern that I see as I travel to visit various flocks of Iowas, is that there appears to be a slight misunderstanding on what exactly a "Charcoal" looks like. This is reasonable considering we haven't had a lot of them over the past few decades. Add to this the fact that we don't know exactly how to produce them. We know the genes responsible, but there are a lot of modifiers that need to be "set" just right in order to get this variation to exhibit properly. No doubt the outside blood that was added by Glenn and then later by Ideal really messed up these modifiers making it harder to reproduce them once we have them. It'll take some time to get this variation fixed in the technical sense I believe. I have included below another picture of a nice Charcoal hen. Preferably she'd be just a hair lighter in color (again, a modifier issue...)



This isn't the best pic, and there is a "redness" to the pic due to the picture being taken after dark. My appologies. The male has been busy as well so her feathers are a bit rough....... for the most part this hen looks like a darker colored Silver Iowa. Her head has a beautiful metalic silver color instead of a bright crisp white as the Standard calls for. This is normal and to be expected when we try to create the Standard Silver coloration over the Er e-locus base.

When questioning if one's bird is a Charcoal or a Birchen in color, the question to ask is this....does the bird look like the Silver Iowas only darker, or do they look like the birchen pattern? To help answer that question, one need only look to the Standard and see how closely your bird in question resembles the Standard. I've been seeing a lot of birchen colored birds who individuals are calling Charcoal. Unfortunately there are lot of birchens out there being sold as Iowa Blues. The Iowa Blue is not a birchen colored bird. This has been corrected by the Standard Committee as we worked to update our breed Standard. We have dropped the birchen standard and have set one standard in place, namely the Silver Standard. This will be reflected once our website is updated.

In short, the Silver Iowa is the Standard to which we should breed our birds towards. Historically, both the Smokey and Charcoal birds were bred as close to the Silver type as possible. The Silver is the Silver pattern (plus Iowa specific modifiers) over the eb locus, the Smokey is the Silver pattern (plus Iowa specific modifiers) over the e+ locus, and the Charcoal is the Silver pattern (plus Iowa specific modifiers) over the Er e-locus. Hopefully this will help to clearify the Charcoal pattern for those who wish to breed the Iowas in the traditional sense and within the traditional variation the breed was once known for.

(I will post additional pics as I can get them.)

 

[IowaBlueCurt]

Here's a Charcoal hen whose picture was taken by Denny Johnston while living in his barn. Now she's in my barn so I have plans to take more pictures and hopefully her color will be easier to capture once she's molted and in good lighting. As stated above, you can see the Silver Iowa pattern trying to work itself onto this bird (which is an Er based bird instead of the eb like the "true" Silver). This hen could be lighter in color yet as he's just a tad too dark. As with the hen above, it's a modifier issue, hopefully by putting this hen on a light colored Silver male, one can restrict the dark coloration on her and produce some nice Charcoals that resemble more the Silver Iowas.

You can see by this pic that she's definately not a birchen colored bird even though her e-locus gene is the birchen gene (Er) this I believe also adds some confusion to this color. The Charcoal hen should look as close to a Silver hen as possible. There are some limits here due to the Er gene but as modifiers continue to be fine tuned we will see hens that will look more like a Silver hen than the hen below does. The key is to breed our Charcoals (and Smokeys) to look like the Standard as much as possible if we want our Charcoals and Smokeys to coexist in our flocks as they did in the days gone by.

 

[karimw]

Here's a Charcoal hen whose picture was taken by Denny Johnston while living in his barn. Now she's in my barn so I have plans to take more pictures and hopefully her color will be easier to capture once she's molted and in good lighting. As stated above, you can see the Silver Iowa pattern trying to work itself onto this bird (which is an Er based bird instead of the eb like the "true" Silver). This hen could be lighter in color yet as he's just a tad too dark. As with the hen above, it's a modifier issue, hopefully by putting this hen on a light colored Silver male, one can restrict the dark coloration on her and produce some nice Charcoals that resemble more the Silver Iowas.

You can see by this pic that she's definately not a birchen colored bird even though her e-locus gene is the birchen gene (Er) this I believe also adds some confusion to this color. The Charcoal hen should look as close to a Silver hen as possible. There are some limits here due to the Er gene but as modifiers continue to be fine tuned we will see hens that will look more like a Silver hen than the hen below does. The key is to breed our Charcoals (and Smokeys) to look like the Standard as much as possible if we want our Charcoals and Smokeys to coexist in our flocks as they did in the days gone by.

Is the barring pattern on the birds a factor in the charcoal color? Instead of a lace I am seeing a pattern similar to the Campine barring, more so on the males, but the females as well. Now though, I have that pattern on some birds that hatched with a silver chick coloration, except they had the dark chocolate color down their back. Sorry, I know I need to post pictures

.

 

[IowaBlueCurt]

I know what you're talking about Kari, I see it too. I believe the autosomal barring that we see on the breasts and sides of the Charcoal males as well as the autosomal barring that is sometimes present on the Charcoal hens is due to the action of the Db over the Er locus. When the Db is over the e+ and eb locus it appears to have a reduced effect and in our Silvers it doesn't seem to express the autosomal barring very often.

Regarding the chicks that hatch out Silver with the dark wide chestnut/chocolate colored stripe down their back, they are definately Silver as you know. I haven't been able to segregate those Silver chicks from other more mottled Silver chicks at adulthood as far pattern goes. That's not to say something isn't there that could help us predetermine how they will mature out, I just haven't been able to observe a consistant result yet. Kari, have you been able to make any observations regarding the Silver chick down patterns and adult pattern correlation?

I know Connie is working on tagging Silver chicks by down color and making notes on any correlation to adult pattern, but to date nothing has been conclusive. My best guess is that the pattern and modifiers are too variable to pin down any correlation in our Silver chicks.

Going back to the Charcoals for a moment, what is confusing at the present is that the chestnut colored chicks were supposed to grow up looking like the Silver colored birds and the males were "supposed" to be clean of the autosomal barring effect even though they were built on the Er gene. If this is true, then the original population must have included Charcoals who's modifiers prevented the autosomal barring from having a large expression on them. So, another piece of the puzzle concerning the Charcoals that isn't totally known yet..... time and breeding tests will tell if we can fully capture the original modifers to the Charcoals. I believe we are very close and if we try to breed them to look as close to the Silver Standard as possible, we'll get them there in a few generations. We're close now on the birds we have, but we've still got a little ways to go.

 

[iamfivewire]

Would you like us to document anything on color &/or patterns on our hatches of the chicks to adult to see if anything becomes consistant or somewhat "predictable" - we seem to get mostly Smokey & birchen/charcoal chicks & very few silver. on our most recent hatch, ive noticed some variation in the thick center-stripe of the smokey chicks ranging from a dark brown to med dusty brown to a light grey color - some the stripe goes from the head to tail, but a couple it stops & restarts on back of neck + the "diamond shape on top of head - some are narrow & some wide.
on the dark chicks, they've varied to black w/ a "lemon white" on chest & rear fluff, some pure dark, some a deep brown/black color, & some that have black body/brown wings ("mulberry").

 

[IowaBlueCurt]

Presently, I don't think it's necessary to try to document predictability in the variable Silver chick downs. The reason? When we look at other silver based breeds with the Pattern gene (Silver Penciled Rock, Silver Penciled Wyandotte, Silver Campine) they exhibit a wide range of variability in their chicks, so my best guess is that it's due to simple modifiers and the nature of pg on an eb base.

I would maybe keep track of a few of the black/chestnut/ "mulberry" chicks to see if anything can be determined only because we have so few of them and anything we can learn would really shed some light on this variation.

 

[IowaBlueCurt]

Here's an interesting picture. I was out to Glenn's place about three weeks ago to take some chicks to him. As a group of breeders, we're moving in the right direction. I had only 11 for him but he said they were the best group of chicks he'd seen in decades and that in the last 20 years he hadn't produced a group of chicks as nice as they were. That's encouraging! While I was there I asked him to take out his "best" Iowa. What I wanted was not necessarily the best colored individual, but the best bodied individual. He proceeded to pull out this very old male. Glenn was thinking he's about 10 years old or more. What was most interesting to me was that while this male had some weight to him, he wasn't particularly tall like we've been seeing in our males today. He was short and very stocky. Glenn mentioned that he remembered the original birds being short and stocky, but heavy. He felt his current flock is too "rangy" compared to what they used to look like. Thought I'd share his thoughts and this pic. Not the best pic of the male, but you'll get the idea. Color isn't quite right, you'll see that when you look at him. But he does seem to possess an attitude of "been there done that"...........maybe his age has something to do with it. I'm planning on taking a hen to Glenn's to put with this male and see if we can get anything out of him. Don't know if he's fertile anymore or not....slim chance, but just maybe......