Question about feather type

[RoostersAreAwesome]

She’s just blue. If you do want to make blue silver laced with only the birds you have available, I would cross your gold laced wyandotte rooster to your Delaware (assuming the GLW is your only rooster). You would get gold partially laced or gold messy columbian hens and silver/gold split partially laced barred or silver/gold split messy columbian barred roosters.
From there you could go several directions. You could breed back to the Delaware for pure to silver chicks, but then you’d have a bunch of barring (a dominant gene) and pretty much no lacing. I’m pretty sure this plan would take the longest, as you’d have to breed back to the GLWs and breed out the barring. Still would make some pretty chicks though.

You could breed one of the GLW/Delaware roosters (silver/gold split) to a GLW hen, producing silver hens, gold hens, silver/gold split roosters, and pure gold roosters, all with better lacing than the original GLW/Delaware crosses but probably not quite as uniform as the pure GLWs. Then you could breed a silver/gold split rooster to the sapphire Olive egger and then those offspring back to a 3/4 GLW 1/4 Delaware that has the silver gene. You would get about half golds in this route, but that sounds like what you want. You probably wouldn’t get any pure silver roosters, but most silver/gold splits just look like silver with some yellowing in the hackles/saddles. If you don’t want barring, you could pick a 3/4 GLW 1/4 Delaware rooster that doesn’t have it for breeding.

The shortest route would be to take a 1/2 GLW 1/2 Delaware rooster and breed that to a sapphire Olive egger. However, since you want lacing, you would have to be lucky to get a first generation GLW/Delaware that actually has clear lacing. Though I have seen it happen. The sapphire Olive egger x’s will probably not have the best lacing, even when bred back to the GLW/Delaware, a lot will be barred. You’ll also get gold laced blues.

I’m sure there are other ways to do it, like breeding the first generation 1/2 GLW and 1/2 Delawares together. Those are the most direct ways I can think of if you don’t care that the pattern is true breeding.

If you’re still interested in this, I would just make the first generation crosses and see how they look. GLW x Delaware and GLW x sapphire olive egger. From there you can see where you want to go. Actually, GLW/Delaware X GLW/OE may be another route you could go, though you may have problems with lacing.

 

[Lydia Huizenga]

If you’re still interested in this, I would just make the first generation crosses and see how they look. GLW x Delaware and GLW x sapphire olive egger. From there you can see where you want to go. Actually, GLW/Delaware X GLW/OE may be another route you could go, though you may have problems with lacing.

Wow! This is a lot of useful information. I have a few of these mizes going into the incubator soon and I hope it goes in the right direction. Thanks for all of your help. I wish I had that much knowledge about genetics. But I will learn eventually.