Sexlink Olive Egger question

[FaithWalkFarms]

I know that using a black rooster over a legbar hen will result in auto sexing at hatch.

I currently have a BCM roo for my OE pen, but my back-up boy is a Wheaten Marans.

Since the male Wheatens feather out black, does that still work for creating an auto-sexing offspring? Or NO because of the wheaten gene?

 

[fluffycrow]

@NatJ

 

[MysteryChicken]

I know that using a black rooster over a legbar hen will result in auto sexing at hatch.

I currently have a BCM roo for my OE pen, but my back-up boy is a Wheaten Marans.

Since the male Wheatens feather out black, does that still work for creating an auto-sexing offspring? Or NO because of the wheaten gene?

Well, any Solid Rooster(except White, or Silver Columbian)bred to Barred hen works for Sex linking with the barring gene.
But Wheaten usually ends up producing solid yellow chicks, or Yellow chicks with occasional black line on the head.

But it could possibly work with the chicks being split with Duckwing, which cream Legbars are Duckwing with barring(Crele).

 

[NatJ]

I know that using a black rooster over a legbar hen will result in auto sexing at hatch.

Chicks that can be sexed by color, yes. But they are sexlinks, not autosexing.

Autosexing is when they are color-sexable and you can breed them to each other to get more of the same kind of color-sexable chicks, generation after generation. Cream Legbar is an autosexing pure breed of chicken.

Sexlinks are a one-time cross that produces color-sexable chicks. To get more of that kind of chick, you need to cross the same parent types again. Breeding sexlinks to each other does not give color-sexable chicks.

I currently have a BCM roo for my OE pen, but my back-up boy is a Wheaten Marans.

Since the male Wheatens feather out black, does that still work for creating an auto-sexing offspring? Or NO because of the wheaten gene?

I would say the Wheaten Marans would sort-of work, but not nearly as well as the Black Copper Marans.

With sexlinks using the barring gene, people usually sex them at hatch by looking for a light spot on top of the head on the males. The light spot is white or yellow, and is very easy to see on chicks with black down.

Crossing Wheaten Marans with Cream Legbars will probably create chicks where you cannot reliably see a light spot on the heads of the males at hatch, and where you cannot be sure of the females (no light spot on the head.)

If you are willing to wait a week or two, you can probably sex the Wheaten-mix chicks by looking at the wing feathers: white barring on the wing feathers for the males, no white barring on the wing feathers for the females. Both males and females should have wing feathers that are mostly black, or at least dark enough for the white barring to be visible.

But you may not want to wait long enough to see barring in the feathers, in order to sex the chicks. So even though they will be sexlinks by one definition (males with white barring and females with no white barring), they may not be a useful kind of sexlink (actually able to be sexed at an early enough age to be useful.)