Silver East Indies Duck

Repticake · Mar 28, 2023

I have been breeding show lined black East Indies for several years now. The year before last my friend produced a blue out of black ducks and I had assumed it was just a crossbred. Like many people online I was quick to jump on the blue East Indies are just crossbreds bandwagon. But I gave her the benefit of the doubt considering the bird did look very much typed like an East Indy. Knowing that blue is a co-dominant gene in other ducks and supposed to be a different recessive gene in East Indies making it provable if it was a crossbred or not. I had better facilities to separate ducks for proving breeding pairs so I borrowed the duck and bred her to one of my black drakes expecting ~1/2 of the babies to come out blue. All of the babies came out black. I figured since it was a supposed to be a recessive gene I would be able to keep some of the black babies and next year I would breed them back to each other and show if they were blue carriers. Halfway through the breeding season I switched her with a different drake I figured if I was going to inbreed the babies to their siblings at least I could get some from two different dads to make it not so close on the genes. Well once I started hatching eggs from the other Drake I started getting almost all blue babies. I checked my records from that drake and my friends East indies and they both had a relative that came in from Duck Creek Farm. I did the circle back and bred two of her black babies to each other and produced some blue ducks. So I was able to prove she was a Blue East Indy and not a cross. Although not an accepted show color standard, the recessive blue made it provable.

To get to my point. This year I paired a blue East Indy hen with a third completely different black East Indie drake known to have relatives from Duck Creek but not yet proven as to whether he had carried blue. These Silver East Indies ducks hatched along with the blues. I have dug all over and only seen one post online asking about the color. As far as I knew standard for other ducks with the co-dom blue gene you would need two blue parents to create a silver animal. However because Blue East Indies have a totally different recessive blue gene I had assumed that the silver would not be a possibility. Somehow my visual blue hen and blue carrier (split to blue/het blue) drake produced silver. I will try to keep updated pictures as they grow.