The American Paint Silkie

[Three Cedars Silkies]

Sometimes paint chicks are hatched that are the smokey grayish bluish that you sometimes see on silver based white babies. I just saw a couple of them but didn't notice if they had spots. I'm thinking that they didn't but will check and let you know. My chick in the pic below has some of the bluish/grayish tint. Judy's are solidly that color with no yellow or white until the wing feathers start growing and they are stunningly white! As a comparison, the picture below the chick is of this same chick as a grown pullet.

Judy Lee has not kept those chicks, so there is no way to know at this time if they are recessive or dominant silver based white birds. I know that I will be keeping any that I have that hatch and doing a trial breeding to see what they produce.

Edited to give credit to Cat Dance Silkies as the chicks that I hatched were from her eggs!!

 

[Sonoran Silkies]

Quote:
Well, we do not know that there IS a "paint gene," or if instead it is an allele of another gene, or is even a combination of alleles from several different genes. The working theory by those who have been breeding them for 10+ years is that paint is an allele of dominant white, and is dominant to the not-white (i+) allele. (Where it falls in dominance among the other dominant white alleles is not yet tested. Right now still testing to determine if it IS dominant white, as analyzed breeding indicates is most likely.) If paint is a dominant white allele, the postulated dominance could be stated as I > I^p > i+. Thus, if present it WILL show.

Using I^p to indicate paint, if each paint parent carries one copy of I^p, then 50% will inherit one copy of I^p, 25% will inherit 2 copies and 25% will inherit no copies. Under this scenario and theoreticized dominance, birds with one copy could be white or paint, depending on whether their other dominant white allele is I or i+; birds with two copies would be paint and birds with zero copies would be white or black depending on whether the other dominant white allele is I or i+.

I/I = white
I/I^p = paint
I^p/I^p = paint
I^p/i+=paint
i+/i+ = not-white (black)

Toss in other possible dominant white alleles, and you may have even more possibilities of expression, so I tried to simplify it by ignoring them here. Just realize that in real life they cannot be ignored, although laboratory smoky is very rare, and dun is still not common. Toss in that recessive white is common in silkies, and it could pop up even in lines that are thought to be dominant white, throwing off the percentage of whites.

Or at least one copie possibly two?? If both parents have two copies, all siblings must have atleast one copie, some two and it shows with the spots obviously but on the black offspring, they could have two copies as well but no one knows that yet because people admitted like Bren, to just selling off the blacks and not try breeding them.

By all means, please test to see if you can get paints from the black birds; if you can, it will dramatically change what is currently considered considered the most likely genetic theory of paints (by those that have been deliberately breeding them for many years). You are speculating that paint is recessive rather than dominant or incompletely dominant, and that a single copy does not express.

I'm pretty sure white will not come through on the black birds, so how would you know how many copies of the unknown paint gene the black offsprings are carrying. Maybe they carry two doses, but with no leakage how would one know? Say the blackndod carry 1 or 2 doses, wouldn't that be a viable addition to any paint breeding program to help push out more offspring with the paint gene? Why just sell them?

Once again, you are speculating that paint is recessive. You are also speculating that black (not-white or ?) turns off the expression of paint. Paint does not appear to act like a recessive gene, based upon the the outcome of percentages of breeding paints to blacks. For that matter, if it is recessive, in should NEVER express in the first generation of a cross between a paint and a black that did not come from a paint breeding heritage.

Now with that said and hopefully some Of it right ( correct me if I'm wrong I'm no pro and trying to learn to) if you breed the black offspring with one copy of the gene or possibly two, to white American silkies to improve type and continue working on the Paint Colour, then bred all babies back to the black carrier, a certain percentage would be carriers of the one copie of the paint gene and you should have some Paints or atleast 2 copied paint gene birds working 2 generations.

If paint is a recessive gene, and is carried hidden by the blacks from a paint heritage, half their offspring would inherit that hidden copy, and would also remove a copy of recessive white from that parent. Bred together, you would get paints in the 2nd generation.

Now I did not say that a certain percentage would have visible spots to the human eye, ( because of the whites possibly being recessive and not dominant that is) but wouldn't some of the white offspring be true paints, but if they are recessive whites and not dominant whites we would not know because they would not have any leakage from the recessive gene? I know that sounds confusing but Suze, please tell me if that makes any sense.

Recessive white CAN be leaky, but is less so than dominant white. One would generally expect that a bird pure for recessive white to not show paint. Breed a recessive white bird to a non-white bird and you should not expect white offspring unless the non-white is carrying recessive white.

On the flip side, maybe some white chicks will come out with spots, proving you wrong and showing that either one I AM SO LUCKY and have Dominant based american whites or I proved that recessive whites can have the spots come through. Then again, no one has any idea if the whites are recessive or dominant unless bred for several more generations because the whites don't hatch out of an egg with a name tag: "I'm Recessive" or "I'm Dominant" there is not physical way of know what anyones whites has without linebreeding correct?

There is a current breeding test that will show whether the whites are dominant or recessive. Should have results later this year.​

 

[Brody's Broodello]

Love this thread. Having bred Netherland Dwarf rabbits years ago, this reminds me so much of them. You could breed for years and get a white Dwarf out of rabbits that were a solid color. The Blue eyed whites were a totally different makeup. You had to breed one BEW to a color, then the resulting rabbit would be an agouti color with a dutch pattern,hopefully with 1 or 2 blue eyes. Then you take that rabbit to another BEW, to get a full litter of BEW. But with about 30 possible colors of N Dwarfs, it was always a genetics lesson to get what you wanted, in the correct color, then you also had to work on type at the same time. As I was winding down the Rabbit breeding, they were just getting the "broken"(paint) netherland dwarf in the US. They looked just like the paint silkies. The genes for them worked like the paint silkies, you had to do some experimenting to see what you got, them you had to really work to get them to look like good show rabbits. Reading about the paints here takes me back to the rabbit days, I can't wait to see how these progress, and to see how the develope in the future. Good luck to everyone who is working with these!

 

[Three Cedars Silkies]

Lovely, Jen. Keep us posted on how they are coming. Mine are too young for babies yet, but probably in a month or so the boy should be starting to dance for the ladies. Here is a pic I took of him today....my daughter was holding him so you can't really tell much...except for his awesome foot feathering!!

 

[Three Cedars Silkies]

I posted this on the ASBC forum last week but there was no reply so I thought I would try here.

I bathed my paint cockerel yesterday and as I was blowing him dry, I was looking carefully at the feathering. I had always assumed that the black spots were individual black feathers among the white background, but I did find several feathers that were both black and white.

Is this a normal variation and to be expected?

 

[Three Cedars Silkies]

The red paint belongs to Judy Lee and the photo I posted is a pic that she sent me. I only raise black/white paints.

 

[jen5680]

This is one I got from paint/paint or paint/blk

I really love the color and can't wait to see what it turns out like

 

[Sonoran Silkies]

Quote:
I'm glad you posted Sonoran, do you consider mine Buff? It is for sure White and the reddish/orange is in blotches.
I also have some that look like [as some described] a white with sort of an orange cast, for lack of any other thing I'd say they looked Champagne. The color is uniform all over.

I'd sure like an opinion on these strange colors, are these "Champagne" colored birds considered undesirable? How about the Red blotchy ones like I have? They are pretty but I'm not sure they should be called Paints. I'd like to know.

Three Cedars' Red Paint is a beautiful bird and no doubt a Paint, mine don't look that way, so are ones like mine just a weird crop out and not to be spoken of as Paint?

I thank you for your knowledgeable opinion.

I just posted an explanation, but I think that the ones with lots of white are essentially very smutty buffs, but with the black "smut" prevented (or you could say replaced) by dominant white.

Are your champagne birds a similar colour to the off-coloured hackles on some paints--but the entire bird is coloured that way rather than just hackles? Like this:

Or something different? The one I showed is one of my champagne paints. I have several, but have also gotten paints without the champagne ground colouring from them. I am speculating that those with off-coloured hackles and the champagne ground are likely gold, then cleanest paints are probably silver.

I think to be called "paint" it needs large spots of colour. A paint background is just that--a part of its heritage, but not necessarily its appearance or genotype. If a parent bird has a single comb, but the offspring does not, you don't call the offspring single combed. Likewise, if it does not have spots, it is not paint.


As for desirable or undesirable, well, different people have different things they like or dislike, and there really is no standard for paints. As far as I know, no one has even come up with a defined working standard. I think most of us assume a few things: white background, larger, bold patches of black.

Things that I don't think any of us have considered, or at least not put down in words--how much black is too much? or how little black is too little? should off-coloured hackles be a defect or a disqualification? Or even part of the variety description?

Should we also accept those with an entire champagne ground colour, and spots on it? (my vote here would be yes--I like the look). What about a white ground with red spots? Or blue? Or chocolate?

 

[Sonoran Silkies]

From the standpoint of the standard and exhibition, a bird is the breed and variety it is based upon its appearance.

From the standpoint of breeding, you need to take into account that it may or may not be homozygous (2 copies of the same allele), and thus the offspring could vary dramatically if they do not inherit the dominant trait displayed by their parents, or if recessives carried by each parent pair up in the offspring. Add into that the many colour and pattern genes carried, and the outcome can have a huge range of possibilities.

For example, let's say that one parent is E/e+ and the other is E^R/E^Wh. Absent of genes that modify or prevent black pigment, both parents will be black. Let's say one of the offspring inherits e+ from one parent and E^Wh from the other--all of a sudden, the bird has a wheaten base, not black (E^Wh/e+). Pair that one back to the E/e+ parent and you will likely get some wildtype (e+/e+) offspring.

Anyways, that is just speculation on a single gene and what could happen. Add in all the others and ....

 

[chikincrazee]

Quote:
Hi this is a photo of my red paint he was not hatched from my current pen of paints..we call him Mikey...lol