The Calico/Aloha/Mottled Naked Neck Thread

[Kev]

check out my avatar too lol

 

[draye]

check out my avatar too lol

I just looked myself. I use a phone and avatars don't show very well on them. I just hit it and it showed me a view if it. Cool.

 

[draye]

I found this posted in another thread quite old but it will be useful if I ever need to make some buff Columbian birds to make some calico Naked Necks.

Probably would take four or five years to produce.

.Okay here are the 'instructions' on how to make buff columbian wyandottes.

First you will need a partridge cock and columbian hens. Breed those and you will get sexlinks, males will be columbian and females will be poor buff columbian. Breed one of the sons back to the mother and you will get:

25% columbian females
25% buff columbian females
25% columbian males
25% impure columbian males which are hard to distinguish from columbian males

Then breed a buff columbian female to her father and it will produce:

25% columbain females
25% impure columbian males
25% buff columbian males
25% buff columbian females

Then select the best buff columbians and breed from them. Only keep the best from there, dont breed from mossy backed females. Males with black flecks in their thighs tend to throw mossy backed females.

This says to make Wyandottes but I'm sure you could use Plymouth Rocks to do the same thing.

 

[Kev]

Do not use columbian IF black tail buffs(same thing as buff columbian) are available. They are the same genetic make up, the "columbian" in wyandottes and rocks are simply black tail buffs with the silver gene added.

Using a columbian would be deliberately throwing in an extra unwanted gene(silver) if a buff columbian is available.. but is understandable if BTF/buff columbian is not available in the first place. Apparently black tail buff wyandottes didn't exist or are quite uncommon.. in that case all you need is to remove the silver and presto, black tail buff.

Also be aware if you want brighter buff, use wheaten(buff orpingtons, black tail buff turkens etc). If you like darker buff with grayish down at feather base then partridge is the way to go.

 

[alohachickens]

Here's some hints from what I've learned (the hard way!) if you want to try and create Mottled Calico or Mille large birds:

*Anything "dark" like Speckled Sussex, Mottled Java, and Exchequer Leghorn, is going to make all of your chicks black and white, or dark brown and white. If you like black and white spotted chickens - GREAT. But if you want Mille Fluer or any cool tri-color look, you are going to be fighting that heavy pigment for several generations. So, make sure if you bring something like that into the flock, be really picky! Get the biggest, best, and most spotty that you can find. Because it's going to be a ton of work to bring the red and gold colors out again.

*It's hard to get flashy big spangles and spots. When you breed a spotted (Mottled) chicken to solid color chicken without spots, all the babies will lose their spots. If you breed those babies back to each other, or to another Mottled something, the spots will come back - but you don't see more spots than what the grandparents had. So if you take a barely-spotted Sussex and cross to a not-spotted red hen, and breed those babies together, the next generation will have spotting, but probably just a few small spots here and there. Again - the more spots you can find in the first generation of Speckled Sussex (or whatever you use) the more spots you'll get down the road.

I didn't see enough white in Java or Sussex to get what I wanted, so I looked to Exchequer Leghorns (those have a LOT more white than most Sussex.) Here is a photo of Exchequers on Feathersite so you can see what I mean:

http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/CGK/Leghorns/ExcheqLegHens2.JPEG

I also three really cool "Mystery Hens" locally that had TONS of white. I suspect they were from "Spangled Butcher" Game lines. Here is a Spangled Butcher Game hen:

http://s450.photobucket.com/user/fo...bertSpanglebutcherhen-2.jpg.html?t=1245164540

She looks VERY much like the color on the early Aloha hens of mine. And it explains why the hens I found didn't look like "Bantam" hens. They didn't get their color from Mille D'Uccles, they got it from Game chickens!

Anyway, Exchequers and Games are really small chickens. Not really Bantam size, but pretty darn close!

I've spent the years since trying to lock in these cool color patterns, while bringing up size. It's super hard to do BTW.

*Try New Hampshire Red, Buff Sussex, or Black Tailed Buff Turkens for improving size. All three of these worked great for me.

What did not work great: Buff Orpington and Buff Rock. Both are HUGE buff chickens with buff colored tails. Yet for some reason, they seemed to resist all efforts to add spots. Don't ask me why, after beating my head against a wall trying for three years, I tried the black-tailed Buffs (Buff Coloumbian) and POOF - spots galore! So anyway, run like hell from buff with buff tails. It's really weird and I can't explain it!

If anyone wants to piggyback of my many years of battling this project, I will be selling Spotty Naked Neck eggs on Ebay later this winter and into Spring. Probably starting in December. The Calico Aloha NN's are just a random offshoot of Alohas, and I doubt I will be breeding them long-term since the majority of my customers are not into the NN thing. So start planning now! If this interests you, due to space I may have to cut down on the NN's next year. Until I get my NN pen together (limited on space and the breeder pens are holding Alohas right now) you can start looking for black tailed buff NN's and good quality spotty Speckled Sussex. Crossing those two will work great but keep in mind your first generation will be neither spotted nor buff. They would look like boring brown chickens, some with NN's. The magic wouldn't happen until the next generation! LOL.

Money from the sale of the NN eggs would go to help pay for feed on the Alohas. Will put them on Ebay later, don't worry, I'll announce it here on BYC whenever it happens.

My friend Deb in Tucson might be able to set up a pen before then. She currently has "Robin" a really spectacular Mille NN rooster, and she also has a bunch of Aloha hens. I can ask her if there are enough people are interested. Tucson post office is extra lousy, though - FYI. If anyone is passing through Tucson and could pick up eggs, that would work even better, so if you have a trucker friend that would be awesome, ha ha ha!

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

Id= Inhibitor of Dermal melanin.

Green is yellow skin plus melanin in the dermal layer. just to be repetitive as sometimes it helps to click it in more- blue is white skin plus melanin in the dermal layer.

You got it- get green by crossing the blue leg boy with yellow legged girls- if he;s het Id, you will get half green legged girls(with the other girls being blue legged)

you could think of no Id that way... I think of it as being the ancestral trait- the default, with Id being a dominant and sex linked mutation that showed up sometime during domestication.

Oh, yes, this helps. I teach human skin pathology in January.

Sooooo, how does sex-linking work with chickens that's different than humans? (Or is this not sex-linked?)

Wait - never mind. I just looked it up - chickens have a ZW sex-linking system whereby the males have two sex chromosomes and the females have one (just like giant river prawn! Whatever...)

To make it more complicated, it appears that dosage compensation is gene specific. OK, so now I don't feel so bad about having a hard time understanding chicken genetics. Geez.....

When in doubt, just listen to Kev...

- Ant Farm

 

[Kev]

His great gma was Thing One or Two, both had mottled houdan for one parent (not sure if it was father or mother) anyway, they did not show anything, they were solid black, so I know there is mottling POSSIBILITY in his ancestry. I know he descends from one of the Things b/c of his split comb. There is also lots of barring in my current flock b/c of a bottle necking of genetics a couple of years ago due to catastrophic loss of most of my flock. Either way something genetically is "screwing" w/ his barred patterning, which in my opinion can only be good, lol. Mottling would be a cool and welcome patterning that I would encourage genetically, I know for sure one hen is definitely mottled and am sure I have other "carriers" in the flock. But my main goal is size and good dark fm skin color. Kev pointed out that bichen enhances my ability to get good fm skin color. And Draye mentioned (or maybe Kev) birchen and mottling don't play well together so I may be tilting at the wind.

I think he is mottled from his his "pied" look as a juvenile.. however now he is mostly typical for a mottle+ barred(single barred it looks like?). Mottle is known to 'mess with' barring and make them much lighter than regular barred. It actually can be used to create autosexing by making the roosters pure for mottle and barring- they will be nearly white with black speckles. Hens having more black but still very 'mottly'... an autosexing line called Fiftyfive Flowery was created using this combination.

 

[Phill98]

Part of me really wants to get some of these eggs - but I've never hatched before, and I worry that I'll mess it up (natural reaction when you've never done something before, I suppose). I will be getting an incubator for my own eggs, though. Maybe I'll wait and try to get some eggs from you later on, can't decide... I'm also torn between aloha and Fm project ideas. Apparently I can never keep things simple...

(I already have Speckled Sussex girls to put with my big black-tailed red NN boy Tank. But they're pretty small so far - about 2-2.25 lbs at 12 weeks, so your sizes are tempting.)

- Ant Farm

I think that you shouldn't be afraid of hatching because I remember you keeping track on your naked necks this past year. You did an awsome job and I just think you would do it again.

And I am here in the same situation about hatching, I have never hatched anything, but will be trying this spring with broodies

 

[alohachickens]

@alohachickens

Are these the ones?
http://m.ebay.com/itm/7-Turken-Naked-Neck-Project-Hatching-Eggs-For-Incubation-/161957952050?nav=SE

No, not mine. Huh, weird, when I search "Turken" it doesn't show up, but I put in "Turkens" (with an "s" at the end) and it does.

Geez, Ebay, do I have to be THAT careful with how I word things? Eeek. Wondering if people will find them?!??!

Below is the photo that is the "main photo" on my auction:

 

[draye]

No, not mine. Huh, weird, when I search "Turken" it doesn't show up, but I put in "Turkens" (with an "s" at the end) and it does. Geez, Ebay, do I have to be THAT careful with how I word things? Eeek. Wondering if people will find them?!??! Below is the photo that is the "main photo" on my auction:

Beautiful!