What color is this?

[MaeIstrom]

I have a line of mostly Araucana with layers of leghorn & cream legbar infused in. The cream legbar heritage has produced some novel patterns and colors over the years and whenever I see red patterning I try to bring it out but historically they were always male, I finally got a hen last year purely red/gold and this year I have a rooster with red on the back and a blue undercarriage and 2 pullets with similar coloring. I suppose brown leghorn crossed with blue would be the best way to describe it. I'm thinking of turning this into a breeding group and wondering how best to describe them. I've included some pictures so curious if anyone has seen a pre-existing colour/pattern that resembles this or if not what it should be called. The hen from last year has no blue at all in her and my camera seems to have a bit of a red shift that turns blue eggs white when photographing but you should get a rough idea from these pics.

 

[Rose the Legbar]

@NatJ is really good with genetics and can help you out!

 

[NatJ]

@NatJ is really good with genetics and can help you out!

Unfortunately, I'm not so good at finding the right name for unusual colors.

curious if anyone has seen a pre-existing colour/pattern that resembles this or if not what it should be called.

I think the hen looks a bit like Wheaten color. Not right for show-quality Wheaten, just more like that than like any other color.

Adding blue to Wheaten would make it Blue Wheaten. (If you breed that hen to that rooster, about half the chicks should show blue instead of black in their coloring.)

Wheaten males can look about the same as males with several other combinations of genes, so I can't tell if your male is Wheaten (genetically speaking) or something else.

 

[MaeIstrom]

Unfortunately, I'm not so good at finding the right name for unusual colors.


I think the hen looks a bit like Wheaten color. Not right for show-quality Wheaten, just more like that than like any other color.

Adding blue to Wheaten would make it Blue Wheaten. (If you breed that hen to that rooster, about half the chicks should show blue instead of black in their coloring.)

Wheaten males can look about the same as males with several other combinations of genes, so I can't tell if your male is Wheaten (genetically speaking) or something else.

Googled wheaten and blue wheaten and they definitely seem the closest match. Oddly I don't think there's any actual wheaten in their ancestry. I had some duckwing "ameracaunas" that a local breeder had re-created by crossing araucana to OEG in the first generation that disappeared completely in their offspring and she didn't have any wheaten birds. Outside of that I always assumed the patterns and red splashes came from a cream legbar rooster several generations back. There's been some isa brown and new hampshire blood thrown in by adding the occasional easter-egger to the flock but no patterned birds. Up till now it's been just the occasional chick that hatches looking like a brown leghorn but feathers into a mostly black bird with random splashes of red.

 

[NatJ]

Oddly I don't think there's any actual wheaten in their ancestry.

There's been some isa brown and new hampshire blood thrown in

ISA Browns and New Hampshires have some of the genes you need to get the Wheaten color. They also have the Columbian gene (removes the black breast in the males).

To get the rooster with a blue breast, he might just be Duckwing pattern, or he might be Wheaten (with the not-Columbian gene coming from the Cream Legbars or the Duckwing Ameraucanas.)

Have you played with the chicken calculator?
http://kippenjungle.nl/chickencalculator.html

The default settings give you a duckwing chicken. You can get Wheaten by changing the first gene in the first dropdown box: Duckwing has e+/e+, Wheaten has E^Wh/E^WH
You will see that the hens are quite different, but the roosters look the same (in real life, I think the roosters have small differences, but the calculator images don't have that much detail).

To change a wheaten chicken into almost a New Hampshire colored chicken, change co+/co+ to Co/Co (adds the Columbian gene, which moves the colors around, mostly shoving black to the tail and hackles.) Actual New Hampshire color also needs Mahogany (Mh, turns gold into red.)

Further down the list of genes, "Bl" is the blue gene. bl+/bl+ is the wild-type form that allows black to show normally. Bl/bl+ is one blue gene and one not-blue, and turns all black on the chicken into blue. Bl/Bl is two blue genes, and turns all the black into splash.

The ISA Browns would have had Dominant White (abbreviation I) that turns black into white. That's just above blue on the list of genes in the calculator.

Some people use the chicken calculator to predict what chicks can come from what cross. Personally, I tend to just change genes and watch the pictures change, to get an idea of what genes do what

 

[MaeIstrom]

ISA Browns and New Hampshires have some of the genes you need to get the Wheaten color. They also have the Columbian gene (removes the black breast in the males).

To get the rooster with a blue breast, he might just be Duckwing pattern, or he might be Wheaten (with the not-Columbian gene coming from the Cream Legbars or the Duckwing Ameraucanas.)

Have you played with the chicken calculator?
http://kippenjungle.nl/chickencalculator.html

The default settings give you a duckwing chicken. You can get Wheaten by changing the first gene in the first dropdown box: Duckwing has e+/e+, Wheaten has E^Wh/E^WH
You will see that the hens are quite different, but the roosters look the same (in real life, I think the roosters have small differences, but the calculator images don't have that much detail).

To change a wheaten chicken into almost a New Hampshire colored chicken, change co+/co+ to Co/Co (adds the Columbian gene, which moves the colors around, mostly shoving black to the tail and hackles.) Actual New Hampshire color also needs Mahogany (Mh, turns gold into red.)

Further down the list of genes, "Bl" is the blue gene. bl+/bl+ is the wild-type form that allows black to show normally. Bl/bl+ is one blue gene and one not-blue, and turns all black on the chicken into blue. Bl/Bl is two blue genes, and turns all the black into splash.

The ISA Browns would have had Dominant White (abbreviation I) that turns black into white. That's just above blue on the list of genes in the calculator.

Some people use the chicken calculator to predict what chicks can come from what cross. Personally, I tend to just change genes and watch the pictures change, to get an idea of what genes do what

Thanks for that run down. TBH I have "played" with the chicken calculator but I find its usefulness very limited by the fact I don't know which genes are present in a given breed to start with and I can't seem to find a reliable source for that. For example I knew Isa Browns had dominant white but had no idea they had wheaten. I find it baffling this information isn't included with the calculator in the form of a drop down list of breeds that presets all the genes to what the default is for the breed/color variant. In the spirit of teaching a man how to fish do you know of a source of finding that type of information? Last time I was on this forum it was claimed the cream crested legbar had gold, had silver or had a gene that diluted gold depending on who you asked.

 

[GirlsHuntToo]

Maybe Partidge crossed with blue

 

[NatJ]

Thanks for that run down. TBH I have "played" with the chicken calculator but I find its usefulness very limited by the fact I don't know which genes are present in a given breed to start with and I can't seem to find a reliable source for that.

Yes, that is hard.

For example I knew Isa Browns had dominant white but had no idea they had wheaten.

Yes, they would be Wheaten, Columbian, Mahogany, Dominant White. I think everything else stays at the default settings. They typically have one copy of the Dominant White gene, and one copy of i+ the wild-type that allows black. So they can produce chicks with white or black.

I find it baffling this information isn't included with the calculator in the form of a drop down list of breeds that presets all the genes to what the default is for the breed/color variant.

There are several versions of the calculator.
This one has a dropdown list with some breeds and varieties:
http://kippenjungle.nl/breeds/crossbreeds.html

But there are many different breeds of chickens, and even more varieties of breeds. Also, most breeds are based on how they look, not the genes that make those colors. So for example, Dark Cornish in the USA often have e+/e+ (the wildtype/duckwing form of the gene.) Dark Cornish in Australian often have E^Wh/E^Wh (Wheaten). The newly-hatched chicks look very different (chipmunk stripes in the USA, plain yellow in Australia), but the adult birds look almost identical because of the other genes involved in their color pattern.

White chickens are especially hard, because there are at least three ways to create a white chicken: recessive white (c/c) will do it. But so will E+/E+ (Extended Black, turns the whole chicken black) with I/I (Dominant White, turns that black chicken white.) And a combination of genes to turn the whole chicken gold, plus the silver gene to turn the gold into white, will also produce a white chicken. Or take a gold-and-black chicken and have Dominant White turn the black to white, and silver turn the gold to white (this happens when someone crosses a White Laced Red chicken to a Silver Laced chicken: they get white laced silver, which basically means a white chicken.)

In the spirit of teaching a man how to fish do you know of a source of finding that type of information?

For specific breeds, I can't think of any place that has very many of them. I think someone did try to start a thread on this forum at one point, to collect as many as they could, but I don't know if I can find it again.

For understanding the genes, and some examples of which chicken has what, you could try this:
http://www.sellers.kippenjungle.nl/page3.html
(That one's got a table of genes)
http://www.sellers.kippenjungle.nl/page2.html
(That one's got a longer description of what some of them do, and examples of some specific breeds.)
http://www.sellers.kippenjungle.nl/page0.html
(That one's got links to the other two, plus some other stuff.)

Last time I was on this forum it was claimed the cream crested legbar had gold, had silver or had a gene that diluted gold depending on who you asked.

For that exact question: Cream Legbars would have diluted gold (gold gene not silver, plus a different gene to dilute the gold.)

 

[JedJackson]

I would call these blue breasted red with the silver gene in play as well. The hens don't look wheaten to me but more like the cinnamon variation in black breasted red that Cubalaya and some other breeds have in the hens. Just guess work, but that's what I am seeing.