A Silkie Pen - what sort of colors might I get?

[paceysgl5]

We have 6 straight-run silkie chicks currently. Assuming a nice 50/50 split, we'll just say that I will have 1 Grey Roo, 1 Grey Pullet, 1 White Roo, 1 White Pullet, 1 Black Roo, 1 Splash Pullet.

If we make a dedicated silkie pen for these chickens, what sort of color combinations would we be looking at? Would you get rid of a particular roo or pullet?

Or are we just going to end up with mutt silkies besides the possibly grey or white silkie baby?

What would you do? I'm thinking it'd be fun to start breeding silkies (4 of these are from a local breeder, the 2 grey's are from ideal hatchery).

Thanks.

 

[RAREROO]

Assuming that you do get the sexes you listed, I would say not to breed the greys into the other colors becuase then you will be dealing with silver leakage that would be harder to breed out and they would look mutty. With the Whites, they are recessive White so you dont have any way of knowing what color is under the white and you may end up with the same leakage problem there as well but ideally they would be masking black so that way they would be fine to breed to the black or splash if they were masking black then they would work just like black in the first cross with a BBorS bird and in later generations if they were bred together or back to the whites, more whites would show up then.

 

[Sonoran Silkies]

Set up three breeding pens: grey X grey, white X white and black X splash. This, of course is assuming that you do have the gender mix of each variety as you assume.

 

[paceysgl5]

Thanks for the replies. By breeding pens - is that just separating the chickens during the day and allowing them to roost together at night or how does that work?

 

[Doug the Chicken Man]

It is a seperate area for each color with now intermixing.
for example a different coop and run for each color

 

[Sonoran Silkies]

Or you can subdivide their area if that works better for you, but you do not want the roosters in with hens that they shouldn't breed with.

 

[hoppy]

Quote:
you said gray, but that might be blue in which case you have blue/ black/ splash as well as whites.
I'd make 2 pens one being all whites and the other being blue/black/splash. of that pen, I'd keep the best roo and get rid of the extra one.

 

[RAREROO]

Quote:
No Separate all the time. 4x4 pens would work fine for each pair of Silkies.