Amberlink over BR sexlink?

[TyRi]

I have an Amberlink roo in with barred rock, blue rock, Silver Laced Wyandotte, Amberlink, and olive egger hens at almost point of lay. And a shipment on the way of Cream Legbar hens plus a Cream Legbar roo. What combos would produce 1. sexlink chicks and 2 blue eggs or green/olive eggs? Love to learn about genetics so any and all information and possibilities are welcome and appreciated!!

 

[Rose the Legbar]

@NatJ

 

[NatJ]

I have an Amberlink roo in with barred rock, blue rock, Silver Laced Wyandotte, Amberlink, and olive egger hens at almost point of lay. And a shipment on the way of Cream Legbar hens plus a Cream Legbar roo. What combos would produce... blue eggs or green/olive eggs?

You should get green or olive eggs from daughters of the Cream Legbar rooster with any of the hens. The darker brown or green eggs the hen lays, the more likely that her daughters will lay dark eggs as well.

The Amberlink rooster should produce daughters that lay brown eggs from any hen that lays brown eggs. With Olive Egger hens, his daughters might lay green eggs or might lay brown eggs (50/50 mix is likely but not certain.) With Cream Legbar hens, the Amberlink rooster should produce daughters that lay green eggs (probably NOT dark enough to be called "olive," but not light enough to be called blue.)

For the Cream Legbars, those predictions are assuming they each have two blue egg genes. That is not always the case. If a Cream Legbar hen has just one blue egg gene, she can still lay blue eggs, but half of her chicks will inherit the not-blue gene. Because a rooster does not lay eggs, you don't know what egg color genes he is carrying until you see what his daughters lay and consider what they could have inherited from their mothers. Or until you do a test.

https://iqbirdtesting.com/blueegg
This place has a test for the blue egg gene. If you care strongly about egg colors, it might be worth testing that Cream Legbar rooster before you make breeding plans. It may not be worth testing hens, because their own eggs tell you at least half the answer (whether they have any blue egg genes), even though the egg color does not tell whether they have 1 vs. 2 blue egg genes.

I have an Amberlink roo in with barred rock, blue rock, Silver Laced Wyandotte, Amberlink, and olive egger hens at almost point of lay. And a shipment on the way of Cream Legbar hens plus a Cream Legbar roo. What combos would produce 1. sexlink chicks

Your Amberlink rooster is not going to be a very good choice for breeding any kind of sexlinks. He has both the gold and silver genes (you want pure gold for one kind of sexlink), and he has Dominant White that turns black into white (which makes it hard to spot the white barring you want for another kind of sexlink.) Because of what mix he is, he probably has just one Dominant White gene, so some of his chicks may be sexable by whether they have barring or not.

Using the Amberlink rooster, you will be able to sex SOME chicks from certain hens:

Barred Rock hen will produce black daughters with no barring, black sons with white barring (both of those are color-sexable), white daughters with no barring, white sons with white barring (those probably look alike, so not color-sexable.) For the black ones, look for a light dot on the head of male chicks, and no dot on the female chicks.

Silver Laced Wyandotte hen will produce some gold daughters (color-sexable) and some silver daughters. She will also produce silver sons, of which some carry gold and some do not. You will not be able to color-sex the silver chicks, because some are males and some are females. Gold vs. silver is often visible in the chick down, but sometimes it is hard to tell silver chicks (may look yellow) from the lightest of gold chicks (look red/brown/gold/yellow.) For all of them, half will show some amount of black patterning and half will have that patterning in white. The tails and the big flight feathers of the wings will be the most obvious places to see the black vs. white difference.

Amberlink hens will produce silver sons, with or without yellow/red leakage. Daughters may be gold (color-sexable) or silver (not color-sexable because they look like their silver brothers.) The silver sons and daughters are not color-sexable because they look like each other. Both sexes can have black or white in their tail feathers and other places, probably about 3/4 with white and 1/4 with black.

Amberlink rooster with Blue Rock hens will not produce any color-sexable chicks. With Blue Rock hens, you'll get black chicks, blue chicks, and white chicks that may have black or blue leakage. Each color can happen in each sex.

Amberlink rooster with Cream Legbar hens will produce sons with white barring and daughters with no white barring. But some of the chicks will have Silver and some will have Dominant White and some will have both, so that will make it much harder to see white barring. Also, chicks with a stripe on their head (like what Cream Legbars have) are much less likely to show a light dot from barring when you make this cross (like how female Cream Legbars have barring but do not usually show a light dot on their head.)

For colors when they grow their feathers, from Amberlink rooster and Cream Legbar hens:
--About 1/4 of chicks should have both gold and black in their coloring, so you can probably tell if they have white barring.
--About 1/4 of chicks will have silver and black, so you can probably see the white barring on the black parts (like on a Delaware Hen, where the black around her neck and tail is broken into speckles by the white barring.)
--About 1/4 of chicks will have gold and dominant white. Barring is harder to see on gold than on black, but you might be able to pick them out. I don't think you are going to see the white barring on the white parts.
--About 1/4 of chicks will have both Silver and Dominant White, so they will just look white. There is a chance of those males having ghost barring (shades of white), but I wouldn't count on it for reliable sexing.

For the Olive Eggers, I would need to know their colors before I could even make a guess about their chicks with either rooster (photos are helpful.)

With the Cream Legbar rooster, all chicks will have white barring, no matter what mother they have.

Cream Legbar rooster x Silver Laced Wyandotte hens will give gold/silver sexlinks (silver sons and gold daughters.) This will probably be visible in their down when they are chicks, but there may be some that are not obvious. If you look at hatchery photos of chicks, you can see how obvious it is in laced chicks (Gold Laced Wyandottes vs. Silver Laced Wyandottes) and in some others (Black Breasted Red Old English Game Bantams are gold, Silver Duckwing Old English Game Bantams are silver.)
Hatchery examples, that may help when sexing your chicks:
https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/golden_laced_wyandottes.html
https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/silver_laced_wyandottes.html
https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/bantam_b_b_red_old_english_game.html
https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/bantam_silver_duckwing_old_english_game.html
The gold vs. silver should become more obvious as they grow.
All of these chicks, both males and females, will have white barring over top of whatever other colors they have.

Cream Legbar rooster with Amberlink hens should make gold/silver sexlinks (gold daughters, silver sons). Half of each sex will show some black in their coloring, the other half will have white instead. That means females will grow up to be gold with black tails, or else gold with white tails. Males will grow up to be silver with black tails or else silver with white tails (=white.) The "silver" males will probably have a yellowish tint in their feathers and may have blotches of red (pretty much the same as Amberlinks, but with half of them having black in their tails instead of white.) The "tail" color may also show up in the primary feathers of the wings and in the feathers at the base of the neck, and possibly sprinkled elsewhere in the feathers as well. All chicks will have white barring across their other colors.

With the Cream Legbar rooster and the Barred Rock hens, all chicks should be black with white barring. You will probably be able to sex them the same way as pure Barred Rocks: males usually have a larger spot of light down on top of their head, and lighter colored feet. Females usually have a smaller headspot and black shading on their lower legs and feet. As they grow feathers, males have an overall lighter color because they have either more white bars or wider white bars.

Cream Legbar rooster with Cream Legbar hens will of course make autosexing purebred Cream Legbar chicks. I assume you already know about this.

Cream Legbar rooster with Blue Rock hens will probably not make any color-sexable chicks. All chicks will have white barring. They may have a base color of black or blue, but they may also have a base color of gold or silver with darker tails and some other dark patterning. The "dark" may be black or blue. If you get some chicks that are silver with black or blue, those are males. If you get males like that, then any chicks that are gold with black or blue will have to be females. But if you get just gold chicks and no silver ones, then you cannot use that to tell male from female. I think you are most likely to get just black and blue chicks, with none that show gold or silver, but it depends on the exact mix of breeds used to create the Blue Rocks (which are a hybrid, not pure Plymouth Rocks in the color Blue.)

Love to learn about genetics so any and all information and possibilities are welcome and appreciated!!

Egg color genetics:
Roosters do not lay eggs, but they do carry egg color genes from their mothers and fathers, and give them to both their sons and their daughters.

There is a dominant gene that causes blue color in the eggshell. A hen can inherit it from her father or her mother or both. She can give it to both her sons and her daughters. If she has one blue egg gene and one not-blue egg gene, she lays blue eggs. If she has two blue egg genes, she still lays blue eggs. If she has no blue egg genes, she does not lay blue eggs.

There are a number of genes that make eggs brown vs. white. For rough predictions, you can figure that a hen will lay eggs of a shade in between what her father and mother have (so dark brown x light brown usually makes medium brown.)

A genetically "white" egg will be blue if the hen has the blue egg gene.
A genetically "brown" egg will be green if the hen has the blue egg gene.
A genetically "dark brown" egg will be dark green (olive) if the hen has the blue egg gene.

Or to put that another way, a genetically "blue" egg can actually be blue or green or dark green (olive), depending on what brown eggshell genes are present.

The blue color goes all the way through the eggshell. The brown is on the outside, one of the last things added before the egg is laid. (The bloom is added after that: a wet slippery coating that dries after the egg is laid, and can make eggs look gray or pink or have white dots.)

Sexlink color genetics:

For Cream Legbar/Barred Rock mixes or pure Barred Rocks, the sexing works because the barring gene is on the Z sex chromosome, and is incompletely dominant. A hen has sex chromosomes ZW, so she only has one barring gene. That gives a certain amount of effect (white barring on feathers, headspot at hatch, feet lighter than a solid black chicken would have.) A rooster has sex chromosomes ZZ, so he can have two barring genes. Two barring genes makes a bigger headspot, lighter feet, and more white in the barring of the feathers (I'm not sure if that is more white bars, or wider white bars, but the difference is usually pretty obvious when you have both males and females in the same pen.)

For pure Cream Legbars, the sexing also works because of the barring gene, but the base color is not black. The chipmunk-striped coloring of female Cream Legbar chicks does not get affected very much by one barring gene. But two barring genes makes the overall color lighter, and makes a light dot on the head (male Cream Legbar chicks.)

Those cases, where females have one barring gene and males have two, are the basis of all the "autosexing" chicken breeds. You can breed them to each other and get color-sexable chicks in every generation.

When you breed a Cream Legbar rooster to non-barred hens, he gives one barring gene to every chick (male and female), so you can't sex them by looking for the barring.

When you breed a hen with barring (Barred Rock, Cream Legbar, etc) to a male with no barring, you get sexlink chicks. The unbarred rooster with his ZZ chromosomes gives a Z with no barring to every chick. The barred hen gives a Z chromosome (with barring) to her sons, and a W chromosome to her daughters (makes them female, but has no barring.) So the sons have barring and the daughters do not.

For gold/silver sexlinks, you are dealing with a different sexlinked gene. It is still on the Z sex chromosome, but Silver is dominant over gold. So a rooster with two gold genes will show gold (like the Cream Legbar), while a rooster with one gold and one Silver gene will show Silver (like the Amberlink rooster.) A rooster with two Silver genes will also show Silver, and will often have a cleaner/whiter appearance than the one carrying gold.

Because a hen has only one Z chromsome, she is either gold or silver but never both.

If both parents are gold, all chicks will be gold (pure Cream Legbars.)

If the father is gold and the mother is Silver, the father gives a gold gene to each chick. The mother gives a silver gene to each son (it's on the Z chromosome), but she gives a W chromosome to each daughter (so they are female, but they do not get their mother's Silver gene.) This makes sons Silver and daughters gold. Example: Cream Legbar rooster with Silver Laced Wyandotte hens or Amberlink hens.

If the father has both a gold and a silver gene (Amberlink rooster), he gives gold to some chicks and silver to other chicks. For his daughters, that is the only Z chromosome they have, so some are gold and some are silver. For the sons, they also inherit a Z chromosome from their mother. A male with two gold genes (one from each parent) will be gold, but a male who inherits silver from either parent will show silver. He may be a gold/silver split if he inherits one gene from each parent, or may be pure for silver if he inherits that from both parents.

So an Amberlink rooster with a Silver Laced Wyandotte hen will produce sons that are pure for silver and sons that are gold/silver splits. An Amberlink rooster with a Cream Legbar hen (gold) will produce sons that are gold/silver splits and sons that are pure for gold. In either case, the daughters will be about 50/50 each of silver and gold, because they inherit that only from their father.

Chickens that are black or blue will also have the genes for gold or silver, but you just can't see it when they are a different solid color.

Other color genes in your flock:

The blue gene (feathers, not eggs) turns all the black on a chicken into a gray shade ("blue"). A chicken with two copies of the blue gene will have a lighter color called "splash," which usually looks like a dirty white with splashes of black or blue. Your Blue Rocks will have one blue gene and one not-blue gene. Half of their chicks should inherit the blue gene and half will inherit the not-blue gene. The blue gene has little or no effect on gold/silver parts of the chicken. That is how people get colors like Blue Laced Red (black lacing turns blue, red is unaffected) and Blue Wheaten (black areas turn blue, other areas are unaffected.)

Dominant White turns black into white, wherever it is on the chicken, but gold/silver is pretty much unaffected. That is why a Rhode Island Red is red with a black tail, but many Red Sexlinks are red with a white tail: Dominant White changes the tail color. One Dominant White gene can be a little leaky, so chickens may have spots of black in the white areas (Paint chickens are an example of this.) Two Dominant White genes are more effective, so you don't usually get obvious black leakage if the bird has two Dominant White genes.

Chickens that are black all over usually have a gene called Extended Black (sometimes just abbreviated E) That gene is dominant over the genes that allow other colors and/or patterns. Barred Rock and Blue Rock have Extended Black (with barring or blue affecting what you actually see). Legbars, Laced Wyandottes, and Amberlinks do not. Some Olive Eggers do and some do not, so I can't say about yours.

 

[TyRi]

You should get green or olive eggs from daughters of the Cream Legbar rooster with any of the hens. The darker brown or green eggs the hen lays, the more likely that her daughters will lay dark eggs as well.

The Amberlink rooster should produce daughters that lay brown eggs from any hen that lays brown eggs. With Olive Egger hens, his daughters might lay green eggs or might lay brown eggs (50/50 mix is likely but not certain.) With Cream Legbar hens, the Amberlink rooster should produce daughters that lay green eggs (probably NOT dark enough to be called "olive," but not light enough to be called blue.)

For the Cream Legbars, those predictions are assuming they each have two blue egg genes. That is not always the case. If a Cream Legbar hen has just one blue egg gene, she can still lay blue eggs, but half of her chicks will inherit the not-blue gene. Because a rooster does not lay eggs, you don't know what egg color genes he is carrying until you see what his daughters lay and consider what they could have inherited from their mothers. Or until you do a test.

https://iqbirdtesting.com/blueegg
This place has a test for the blue egg gene. If you care strongly about egg colors, it might be worth testing that Cream Legbar rooster before you make breeding plans. It may not be worth testing hens, because their own eggs tell you at least half the answer (whether they have any blue egg genes), even though the egg color does not tell whether they have 1 vs. 2 blue egg genes.


Your Amberlink rooster is not going to be a very good choice for breeding any kind of sexlinks. He has both the gold and silver genes (you want pure gold for one kind of sexlink), and he has Dominant White that turns black into white (which makes it hard to spot the white barring you want for another kind of sexlink.) Because of what mix he is, he probably has just one Dominant White gene, so some of his chicks may be sexable by whether they have barring or not.

Using the Amberlink rooster, you will be able to sex SOME chicks from certain hens:

Barred Rock hen will produce black daughters with no barring, black sons with white barring (both of those are color-sexable), white daughters with no barring, white sons with white barring (those probably look alike, so not color-sexable.) For the black ones, look for a light dot on the head of male chicks, and no dot on the female chicks.

Silver Laced Wyandotte hen will produce some gold daughters (color-sexable) and some silver daughters. She will also produce silver sons, of which some carry gold and some do not. You will not be able to color-sex the silver chicks, because some are males and some are females. Gold vs. silver is often visible in the chick down, but sometimes it is hard to tell silver chicks (may look yellow) from the lightest of gold chicks (look red/brown/gold/yellow.) For all of them, half will show some amount of black patterning and half will have that patterning in white. The tails and the big flight feathers of the wings will be the most obvious places to see the black vs. white difference.

Amberlink hens will produce silver sons, with or without yellow/red leakage. Daughters may be gold (color-sexable) or silver (not color-sexable because they look like their silver brothers.) The silver sons and daughters are not color-sexable because they look like each other. Both sexes can have black or white in their tail feathers and other places, probably about 3/4 with white and 1/4 with black.

Amberlink rooster with Blue Rock hens will not produce any color-sexable chicks. With Blue Rock hens, you'll get black chicks, blue chicks, and white chicks that may have black or blue leakage. Each color can happen in each sex.

Amberlink rooster with Cream Legbar hens will produce sons with white barring and daughters with no white barring. But some of the chicks will have Silver and some will have Dominant White and some will have both, so that will make it much harder to see white barring. Also, chicks with a stripe on their head (like what Cream Legbars have) are much less likely to show a light dot from barring when you make this cross (like how female Cream Legbars have barring but do not usually show a light dot on their head.)

For colors when they grow their feathers, from Amberlink rooster and Cream Legbar hens:
--About 1/4 of chicks should have both gold and black in their coloring, so you can probably tell if they have white barring.
--About 1/4 of chicks will have silver and black, so you can probably see the white barring on the black parts (like on a Delaware Hen, where the black around her neck and tail is broken into speckles by the white barring.)
--About 1/4 of chicks will have gold and dominant white. Barring is harder to see on gold than on black, but you might be able to pick them out. I don't think you are going to see the white barring on the white parts.
--About 1/4 of chicks will have both Silver and Dominant White, so they will just look white. There is a chance of those males having ghost barring (shades of white), but I wouldn't count on it for reliable sexing.

For the Olive Eggers, I would need to know their colors before I could even make a guess about their chicks with either rooster (photos are helpful.)

With the Cream Legbar rooster, all chicks will have white barring, no matter what mother they have.

Cream Legbar rooster x Silver Laced Wyandotte hens will give gold/silver sexlinks (silver sons and gold daughters.) This will probably be visible in their down when they are chicks, but there may be some that are not obvious. If you look at hatchery photos of chicks, you can see how obvious it is in laced chicks (Gold Laced Wyandottes vs. Silver Laced Wyandottes) and in some others (Black Breasted Red Old English Game Bantams are gold, Silver Duckwing Old English Game Bantams are silver.)
Hatchery examples, that may help when sexing your chicks:
https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/golden_laced_wyandottes.html
https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/silver_laced_wyandottes.html
https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/bantam_b_b_red_old_english_game.html
https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/bantam_silver_duckwing_old_english_game.html
The gold vs. silver should become more obvious as they grow.
All of these chicks, both males and females, will have white barring over top of whatever other colors they have.

Cream Legbar rooster with Amberlink hens should make gold/silver sexlinks (gold daughters, silver sons). Half of each sex will show some black in their coloring, the other half will have white instead. That means females will grow up to be gold with black tails, or else gold with white tails. Males will grow up to be silver with black tails or else silver with white tails (=white.) The "silver" males will probably have a yellowish tint in their feathers and may have blotches of red (pretty much the same as Amberlinks, but with half of them having black in their tails instead of white.) The "tail" color may also show up in the primary feathers of the wings and in the feathers at the base of the neck, and possibly sprinkled elsewhere in the feathers as well. All chicks will have white barring across their other colors.

With the Cream Legbar rooster and the Barred Rock hens, all chicks should be black with white barring. You will probably be able to sex them the same way as pure Barred Rocks: males usually have a larger spot of light down on top of their head, and lighter colored feet. Females usually have a smaller headspot and black shading on their lower legs and feet. As they grow feathers, males have an overall lighter color because they have either more white bars or wider white bars.

Cream Legbar rooster with Cream Legbar hens will of course make autosexing purebred Cream Legbar chicks. I assume you already know about this.

Cream Legbar rooster with Blue Rock hens will probably not make any color-sexable chicks. All chicks will have white barring. They may have a base color of black or blue, but they may also have a base color of gold or silver with darker tails and some other dark patterning. The "dark" may be black or blue. If you get some chicks that are silver with black or blue, those are males. If you get males like that, then any chicks that are gold with black or blue will have to be females. But if you get just gold chicks and no silver ones, then you cannot use that to tell male from female. I think you are most likely to get just black and blue chicks, with none that show gold or silver, but it depends on the exact mix of breeds used to create the Blue Rocks (which are a hybrid, not pure Plymouth Rocks in the color Blue.)


Egg color genetics:
Roosters do not lay eggs, but they do carry egg color genes from their mothers and fathers, and give them to both their sons and their daughters.

There is a dominant gene that causes blue color in the eggshell. A hen can inherit it from her father or her mother or both. She can give it to both her sons and her daughters. If she has one blue egg gene and one not-blue egg gene, she lays blue eggs. If she has two blue egg genes, she still lays blue eggs. If she has no blue egg genes, she does not lay blue eggs.

There are a number of genes that make eggs brown vs. white. For rough predictions, you can figure that a hen will lay eggs of a shade in between what her father and mother have (so dark brown x light brown usually makes medium brown.)

A genetically "white" egg will be blue if the hen has the blue egg gene.
A genetically "brown" egg will be green if the hen has the blue egg gene.
A genetically "dark brown" egg will be dark green (olive) if the hen has the blue egg gene.

Or to put that another way, a genetically "blue" egg can actually be blue or green or dark green (olive), depending on what brown eggshell genes are present.

The blue color goes all the way through the eggshell. The brown is on the outside, one of the last things added before the egg is laid. (The bloom is added after that: a wet slippery coating that dries after the egg is laid, and can make eggs look gray or pink or have white dots.)

Sexlink color genetics:

For Cream Legbar/Barred Rock mixes or pure Barred Rocks, the sexing works because the barring gene is on the Z sex chromosome, and is incompletely dominant. A hen has sex chromosomes ZW, so she only has one barring gene. That gives a certain amount of effect (white barring on feathers, headspot at hatch, feet lighter than a solid black chicken would have.) A rooster has sex chromosomes ZZ, so he can have two barring genes. Two barring genes makes a bigger headspot, lighter feet, and more white in the barring of the feathers (I'm not sure if that is more white bars, or wider white bars, but the difference is usually pretty obvious when you have both males and females in the same pen.)

For pure Cream Legbars, the sexing also works because of the barring gene, but the base color is not black. The chipmunk-striped coloring of female Cream Legbar chicks does not get affected very much by one barring gene. But two barring genes makes the overall color lighter, and makes a light dot on the head (male Cream Legbar chicks.)

Those cases, where females have one barring gene and males have two, are the basis of all the "autosexing" chicken breeds. You can breed them to each other and get color-sexable chicks in every generation.

When you breed a Cream Legbar rooster to non-barred hens, he gives one barring gene to every chick (male and female), so you can't sex them by looking for the barring.

When you breed a hen with barring (Barred Rock, Cream Legbar, etc) to a male with no barring, you get sexlink chicks. The unbarred rooster with his ZZ chromosomes gives a Z with no barring to every chick. The barred hen gives a Z chromosome (with barring) to her sons, and a W chromosome to her daughters (makes them female, but has no barring.) So the sons have barring and the daughters do not.

For gold/silver sexlinks, you are dealing with a different sexlinked gene. It is still on the Z sex chromosome, but Silver is dominant over gold. So a rooster with two gold genes will show gold (like the Cream Legbar), while a rooster with one gold and one Silver gene will show Silver (like the Amberlink rooster.) A rooster with two Silver genes will also show Silver, and will often have a cleaner/whiter appearance than the one carrying gold.

Because a hen has only one Z chromsome, she is either gold or silver but never both.

If both parents are gold, all chicks will be gold (pure Cream Legbars.)

If the father is gold and the mother is Silver, the father gives a gold gene to each chick. The mother gives a silver gene to each son (it's on the Z chromosome), but she gives a W chromosome to each daughter (so they are female, but they do not get their mother's Silver gene.) This makes sons Silver and daughters gold. Example: Cream Legbar rooster with Silver Laced Wyandotte hens or Amberlink hens.

If the father has both a gold and a silver gene (Amberlink rooster), he gives gold to some chicks and silver to other chicks. For his daughters, that is the only Z chromosome they have, so some are gold and some are silver. For the sons, they also inherit a Z chromosome from their mother. A male with two gold genes (one from each parent) will be gold, but a male who inherits silver from either parent will show silver. He may be a gold/silver split if he inherits one gene from each parent, or may be pure for silver if he inherits that from both parents.

So an Amberlink rooster with a Silver Laced Wyandotte hen will produce sons that are pure for silver and sons that are gold/silver splits. An Amberlink rooster with a Cream Legbar hen (gold) will produce sons that are gold/silver splits and sons that are pure for gold. In either case, the daughters will be about 50/50 each of silver and gold, because they inherit that only from their father.

Chickens that are black or blue will also have the genes for gold or silver, but you just can't see it when they are a different solid color.

Other color genes in your flock:

The blue gene (feathers, not eggs) turns all the black on a chicken into a gray shade ("blue"). A chicken with two copies of the blue gene will have a lighter color called "splash," which usually looks like a dirty white with splashes of black or blue. Your Blue Rocks will have one blue gene and one not-blue gene. Half of their chicks should inherit the blue gene and half will inherit the not-blue gene. The blue gene has little or no effect on gold/silver parts of the chicken. That is how people get colors like Blue Laced Red (black lacing turns blue, red is unaffected) and Blue Wheaten (black areas turn blue, other areas are unaffected.)

Dominant White turns black into white, wherever it is on the chicken, but gold/silver is pretty much unaffected. That is why a Rhode Island Red is red with a black tail, but many Red Sexlinks are red with a white tail: Dominant White changes the tail color. One Dominant White gene can be a little leaky, so chickens may have spots of black in the white areas (Paint chickens are an example of this.) Two Dominant White genes are more effective, so you don't usually get obvious black leakage if the bird has two Dominant White genes.

Chickens that are black all over usually have a gene called Extended Black (sometimes just abbreviated E) That gene is dominant over the genes that allow other colors and/or patterns. Barred Rock and Blue Rock have Extended Black (with barring or blue affecting what you actually see). Legbars, Laced Wyandottes, and Amberlinks do not. Some Olive Eggers do and some do not, so I can't say about yours.

This is insanely informative and I thank you more than i possibly can!!
I have a few questions for you that may be redundant or a guess! (And I apologize if you had explained it in your previous post!)
1. Is there a certain group I should keep together to have a better chance of sexlink and or easier to identify?
2. Are there certain breeds I should keep together to get the most interesting colors?
3. Would the Amberlink and Pearl Star offsprings keep up with production or is it more dependent on what genes my chickens got from the original pairing?
4. Is there any chance or a crele pattern to come with any of them? Wasnt sure if it was possible with the SLW mixed with the CL to get a lighter shade with lacing to make it look more crele.
5. This is more of I’m pretty sure I know but I am going to ask anyway, outside of 2 pens is there a way to know who is breeding who? I know roosters like their own group of ladies so I didn’t know if once they are a year or so old, one rooster would stick with their ladies or if its more of a free for all. *I am extremely new so thank you again for your patience*
You are incredibly knowledgeable and make me want to get more birds to hear you explain all the possibilities!!

 

[TyRi]

I will also snap some more pictures of the olive eggers when i get home. They are all black with green sheen and 1 has a more pronounced muff and some copper leakage around her neck!

 

[NatJ]

3. Would the Amberlink and Pearl Star offsprings keep up with production or is it more dependent on what genes my chickens got from the original pairing?

It would be a bit variable, but overall their chicks will probably be quite good layers.

4. Is there any chance or a crele pattern to come with any of them? Wasnt sure if it was possible with the SLW mixed with the CL to get a lighter shade with lacing to make it look more crele.

Cream Legbar is basically crele already. Crele should just be wild-type with barring. Cream Legbars are that plus the cream gene (makes red/gold shades be lighter than they otherwise would be. I would expect the Amberlinks to have at least one not-cream gene, but I don't know about the others. Silver birds are likely to have cream (helps make a nice white "Silver" color, without yellowish or reddish areas), black and blue ones less likely because it just doesn't matter for their coloring.

If you want crele, I would probably breed Cream Legbar to Amberlink, choose the reddest of the offspring, and breed those back to Cream Legbar or to each other.

Oh, I just remembered something: I have considered Cream Legbars to be gentically gold. But I have read that some lines are actually silver (I'm not sure of the logic-- maybe trying to get an even lighter "cream" shade?) If yours end up being silver, that will change how the gold/silver sexlinking works.

5. This is more of I’m pretty sure I know but I am going to ask anyway, outside of 2 pens is there a way to know who is breeding who? I know roosters like their own group of ladies so I didn’t know if once they are a year or so old, one rooster would stick with their ladies or if its more of a free for all. *I am extremely new so thank you again for your patience*

I do not think there is any way to know who is breeding who except:
--separate pens
--recognizing traits in the chicks.

In this case, assuming all the Cream Legbar hens to lay blue eggs, any eggs that are brown or olive will be from other hens. The Cream Legbar rooster will give barring to his chicks, the Amberlink will not. So you can probably sort out some of the chicks by looking for that. But the son of a Barred Rock with the Amberlink rooster might be black with white barring, and the son of a Blue Rock with the Cream Legbar rooster might also be black with white barring, so there will still be some that you can't figure out that way. The Amberlink can give gold or silver to his chicks, a Cream Legbar that is gold can only give gold. So silver pullets must have the Amberlink father. Cockerels can inherit Silver from either their father or their mother or both, so it is harder to figure out which father they have.

The Cream Legbar should give a crest to his chicks, but the Amberlink will not. That can help identify some chicks, but some crests may be small enough that you can't be sure they are there at all, and there is a chance that the Cream Legbar rooster may have no crest, or may have one crest gene and one not, so he might also be able to produce chicks with no crests.

Note, a hen can store sperm from previous matings. So if you have the whole flock running together, then separate them, plan to wait about 3 weeks before you and start collecting eggs for hatching. Hens will reliably store sperm for up to a week (so if something happens to one of your roosters, collect eggs for a week and put them in the incubator, and you will probably get some chicks from the recently-deceased father.) For the second and third weeks, the chance goes down, but there have been a few cases of hens that stored sperm for more than a month. When you can recognize which chicks have which father, you can tell if that happened. So if you change which rooster is in which breeding pen, you can wait 3+ weeks before collecting eggs, or sometimes you can just collect eggs and plan to sort the chicks after they hatch.

2. Are there certain breeds I should keep together to get the most interesting colors?

That partly depends on what colors you consider "interesting," but I don't see a an obvious benefit to any specific pairings. You could split the hens up so some of each breed are with each rooster.

1. Is there a certain group I should keep together to have a better chance of sexlink and or easier to identify?

Hmm.

I would probably start by checking what color eggs each group lays. So you could put all the Cream Legbar hens in a pen together, with no other breeds, and you should get only blue eggs. Then if you add the Olive Eggers to the Legbars, one pen should give just blue & olive eggs and the other pen should give just brown eggs.

When hatching eggs, there are several ways to keep straight which chicks came from which eggs. You can hatch eggs at different times, or in separate incubators, or inside mesh bags in the same incubator, or under separate broody hens. It doesn't matter if they are incubated together, as long as you can sort them into separate groups before the chicks come out. So you could sort eggs by pen (label each egg and you'll know which pen it came from), or by brown vs. blue vs. olive, or any combination of those.

If you put the Cream Legbar rooster with the Cream Legbar hens and the Barred Rock hens, you will get black-based chicks from the brown eggs and stripey chicks from the blue eggs. All chicks will be pure for barring (2 barring genes for males, 1 barring gene for females), so you can probably sex them all by that. If you add the Silver Laced Wyandotte hens and the Amberlink hens to the pen, their chicks should be gold/silver sexlinks (sexable). They will not be black-based, so you won't mix them up with the chicks from the Barred Rocks (who also lay brown eggs.) They will probably not have the nice striping of the Cream Legbar chicks, so you can probably tell them apart there too, but you might want to hatch them separately until you are sure that you can tell them apart. Even if they do get mixed, chicks from the Silver Laced Wyandottes will be the only ones that can have Silver in that pen (males only) and the only ones that can have rose combs (males & females, but it is common for Wyandottes to carry the gene for not-rose combs, so you might get some single comb Wyandotte-mix chicks too.) Chicks from the Amberlinks will be the only ones who can have Dominant White (but that will only be half of their chicks, the other half will show black in their patterning just like chicks from the Wyandotte and Legbar hens.) Chicks from Wyandotte vs. Amberlink will probably have different patterns in their feathers as they grow up. So you can look for the rose combs and Dominant White to sort some of them, then compare patterns to hopefully sort the rest of them.

That would leave the Amberlnk rooster with the Blue Rock hens and the Olive Egger hens. The chicks will not be color-sexable. But Amberlink x Blue Rock should give you black chicks, blue chicks, and white chicks with black or blue leakage (Black Paint and Blue Paint, if they have enough leakage). There is a chance of chicks with gold or silver, with black or blue or white in their tails (appearance would be similar to Rhode Island Red, Columbian Rock, hens of ISA Brown.) So you might have some nice colors of chicks from there.

I will also snap some more pictures of the olive eggers when i get home. They are all black with green sheen and 1 has a more pronounced muff and some copper leakage around her neck!

I'll look forward to seeing those!

You are incredibly knowledgeable and make me want to get more birds to hear you explain all the possibilities!!

You may not have to buy more chickens to see me or others explain possibilities

Posts of this type are most likely to be found in the forum section "Exhibition, Genetics, & Breeding to the SOP." (SOP means Standard of Perfection.) You can look around there and probably find some that are fun to read. You can also search for posts by a particular user (myself or anyone else you find interesting) and if you use the "Advanced Search" you can search for ones within a particular section of the forums (which is handy if you want a certain kind of post, but you are searching for a user who posts a lot of other types too.)

 

[TyRi]

It would be a bit variable, but overall their chicks will probably be quite good layers.


Cream Legbar is basically crele already. Crele should just be wild-type with barring. Cream Legbars are that plus the cream gene (makes red/gold shades be lighter than they otherwise would be. I would expect the Amberlinks to have at least one not-cream gene, but I don't know about the others. Silver birds are likely to have cream (helps make a nice white "Silver" color, without yellowish or reddish areas), black and blue ones less likely because it just doesn't matter for their coloring.

If you want crele, I would probably breed Cream Legbar to Amberlink, choose the reddest of the offspring, and breed those back to Cream Legbar or to each other.

Oh, I just remembered something: I have considered Cream Legbars to be gentically gold. But I have read that some lines are actually silver (I'm not sure of the logic-- maybe trying to get an even lighter "cream" shade?) If yours end up being silver, that will change how the gold/silver sexlinking works.


I do not think there is any way to know who is breeding who except:
--separate pens
--recognizing traits in the chicks.

In this case, assuming all the Cream Legbar hens to lay blue eggs, any eggs that are brown or olive will be from other hens. The Cream Legbar rooster will give barring to his chicks, the Amberlink will not. So you can probably sort out some of the chicks by looking for that. But the son of a Barred Rock with the Amberlink rooster might be black with white barring, and the son of a Blue Rock with the Cream Legbar rooster might also be black with white barring, so there will still be some that you can't figure out that way. The Amberlink can give gold or silver to his chicks, a Cream Legbar that is gold can only give gold. So silver pullets must have the Amberlink father. Cockerels can inherit Silver from either their father or their mother or both, so it is harder to figure out which father they have.

The Cream Legbar should give a crest to his chicks, but the Amberlink will not. That can help identify some chicks, but some crests may be small enough that you can't be sure they are there at all, and there is a chance that the Cream Legbar rooster may have no crest, or may have one crest gene and one not, so he might also be able to produce chicks with no crests.

Note, a hen can store sperm from previous matings. So if you have the whole flock running together, then separate them, plan to wait about 3 weeks before you and start collecting eggs for hatching. Hens will reliably store sperm for up to a week (so if something happens to one of your roosters, collect eggs for a week and put them in the incubator, and you will probably get some chicks from the recently-deceased father.) For the second and third weeks, the chance goes down, but there have been a few cases of hens that stored sperm for more than a month. When you can recognize which chicks have which father, you can tell if that happened. So if you change which rooster is in which breeding pen, you can wait 3+ weeks before collecting eggs, or sometimes you can just collect eggs and plan to sort the chicks after they hatch.


That partly depends on what colors you consider "interesting," but I don't see a an obvious benefit to any specific pairings. You could split the hens up so some of each breed are with each rooster.


Hmm.

I would probably start by checking what color eggs each group lays. So you could put all the Cream Legbar hens in a pen together, with no other breeds, and you should get only blue eggs. Then if you add the Olive Eggers to the Legbars, one pen should give just blue & olive eggs and the other pen should give just brown eggs.

When hatching eggs, there are several ways to keep straight which chicks came from which eggs. You can hatch eggs at different times, or in separate incubators, or inside mesh bags in the same incubator, or under separate broody hens. It doesn't matter if they are incubated together, as long as you can sort them into separate groups before the chicks come out. So you could sort eggs by pen (label each egg and you'll know which pen it came from), or by brown vs. blue vs. olive, or any combination of those.

If you put the Cream Legbar rooster with the Cream Legbar hens and the Barred Rock hens, you will get black-based chicks from the brown eggs and stripey chicks from the blue eggs. All chicks will be pure for barring (2 barring genes for males, 1 barring gene for females), so you can probably sex them all by that. If you add the Silver Laced Wyandotte hens and the Amberlink hens to the pen, their chicks should be gold/silver sexlinks (sexable). They will not be black-based, so you won't mix them up with the chicks from the Barred Rocks (who also lay brown eggs.) They will probably not have the nice striping of the Cream Legbar chicks, so you can probably tell them apart there too, but you might want to hatch them separately until you are sure that you can tell them apart. Even if they do get mixed, chicks from the Silver Laced Wyandottes will be the only ones that can have Silver in that pen (males only) and the only ones that can have rose combs (males & females, but it is common for Wyandottes to carry the gene for not-rose combs, so you might get some single comb Wyandotte-mix chicks too.) Chicks from the Amberlinks will be the only ones who can have Dominant White (but that will only be half of their chicks, the other half will show black in their patterning just like chicks from the Wyandotte and Legbar hens.) Chicks from Wyandotte vs. Amberlink will probably have different patterns in their feathers as they grow up. So you can look for the rose combs and Dominant White to sort some of them, then compare patterns to hopefully sort the rest of them.

That would leave the Amberlnk rooster with the Blue Rock hens and the Olive Egger hens. The chicks will not be color-sexable. But Amberlink x Blue Rock should give you black chicks, blue chicks, and white chicks with black or blue leakage (Black Paint and Blue Paint, if they have enough leakage). There is a chance of chicks with gold or silver, with black or blue or white in their tails (appearance would be similar to Rhode Island Red, Columbian Rock, hens of ISA Brown.) So you might have some nice colors of chicks from there.


I'll look forward to seeing those!


You may not have to buy more chickens to see me or others explain possibilities

Posts of this type are most likely to be found in the forum section "Exhibition, Genetics, & Breeding to the SOP." (SOP means Standard of Perfection.) You can look around there and probably find some that are fun to read. You can also search for posts by a particular user (myself or anyone else you find interesting) and if you use the "Advanced Search" you can search for ones within a particular section of the forums (which is handy if you want a certain kind of post, but you are searching for a user who posts a lot of other types too.)

Thank you again for all the information! Its sounds like I atleast have an idea for when that time comes!
I do have 1 last question to the last post and that is an idea for the pearl star leghorns. I have attached 2 screenshots of where my tsc gets some of their stock and they told me they came from townline. So I didn’t know what to expect as far as offsprings with those 2 roosters. Seems like a lot of hit and miss info on them and if you are unsure thats okay as well! Just figured I would ask about them as well!

 

[TyRi]

Here are better pictures of my Olive Eggers! Hopefully they actually pump out some olive eggs and I don’t get unlucky brown eggs!

 

[TyRi]

And this would explain my worry on a brown or “pink” egg because it seems from the description its a semi common thing.

 

[NatJ]

Here are better pictures of my Olive Eggers! Hopefully they actually pump out some olive eggs and I don’t get unlucky brown eggs!

I see they have black feathers, pea combs, and some have muff/beard on their faces.

Any hen with muff/beard can give it to some or all of her chicks.

They should give pea combs to at least half of their chicks, and maybe to all of them. The chcks that inherit the pea comb will probably inherit the blue egg gene as well.

They should give black (Extended Black gene) to at least half of their chicks, but they may be carrying genes for some other colors that would go to their other chicks.

With the Cream Legbar rooster, chicks could be black with white barring (not color sexable), or may have some other colors (probably not color sexable either.)

With the Amberlink rooster, chicks could be black or white (Dominant White on black chicks), and have a chance of other colors as well.

Pea comb/blue egg gene:
The two genes are linked on one chromosome, and are usually inherited together. But they can be linked in any combination:
blue egg/pea comb (Ameraucana, and probably your Olive Eggers)
blue egg/not-pea comb (Cream Legbar)
not-blue egg/pea comb (Brahma)
not-blue egg/not-pea comb (Amberlink, Barred Rock, most other common breeds)

Knowing that pea combs and blue egg gene (or lack of it) tend to be inherited together, people can use that as a shortcut when creating a flock of Olive Eggers or Easter Eggers. They can cross blue-egg chickens to dark-brown chickens, or to breeds that lay lots of eggs, and can mostly trust that the offspring with pea combs will be the ones that lay blue or green eggs. In later generations, they can produce a flock of chickens that are pure for the pea comb gene, and (in theory) pure for the blue egg gene as well. But sometimes there is a crossover, where the gene linkage changes (so now there is a pea comb bird with a not-blue egg gene, or a single comb bird with the blue egg gene.) That is said to happen about 5% of the time. Once there is a chicken with pea comb and not-blue egg, that chicken can pass the same combination to its own chicks, so that gene pairing spreads in the flock. So a flock that is pure for pea combs, that "should" be pure for the blue egg gene, can actually have some that lay brown eggs. That is why hatcheries say their Easter Eggers or Olive Eggers may have a few that lay brown or "pink" eggs. Cream Legbars were bred from one or more crossovers the other direction: the blue egg gene became linked with not-pea comb, and the linkage stays that way unless someone mixes them with another pea comb breed and another crossover happens.

And this would explain my worry on a brown or “pink” egg because it seems from the description its a semi common thing.

Yes, it does happen (explanation just above.)

I do have 1 last question to the last post and that is an idea for the pearl star leghorns. I have attached 2 screenshots of where my tsc gets some of their stock and they told me they came from townline. So I didn’t know what to expect as far as offsprings with those 2 roosters. Seems like a lot of hit and miss info on them and if you are unsure thats okay as well! Just figured I would ask about them as well!

I'm not quite sure what you are asking. Do you have some of these hens and are wanting to know what happens when you cross them with your roosters?

The hens are gold and not-barred, so they cannot produce sexlinked chicks of either type. With the Cream Legbar rooster, they should produce chicks that show gold & black, plus white barring, in both males and females.
With the Amberlink rooster, they should produce chcks that show gold & black, or silver & black, or gold & white, or silver & white, each color being possible in both males and females.

Since that information says they are a cross of Partridge Rock and Sussex, it makes no sense to call them "Leghorns." The chickens in the photos do not look like Partridge Rocks, or any Sussex variety I know of, or even what I would expect from a cross betwen the two. So I think the parent stock probably has some kind of mixed ancestry, not actually what is stated. I would trust that the name "Pearl Star Leghorn" means the chickens described there, in feather colors and laying ability and egg color, but I strongly doubt some of the other information. I won't quite accuse them of drawing names from a hat or rolling dice to decide which breed names to use, but every now and then I do wonder...