ATTN: Yokohama Lovers!

[Bentley]

With long tail fowl you need to pay a lot of attention to the female tail. The old timers will say that you make more progress selecting your hens for sickles and tail length and fullness than on the males. One thing for sure is you can make a determination of genetic potential in the hens tail far sooner than the male side as he takes longer for his tail and sickle feathers to really mature. In addition, a chicken normally has 12 (6 on each side) main tail feathers (not counting mutant sickle feathers). Some chickens you can reasonably count 14 to 16 main tail feathers with feathers numbers 7 and 8 being sometimes questionable depending upon who is counting. At any rate, you can count those main tail feathers and select for more in the future breeders and make progress with tail fulness that way.

 

[Bentley]

Does anyone have any thoughts on a potential tie between comb type and the red shouldered/spangled coloring? I have run into a potential wall with my RS Yokohama project. The original stock I started with last year (not good stock AT ALL mind you) had half the birds possessing a pea comb and the other half with the walnut comb which is the correct type for Yokohamas. My first order of business was to fix come type then work on color and then tails. I have set about 300-400 eggs in the past couple of months and have noticed a very strong correlation with wrong come (pea comb) and better (not great) coloring. Of those that have the correct comb type I get next to no birds with anything even close to correct coloring/spangling.

Anyone seen this in RS Yokohamas?

 

[onagadori]

Bentley, I raise the german line of red shoulders from Joseph Wolters (as seen on onagadori.com which is marc king's site) They tend to have great coloring, but not exceptional tails.. While my peacombed white yokohamas have wonderful tails and so is there a chance that someone crossed white yokos into the ones you have.. This would explain why some of them have poor coloring as whites can't be bred for anything but feather since it is a rec. white and you can not view the pattern to select proper coloration.. Just a thought..

 

[Bentley]

From what I understand in talking with some of the 'old folks' there were a couple of imports of Yokohamas into the US from the UK stock which favors the pea comb. I believe back in 2002 some UK RS Yokohamas were imported into the US, possibly bantams. These birds exhibited exceptional coloring and therefore were bred into some of the US populations. Somewhere about 05 or 06 some of the hatcheries began adding this to their stock. So, pea comb Yokohamas seem to be fairly common in the US even though the walnut or strawberry comb is preferred.

In the last few months I have hatched several hundred RS Yokohamas chicks and while there are very few real strong 'keepers' I am beginning to get a few birds with the proper comb and the RS shoulder color pattern. My struggle is when determining how early I can begin culling for color as it seems that the birds true colors do not come out for several months. Also, from what I understand with the RS should trait and trying to get the deep 'ox blood' coloring, you need to keep males that are very dark to dirty as breeders. Thoughts on this?

 

[onagadori]

I got the red shoulders I have from David Rogers. Toni Astin said they were imported in 2002 by her. They are not peacombed..

 

[pokey]

Is it a fault for a white birds ear lobes to be more bluish white or should they be solid white?

 

[onagadori]

To show, they need to be red I think.. Some of my longer tailed partial nonmolting whites have white in their ear lobes,but red is correct for show..

 

[Bentley]

Yep, red ear lobes

 

[pokey]

I don't know if you can see her lobes. They are more blue I guess than white. Should I not use her to breed to? I meant to say solid red in my previous post, but work kicked my tail today. I am pooped.https://www.backyardchickens.com/gallery/image/view/id/4540095/album/6138308

 

[onagadori]

I can't see the pic of the hen can you email it to me.. thanks.