Baby chicks
- Thread starter LauraD21
- Start date
The color will not still be sex linked, no. You will get 50/50 of red and barred chicks, and they could be either male or female.
Welcome to the forum! Glad you joined us! The first post in this thread explains what is required to make a sex link, whether red, black, or feather-sexed. You might want to study it. The basics aren’t as complicated as you might first think, but you may have to read it and think about it a bit to get the idea. Just read the first post. You can pretty much ignore the rest of the thread.
Tadkerson’s Sex Link Thread
https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=261208
Your black chicks are not sex linked. The hen has split genetics since she is a cross. Both parents have to be pure for a gene to start with to make sex links and those have to be specific genes.
To explain pure and split. Genes generally come in pairs and only one gets passed down to the offspring. Which specific one is purely random. If both genes in the parent are the same, say extended black, that is considered pure for that gene. The chick will get an extended black gene. But if one gene is extended black and one gene is birchen, that is considered split. Since it is random you just don’t know which of those genes one specific offspring will get.
Since we are talking about gene pairs it’s a little awkward phrasing this, but a rooster will give a copy of one of each and every gene pair he has to all his offspring. A hen is not so generous though. She is a stingy sexist. She gives a copy of everything she has to her sons but withholds certain sex-linked genes from her daughters. The females wind up with only one of the sex linked genes, not a pair. That’s how you make sex links. If the rooster is pure for a recessive gene and the hen has one copy of a dominant gene and that dominance shows up in the down or feathers at hatch, you can sex the chicks at hatch.
What is happening with your black sex link hen and RIR rooster, the hen is split for extended black and something else. I’m not going to guess what because I don’t know. There are several options. She also has silver and the RIR rooster is pure for gold.
The black is dominant over what else is there. The hen will randomly give a black to some of her offspring, whether male or female. Those are your black chicks and they could be any sex.
The yellow ones are different though. Your RIR rooster is pure for the gold gene and the Black sex link has silver. That’s the formula for red sex links. Those yellow chicks are all going to be roosters. Any red chicks will be pullets.
This does not happen with all black sex links. A lot of the time the hen will have gold instead of silver and this won’t work. I’d say most of the time it won’t work. They often use a red rooster to make the black sex links and that red rooster will give his daughters gold, not silver. I don’t know what breeds were crossed to make your black sex link hens but the only way you can get yellow chicks with this cross is for the hen to have silver. If there was dominant white in either parent, that could mask the gold and make it look yellow so this would not work, but I just can’t see how you are going to get dominant white in this mix.
There is no barring involved with a black sex link hen and a RIR rooster. That's what makes her a black sex link hen. Her brothers got the barred gene from their mommy, she did not.
Sorry I meant red and black, heh. I raise Dominiques so I am used to everything being barred.
Now I’m not sure what you mean. If the hen is barred and the rooster is not barred, all male offspring will be barred (actually split for barring but since barring is dominant, they will show barring). All female offspring will not be barred. The way you tell if a chick is barred or not is to look at the spot on its head. If it is barred, it will have a spot. If it is not barred, it will not have a spot. The problem comes in when the down color is such that you cannot see the spot. On those black ones you should be able to tell if they are barred or not but on those yellow ones the spot would be hidden in the yellow down.
Yes, but there is no barring in the cross the OP is asking about. It's a black sex link hen and a RIR roo. So the chicks will be black or red, and none of them will be barred. I just said barred on accident because I am using to having barred chickens in my OWN flocks, complete slip of the typing fingers. There's no barring involved in the above chicks.
Then I got you confused with the OP. I thought your second response was from the OP. I'm not doing well today. But I won't stop while I'm behind.
Those chicks are black and yellow, not black and red. The only way I can see that happening is with the hen being silver, not gold. That's why I think they are roosters.
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