Breeding Ice in Pigeons (mix breeding)

[CascadiaRiver]

So I've sort of got an interesting breeding plan for this next year, I've found myself with extra damascenes as well as birmingham rollers. My plan this year is to breed an almond (a pure almond, I currently only have a spread almond cock) which should be fairly straight forward, I'm getting a blue bar hen this week from a friend.

But, I've always adored the ice colour and would love to try to take on a project of trying to make an Ice birmingham roller. I've looked around for information on breeding Ice, I've read it's dominant but the het.Ice doesn't look the same as the dominant, so it'll probably take a few generations to get back to that pure Ice, right? Or is Ice one of those genes where it relies on other modifiers? Will my roller/damascenes ever look nearly as nice as my damascenes?

I'm not sure how many pigeon people are on backyardchickens, I feel like there isn't too many pigeon places on the internet, the next time I meet with some of the local pigeon guys I'll talk to them about this as well

 

[cavemanrich]

There are quite a few pigeon peeps here on BYC. I cant help you with genetics and breeding, but I will tag a few that may have ideas, and knowledge in that field.
@Pyxis , @WVduckchick , @biophiliac,
WISHING YOU BEST,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

 

[Pyxis]

Ice seems to be an incompletely dominant gene, so that one copy of Ice does look different than two copies. So yes, it would take at least two generations to get back to a homozygous Ic/Ic genotype. You could do the first cross of an Ice to a non-ice, resulting in both offspring being Ic/+ genotype. Then you could breed the offspring together and half of their offspring would be Ic/Ic.

Or at least that's how it should work in theory, lol.

 

[CascadiaRiver]

Ice seems to be an incompletely dominant gene, so that one copy of Ice does look different than two copies. So yes, it would take at least two generations to get back to a homozygous Ic/Ic genotype. You could do the first cross of an Ice to a non-ice, resulting in both offspring being Ic/+ genotype. Then you could breed the offspring together and half of their offspring would be Ic/Ic.

Or at least that's how it should work in theory, lol.

Yeah I crunched those same numbers, I'm hoping I get lucky and get good looking birds on that first generation and even better on second! So I don't have to breed too too much more to get a decent roller look. I'm using Damascene to try and get the Ice into rollers, hopefully the body types in the babies isn't too crazy or too Damascene looking!