Breeding silkied Cochin bantams to the Standard

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pipdzipdnreadytogo said:
Happy (belated?) new year! Yesterday, I took 7 month update pictures on the 2022 hatch birds. (Well, and 9-month update for Trixie).

My poor boys and their combs. 😟 They look a lot better than they did during that freeze at least. I noticed that Zeke and Wyatt do have distinct Blue lacing in their hackles in these pictures, and Wyatt's wings also have some visible lacing! Neat! :D It's not as visible in person, though, unfortunately. I never got around to checking for lacing with a stray feather as I mentioned before. Now Washburne, my other Blue hen, is molting, so I definitely have plenty of feathers around to test it on!

Anyway, the boys, starting with Dean:

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Levi:

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Wyatt:

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Zeke:

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And the girls, Trixie:

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Boba:

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Athena (who always moves, darn it!)

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Inara:

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Ottilie:

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My recessive white girl, Dandelion, passed away this past week and has me thinking about adding recessive whites as well... I've never been fond of solid white plumage, but what a great bird she was temperament-wise, even though she had terrible slipped wing and prolapse issues all her laying life, poor girl. Ah, it's just the grief talking, I know. I'm still determined to focus on just the BBS for now. We'll see about other varieties later on down the line. 🙂
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I love Athena
 
Athena is a favorite for me, too. Such a great temperament, and she's the color I want for these guys. Not overly pale, but definitely blue without question. :love It's hard to get the lighting just right to show them true to what I see, but the other Blues are all just so dark in person. Even Athena is a bit darker than what that picture shows, by just a smidge. Definitely excited to see what her chicks will look like this year. :D
 
Okay, I've taken some time to think things over, take notes, and plan for the spring, and I've updated my silkied Cochin page with the birds I currently plan to group up for spring hatching. https://www.backyardchickens.com/articles/pipds-peeps.72248/page/silkied-cochin-bantams.95/

Still undecided if I want to leave Bella in the breeding population or consider her a cull. Her comb is badly lopped, but she's pretty solid otherwise... Too bad her picture doesn't show it so well. :rolleyes:

Looking at the cockerels for the Blue pen, I have definitely determined that Levi is only going to be a breeding male if both of the other Blue cockerels die unexpectedly, and even then I might put Jack over the Blue girls before him. He's so narrow in the back compared to the other boys, and has a much larger frame than them that I'm not liking so much. To be fair, that was the only reason I kept him, as a back up for my back up. I had two beautiful 2021-hatched Blue cockerels I was excited to put over some hens, and both died on me early last year, one to a hawk and the other to bullying in the cockerel pen. So I kept three Blue cockerels from last year's hatch just in case, have had them locked down pretty tight against hawks, and have been keeping a much closer eye on things for signs of problems between the boys. So far so good on that front.

As for Wyatt versus Zeke, boy, I have no clue. I was looking at them from different angles yesterday and noticed that Wyatt has a nice broad tail set and back. Zeke's back is nice and broad, but his tail is just a little more scrunched when viewed directly from behind. Zeke is also larger, but not too large like Levi, and he has better comb serration than Wyatt. I've liked Zeke a lot for a while, but now Wyatt is catching my eye more and more. Ugh, these two are going to have me going back and forth until the very last minute on who's going to cover my Blue girls!!

Something else I noticed when looking at birds yesterday was that my girls all have pretty good wing angles, nice and high on the thigh, but the boys all carry their wings low, which isn't desired for the breed. Makes me wonder how much of that is a display for me since I'm out there with them and they're always dancing around my feet while I'm there. 🤔 Trixie, who I'm reasonably sure hatched out of a Harley egg but was definitely sired by Pete, has a good wing angle as well, so her father's low wings didn't pass down to her at least.

Anyway, just wanted to put those thoughts down somewhere for future reference. 🙂 As always, I am open to any constructive criticism on my notes and plans, and perfectly willing to switch things around should I be totally out of line in what I'm thinking, here!
 
pipdzipdnreadytogo said:
the boys all carry their wings low, which isn't desired for the breed. Makes me wonder how much of that is a display for me since I'm out there with them and they're always dancing around my feet while I'm there. 🤔
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Small update to this note, I've been trying to look at the boys from a distance and it does look like their wings sit higher up when they aren't paying attention to me or dancing around for the girls. :rolleyes: Little show-offs.
 
pipdzipdnreadytogo said:
I love Splash, too! I'm especially interested in Splash for these guys, though, because one of my goals is to lighten the Blues up a bit and a Splash or two should help with that goal. You can see in that last group of pictures that a lot of the Blues are so dark that they almost look Black unless you're looking closely. There are 3 Blue pullets and 3 Blue cockerels in the mix there. That's an unfortunate side-effect of silkied feathering, that for some reason it makes Blues look so dark. Athena (the pullet in the first picture in that post) is the color I'm hoping to achieve with some consistency; in person, she's the only one that really looks Blue at first glance, at least out of the pullets.

I hear you on the housework and such. It never ends! 😩 I should also try to get some leaves raked (I like to store some for the winter for my birds to dig through), and I've got to get hardware cloth cut and attached to some windows and bedding cleaned out and refreshed in one of my coops so that I can move birds into it for the winter. Been putting that off, but I think that this weekend is just about the last shot I'll have at it since the mild weather won't last forever. It'll be nice once it's done, though!
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Are you selling hatching eggs yet from your silkied Cochin collection? I’m interested ❤️
 

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