Also, what projects could I use with the solid white hens pictured? These were hatched out solid white and it is coming from one of the Calico hens. 1 or 2 out of every 20 chicks come out solid white from this one calico cochin pen.
The white chicks are probably recessive white.
If you breed them together, they should give you just white chicks.
If you have a breeding pen of recessive white birds, you could add them to it.
If you keep them in the Calico pen, they will probably produce some Calico chicks and maybe some white chicks. All their Calico chicks will carry recessive white, which means more white chicks in future (good or bad depending on what your goals are).
If you want more recessive whites without breeding them together, cross a male to his mother or a son to his father, about half the chicks they produce should be recessive white.
If you want to know which Calico chickens are carrying recessive white, you can use these whites to test-mate them: any Calico that produces white chicks when bred to a recessive white bird, is carrying the recessive white gene.
With the buff columbian could I just use a nice solid buff rooster with my nicest columbian hens and be successful on the first try or would it take several yrs to perfect?
I think you might get good ones faster if you start with a Calico rooster and a Columbian hen, instead of using the solid buff rooster.
If you use the solid buff, I expect the chicks will have less black than you want, because of the genes that keep solid buff chickens from showing any black. So you would need to cross back to Columbian one or more times to get the right amount of black. The Calico may give you a different "wrong" amount of black, so I can't say for sure which would be better. You might want to try both, then consider crossing sons from one with daughters from the other to see if you get nice ones that way.
I'm not sure if you already know about the gold/silver genes. Buff and Calico are gold, normal Columbian is silver. These genes are on the Z sex chromsome.
Roosters have two Z chromosomes, so they can have two gold genes, or two silver genes, or one of each. Silver is dominant over gold. A rooster inherits one Z chromosome from each of his parents, and gives one Z choromosome to each chick he produces.
Hens have chromosomes ZW. They inherit Z from their father and give it to their sons. They inherit W from their mother and give it to their daughters. Since the gold or silver gene is on the Z chromosome, a hen can only have one of it. She is either gold or silver but not both.
That means you get the following possibilities when you are breeding them:
If you cross a gold rooster with a silver hen, you get gold daughters and sons that look silver but carry gold. (This is your first cross)
If you cross a gold hen to a silver rooster, all daughters will be silver, and all sons will look silver but carry gold.
If you cross a rooster who is silver-carrying-gold to a silver hen, you get some daughters that are gold. You also get some silver chicks of both sexes, and some sons that are silver-carrying-gold. From this cross, the gold females are probably your best choice to cross back to silver again, because it's easier to recognize them than to be sure which of the "silver" males are carrying gold and which are not.
(These two options are when you backcross one of your first-generation chicks to the Columbian line again. After that, if you need to backcross any further, you can alternate the two: gold hen to silver rooster, silver-carrying-gold rooster to silver hens, repeated as many or as few times as you need.)
If you cross a gold hen with a rooster that is silver-carrying-gold, you will get some gold chicks of both sexes and some silver chicks of both sexes.
(This is how you get some gold males once you have the black parts of the pattern correct.)
If you cross a gold hen with a gold rooster you will get just gold chicks.
(This is what you have with your Buffs and with your Calicos, and what I assume you eventually want with Buff Columbians.)
Is it possible to start the buff mottled line with a nice Buff rooster and calico hens that already have the mottled gene or should I get black mottled and use those in place of the calico?
It should be possible to start with what you have.
