If it or they feather out colored like a wheaten female they are wheaten that carry something else, (usually its the partridge gene) . If they feather out as males , since the impure wheaten male looks similar to the partridge male then its really a toss as both have pencil marks in the neck hackle. Comparatively speaking the eb or partridge male tends to have more. Since the Penedesenca wheaten is suppose to be recessive wheaten the males tend to show some pencil in the neck hackle. Dominant wheaten if they are pure have clean neck hackles. Its a strange catagory as the recessive wheaten is such because they carry darkening genes that are recessive. If you breed it out they become dominant wheaten. Its hard to breed out. After a while you can sort of guess which are partridge roosters and which are wheaten as chicks if you band or mark them. The impure wheaten male will tend to have a more blurred patttern on the back. The partridge male will have a more clear pattern. The lines on the back may break or run a bit off but thats from the autosomal barring gene that the partridge carries, as it tends to break the pattern on the back up a bit. If they have empordanesa blood in them the pattern on the back can become blurred out but darker in color than the rest of the down color. This is caused from the columbian gene and is also marked on the forhead as a couple of dots or sometimes just one dot. Certain patterns on chicks that have pattern it tells their genetics that they carry, even hidden ones that wont show in the feathering later. If you learn them it can be a good tool , and tells you alot when they hatch. Unfortunately wheaten tend to be clear unless they carry other stuff. I dont know if this is a hard fast rule on wheaten, but it tends to be so far. I mention the one on empordanesa , because as time goes by , it will probably become more common for that to pop up in them also. This is because some folks want to promote the two breeds as one or closely related. They are a little bit, as they introduced Penedesenca blood into them and changed the egg shell color of the empordaesa from light pink to the dark shell color. Other than that they come from two distant places in the Catalan region of Spain.
Another trait to watch for is good white earlobes that are solid white. You can be suspicous if much red is showing especially in males. This tends to be more of a problem in the black penedesenca, but since empordanesa dont always have white earlobes then that can dilute those genetics in the other two penedesenca, (wheaten and partridge), that most use to breed to the empordanesa. This may sound confusing, but as time goes by you will tend to pay more attention to the chicks and you'll learn as you go. And to be careful when you go to add new blood to the ones you have established. Hope this helps. So you may want to mark those with lines so that if any are wheaten females you will know which ones are carring something else. They may as feathered out look very much alike.
