Can a pearl breed with a silver or snowie?

[Urbanhomestead_ut]

I thought I read that you can't breed a silver type to a silver type or it can be lethal. Can a pearl breed with a snowie or silver without the same problem?

Is that the only other lethal combo?

 

[shrimpsilkies]

Pearl is Italian + fee, Snowy is Italian + fee + silver. Gold and gold pairings (whether Italian or Manchurian) are often claimed to be lethal, but I have yet to really get a definitive answer on if they really are 100% of the time. The safest pairing would be Pearl and Silver (pharaoh or Tibetan based) because you would largely get Snowies or Silvers. However, the other pairings would still produce some healthy birds, but some of the chicks would either not develop or die in the shell, so you’d get a less than perfect hatch rate.
If you are familiar with chicken genetics, silver in quail is the same thing as blue in chickens. Two copies of blue in a chicken equals splash, which is largely white with blue flecks. Two copies of silver in quail equals double silver white, which is pure white and often weaker than the average bird. I don’t think silver and silver pairings are lethal but you may want to consider if you want to deal with the potentially weaker white birds.

 

[Nabiki]

In my experience, I do get healthy birds breeding light to light, but I get a much higher ratio of albinos, splay legs, cross beaks, or other defects. I gave up on SSCs because of that even though I really like them.

 

[FloorCandy]

As stated before pearl is Italian + fee. The best pairing to produce healthy snowies imo is to cross a male pearl over snowie hens. That way all off spring will be Italian/manchurian pattern, and if both are double fee carriers, all will be fee, if they only have 1 copy of fee, you’ll get more double fees if both have the gene.

with one copy of fee, you won’t have as sharp of a pearl pattern, it will have more creams and light reds/browns blending in. These are actually quite lovely, I have a whole bunch of them in the grow out. Tux adds another element as well, my feeling is that a perfect snowie should be single silver, double fee, either single or double Italian, which being incompletely dominant gets a bit muddy, and tux. If you keep breeding tux to tux, and using the ones with the most white, you start to get white speckling over the back, which looks quite striking on a range pattern silver.

as far as double silver, I have 2 adults. They’re both blind and have purple-ish eyes, and the female has some internal issues. Many of them don’t survive in the egg to even hatch and you’ll have a higher egg mortality, and those that do hatch will often be less likely to thrive, but they are pretty. Their feathers are just a bit wispy and they have a different look than other whites, like the difference between the look of whole milk vs skim. They are bigger up top and look chesty I guess, but are overall smaller and weigh less, my male is closer in size to a button quail than to some of my bigger ladies (he’s happy to jump on ladies of all sizes tho). I’m less willing to nurse sicklings back to health now than I was in the beginning, and I have culled the double silvers when it looked like they were failing. The 2 we have were hatched last October, we call them the snow angels.

 

[Urbanhomestead_ut]

As stated before pearl is Italian + fee. The best pairing to produce healthy snowies imo is to cross a male pearl over snowie hens. That way all off spring will be Italian/manchurian pattern, and if both are double fee carriers, all will be fee, if they only have 1 copy of fee, you’ll get more double fees if both have the gene.

with one copy of fee, you won’t have as sharp of a pearl pattern, it will have more creams and light reds/browns blending in. These are actually quite lovely, I have a whole bunch of them in the grow out. Tux adds another element as well, my feeling is that a perfect snowie should be single silver, double fee, either single or double Italian, which being incompletely dominant gets a bit muddy, and tux. If you keep breeding tux to tux, and using the ones with the most white, you start to get white speckling over the back, which looks quite striking on a range pattern silver.

as far as double silver, I have 2 adults. They’re both blind and have purple-ish eyes, and the female has some internal issues. Many of them don’t survive in the egg to even hatch and you’ll have a higher egg mortality, and those that do hatch will often be less likely to thrive, but they are pretty. Their feathers are just a bit wispy and they have a different look than other whites, like the difference between the look of whole milk vs skim. They are bigger up top and look chesty I guess, but are overall smaller and weigh less, my male is closer in size to a button quail than to some of my bigger ladies (he’s happy to jump on ladies of all sizes tho). I’m less willing to nurse sicklings back to health now than I was in the beginning, and I have culled the double silvers when it looked like they were failing. The 2 we have were hatched last October, we call them the snow angels.

So if I'd like more Pearls... what should I put in cages together? Each cage will have 1 male -6 female.
I currently have -
Males - A silver, a pearl, a Tibetan and a Grau fee.
Females - a snowie (I think), a Falb fee, an Italian, a Tibetan, a Grau fee and 3 Tibetan Tuxedos.

I am going to buy more hens tomorrow because I'm still short girls.

 

[FloorCandy]

So if I'd like more Pearls... what should I put in cages together? Each cage will have 1 male -6 female.
I currently have -
Males - A silver, a pearl, a Tibetan and a Grau fee.
Females - a snowie (I think), a Falb fee, an Italian, a Tibetan, a Grau fee and 3 Tibetan Tuxedos.

I am going to buy more hens tomorrow because I'm still short girls.

I would put the pearl male with the snowie, falb fee, grau fee, Italian and a tux, then mix and match the results.