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.
