Chick colours

[KC8]

Also wondering about crests?
The neighbours have 4 roosters but only the polish comes over here and I've seen here with him free ranging etc

Would polish chick's at a day old have a fluffier top of their head where the crest will be or does that come in after a few weeks once the fluff starts changing to feathers?

I'm 99% sure this guys the Dad but don't see extra fluffy heads lol

 

[NatJ]

Also wondering about crests?
The neighbours have 4 roosters but only the polish comes over here and I've seen here with him free ranging etc

Would polish chick's at a day old have a fluffier top of their head where the crest will be or does that come in after a few weeks once the fluff starts changing to feathers?

I'm 99% sure this guys the Dad but don't see extra fluffy heads lol

Some crested chicks have a bump on their skull ("vaulted skull") where the crest will grow. This is common in purebred Polish and some other breeds. That is usually obvious when they hatch.

Mixed-breed chicks who have only one crested parent are much less likely to have the vaulted skull, but can still grow the crest feathers later. If they have a normal skull, you probably will not be able to tell if they have a crest until after they grow the feathers there.

 

[NatJ]

I love colour genetics but have mostly focussed on horses so loving the chicken ones

In that case, you might be interested in this:
http://www.sellers.kippenjungle.nl/page0.html
It has an overview on that page, and a link to three other pages. The first one talks about genetics in general, the second discusses some specific chicken genes in various levels of detail, and the third has a list of chicken genes with abbreviations and a bit about each one.

Have you found the chicken calculator yet?
http://kippenjungle.nl/chickencalculator.html
You can change the genes in the dropdown boxes, and the little picture of the chicken will change too. It can figure offspring from a cross, but I mostly enjoy using it to model the effects of various genes (I find Punnett Squares easy enough that I don't need a computer program to do that for me.)

With your chicks, the black one probably as E (Extended Black, in the top dropdown box.) The various genes at the e-locus have a big effect on how the black and red pigments are arranged on the chicken, and they also have a big effect on the color & pattern of the chick down. E is the most dominant. e+ the wild-type form is commonly found in chicks with chipmunk stripes, so that might be what your first chick has.

The solid white one and the white one with black dots on the head might have E (Extended Black), and also I (Dominant White, changes black to white, but is leaky in heterozygotes so some bits of black can show through.) The hen herself would be heterozygous for Dominant White, because she shows white but has produced chicks with black.

The hen has the gold gene (s+) and the rooster looks like he probably has both Silver and gold (S/s+). Silver changes gold to white, and is mostly dominant (a nice clean white requires two copies of the silver gene and maybe a few other modifiers. Heterozygotes often show a yellowish color like what I see on the light parts of your rooster.) So I might expect some chicks with gold and some with silver.

Silver/gold is on the Z sex chromosome. Males have ZZ, females have ZW. So females can be gold or silver but not both. The chicken ZW system is backwards of the XY system found in horses & humans. In chickens, the mother determins the sex of the offspring, and all the sex-linked genes behave "backwards" of how they do in the XY system.

 

[KC8]

Some crested chicks have a bump on their skull ("vaulted skull") where the crest will grow. This is common in purebred Polish and some other breeds. That is usually obvious when they hatch.

Mixed-breed chicks who have only one crested parent are much less likely to have the vaulted skull, but can still grow the crest feathers later. If they have a normal skull, you probably will not be able to tell if they have a crest until after they grow the feathers there.

You've been so helpful thank you! Learning heaps

We have 9 beautiful babies now. The newest ones are white too. She still has 14 eggs under her so will check in the morning and see how they've gone overnight