- Jan 21, 2013
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Curt,
My daughter received a trio of Dark Horse Acres Iowa Blues for a post Christmas present this ast year. She also got to hatch out about a dozen Smokey Iowa Blues as well. We're trying to determine how best to breed our flock for this next years breeding season. We have progeny from our original Silver trio, but have "siblings" in the Smokey line. Do you ever breed your Smokey's to your Silver's? Which would you recommend for more genetic diversity? I know we can get Silver chicks out of the Smokey line, so I don't know why we couldn't cross our two varieties, to increase diversity....Open to any and all suggestions. FYI....we just recently joined the Iowa Blue Chicken Club as well, so we're looking to help expand the breed here in Southern Illinois!
Welcome! I'm glad to hear you joined the IBCC! I'll do my best to answer your questions and provide the reasons behind the answers.
The short answer. Yes! Breed them together. There isn't a breeder in the club today who isn't doing just that to my knowledge. To give a little history, the accounts I was able to gather and the interviews I conducted with past breeders shared that the chicks would hatch out all different colors but would grow up looking the same at adulthood. Initially when I and a small group of breeders began the restoration, many people told us it wasn't possible and to be honest when looking at how far the breed had 'fallen' there were some initial doubts in our minds as well. However, we believed that if it had happened in the past, and we still had a pure line of stock, we could get there again. The reason for all the different variations is because of the different e locus genes that are in the genepool. Combined with this are varying amounts of melanizers and modifiers. Our main work has been in 'cementing' the modifiers and melanizers while letting the e locus genes flow in a natural progression. As Kelsie shared earlier, over the past two years, we've seen a lot of improvement in uniformity. As I shared earlier, these differences are seen by the club more as natural variations as opposed to clear cut varieties. This is a different philosophy. To some they enjoy this, to others they hate this. But it is what it is. The current goal of the club is to see all the different variations bred to the Standard. Clearly some of the variations have further to go than others, but this is still a work in progress. Once all the variations are bred to a point where they all can fit within the Standard, then we will have nearly completed our restoration work with the breed. We will then truly have chicks of all colors growing up to look the same.
Of course, as Kelsie also pointed out that in order to obtain APA recognition there would need to be a lot tighter uniformity in the breed. And this topic has been a well versed topic in the breed club and continues to be at the forefront of our minds. Do we severely limit the small gene pool by selecting aggressively toward the Standard in order to align ourselves with the APA requirements, or do we allow the natural flow of the breed to exhibit and allow the breed to continue to be selected for the adaptive traits it was created to exhibit? Because this breed was created as a landrace for homesteading and early 1900's agricultural practices, most who have been attracted to the breed are looking for birds to meet their needs (eggs, meat, predator awareness, protective instincts, etc.) with color and even shape coming in second. That said, the current 'mood' of the IBCC club membership is to let the breed operate in its natural form making selected changes over time requiring all the variations to be put under the same selection pressure. This may take us longer to reach our APA goal (and maybe this goal will never be met), but it pairs up with the needs of our membership and the current needs of the breed.
