i used chocolate polish with super nice crests and bred with black silkie hens to try to get chocolate silkies. did you have any problem with the size of your crests in the offspring ?the crest size in the young was really small and still is. i haven't been breeding much from them because of this. another question i have is about the picture you have as a khaki, when i breed chocolate to chocolate, i've been getting some that i've been calling khaki that are a white looking bird with a faint chocolate overcast to them. if they aren't khaki, is there a color description for them ? thanks in advance for any help. this is my first ever post, hope i got it right.
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Have to breed it in. I used chocolate polish. Here is my baby khaki; way too young to show, but nevertheless, she's in her first tomorrow in Tucson, then again at Shawnee in a couple of weeks.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/uploads/20590_sam_1623.jpg
and with a pale lavender, a blue and a black for colour comparison.
https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/uploads/20590_sam_1630.jpg
I have several younger ones as well. This is the first generation with all silkie features.
Dun is an allele of dominant white; choc is an entirely separate gene. Their appearance is virtually identical. Inheritance is completely different. Dun is incompletely dominant. One copy (I^D/i+) dilutes to the colour chocolate, two copies (I^D/I^D) dilutes to the colour khaki. Fawn silver duckwing is also based upon dun. The e-allele appears to make a huge difference in the amount of dilution. Silver vs gold seems to change the hue.
choc is a sex-linked recessive gene. All the US "chocolates" are actually dun-based. Unless someone is working on a project and has crossed seramas to get choc into a different breed, it is not present in the US, except in seramas. It is available in Europe and elsewhere in other breeds.
I am not aware of chocolate sumatras; they would be interesting to see as their black is so very intense; I wonder how their chocolate would be?