Chocolate/Dun Silkies?

[featherbaby]

pips&peeps :

That is good advice chris. If they don't sell for what I want I will try this expeirment and let you know. I am writing this down. Thanks

If you don't know genetically what color your bird is, why would you promote it as chocolate and try to sell it for a large sum of money?​

IMHO you can sell a bird for whatever sum of money someone is willing to pay for it. Considering the rarity of a new color and the possibilities of refining that color through a careful breeding program, a bird like that would be worth $300 or more to a lot of people. We all know that genetic mutations are tricky and there are no guarantees you'll ever get another one to hatch just like the parent, but that's the chance serious breeders are willing to take to try and perfect a new color.

Personally, I don't care if she "promoted" it as a kumquat....if I saw the bird and had the opportunity to try for a new color, I WOULD BUY IT. Other people can easily fight over the semantics of what to call it , but the breeder is the one spending gobs of time and money working on the actual birds. Let's be encouraging to them, they're on the cutting edge of something wonderful!!!!​

 

[redhen]

Okay..so heres my question.
I'm confused here.. (as usual )

If you take a chocolate polish and breed it to a silkie..and you get chocolate babies that look like silkies...
Are they PURE silkies? Or just mixed chocolate birds?

 

[onthespot]

They are mixed chocolate birds until they look like silkies and breed consistently true like silkies. The original chocolate silkie she posted looks very much like a silkie to me. No tellng how it will breed. Time will tell.

 

[Redcatcher]

Interesting. I have a black Silkie hen that bleaches out to a chocolate color in the summer. None of my other black birds do. What is going on with that?

 

[onthespot]

some black birds bleach out to brown in the summer, some don't. Chocolate birds are chocolate when they hatch, and when they moult.

 

[reesepoultry]

Yeah kinda like my second choc hen. She always molts bad. she looks so horrid. She even gets bald spots on her when she molts lol....

 

[RioLindoAz]

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Where did you get the stock that produced your chocolate? Did they have any reds













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[redhen]

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I agree! It does look like a silkie!

I was just wondering how that works legally..like for showing and such..
I get it now. Thanks!

 

[TurtleFeathers]

Michelle -

As Sonoran Silkies said, "chocolate" and "dun" look pretty much identical - but the way the "chocolate" gene is inherited differs GREATLY from how the "dun" gene is inherited. And because the hobby name "chocolate" is used for BOTH the chocolate gene AND (erroneously) for the dun gene, things get confusing when trying to differentiate the two genes. Personally, I try very hard NOT to refer to my dun Polish as "chocolate" anymore, so people don't get confused as to what I have.

First, as stated above, *true* "chocolate" gene is apparently only available in seramas right now in the US - and chocolate seramas are not real common (so therefore, they're pretty expensive). It is a sex linked recessive gene - males can be visual and split, whereas females can only be visual. Unless your silkies have serama blood somewhere in the background (could be many generations ago), in all likelihood, they're probably dun, because dun is WAY more common (and therefore, dun birds are much less expensive). Many people use Polish to bring new colors into silkies, because its easier to maintain the crest size when breeding two crested breeds together, as opposed to a crested x non-crested breeding. But Polish only come in dun, not *true* chocolate.

Dun is what is referred to as a "dominant" gene (or partial dominant, or something along those lines) - it is NOT a recessive, meaning it cannot be "carried" and a bird cannot be "split" to it - it comes in a strictly visual form, so what you see is what you get. It is inherited exactly like Andalusian blue - "dun" being the equivalent to "blue", and "khaki" being the equivalent to "splash".

Do you know anything about the lineage of your birds? Any idea what breed was used to bring their brown coloring into your line?

A good way to tell whether your silkies are "chocolate" or "dun" is to breed them to a black rooster and produce as many chicks as you can. If some/any of the offspring are visually brown from the get go, then your hens are dun.

If your birds are *true* chocolate, all the offspring with a black rooster will be black, and only the male offspring will be split to chocolate (females won't be split to anything). You can then take one of the black split to chocolate males and breed him back to your hens to get chocolate males, black split to chocolate males, and chocolate females.

Featherbaby - I would agree with you on spending more for an exciting new color. But IMO, $300 is WAAAAY too much to spend on a dun bird. Actually, I don't believe I'd spend that much on a *true* chocolate bird, but to each their own... But I WERE to buy a bird advertised as "chocolate" for $300, only to later find out it was dun and not *true* chocolate, I'd be pretty upset!!! But that's where the saying "buyer beware" comes in - it pays for both the buyer AND the seller to do their research!!

Redcatcher - my black and black cuckoo silkies bleach out to brown in the sun during the summer, and when they molt in the fall, they're all blotchy looking. Has nothing to do with dun or chocolate. My cuckoo marans, barred rock and dominique do the same thing.

 

[Chris09]

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How is this?
If a True Chocolate hen only needs one copy of the gene to become Chocolate shouldn't the female out of a Black rooster / Chocolate hen be Chocolate?

Chris