Cleaning up color Genotype

[Celtic Hill]

If you had a mixed flock and wanted to "clean up" the genetics of the flock, how would you go about breeding out any partridge and lacing with the goal of a silver duckwing base.

 

[NatJ]

The most obvious thing is to hatch large numbers of chicks, keep the best ones for breeding, and cull the rest (rehome them, or keep them but not for breeding, or eat them).

It would help if you can track individual chicks and see which chick colors and markings grow up to have the appearance you want as adults. If they look different as chicks, you can save time and effort by only raising the ones that have a better chance of being correct. (Besides, if you want to sell the culls, it might be easier when they are cute little fluffy chicks, instead of waiting until they are older.)

I might expect chicks with the typical duckwing color to be what you want, and the others might look different, but you would want to raise some up and see. They may all look alike as chicks, or the ones that are best as adults may actually not be the ones I would predict as chicks.

If you can't keep track of individual chicks, you might be able to just split a hatch of chicks into two groups and raise them separately: put the ones that have nicest duckwing stripey appearance in one group, the others in another, and then watch as they grow to see if the sorting was actually useful in predicting adult coloring.

If you can keep track of which roosters and which hens produce the best chicks, you can hatch more chicks from them, and fewer or no chicks from the ones that produce more off-color chicks. This is difficult or impossible if you keep one large flock, but easier if you can separate them into different breeding groups. If you have only one rooster, you can just pen up certain hens for a few days to collect their eggs for hatching, and then keep track of which chicks came from which mother.