Cochin color question-

[lilwanderer]

You could! The mottling gene is recessive, so a first generation cross of mottled to non-mottled will make mottled carriers. That means that all of the birds from the crosses I described in my last post also carry the gene for mottling since Calico is a mottled variety, they just don't express it because it's recessive. So crossing birds expressing mottling to each other will make more mottled birds, and crossing the leaky blacks or blues from my previous post to the ones that are mottled should make roughly equal numbers of mottled and mottled-carriers to work from as well.




Sibling to sibling crosses are fine if done occasionally, but from my understanding it's better to cross them either back to a parent or to an unrelated mottled individual. Line breeding is crossing back to a parent, not crossing sibling to sibling.




I would pick your breeders for less leakage primarily and better mottling secondarily. Both, in other words, but weighted toward getting rid of leakage because that tends to be difficult.

If i were to end up starting a mottled project I would probably end up getting a blue or black mottled bird-
And huh- I didn't know the exact details on line breeding but I'll keep that in mind.
Since Calico carries mottling, would it be better to take a mottled bird from the second generation and cross them to a calico instead of sibling to sibling?
If I did do sibling to sibling it wouldn't be often, especially since I would get my own mottled bird from a different line in the future.

 

[pipdzipdnreadytogo]

Since Calico carries mottling, would it be better to take a mottled bird from the second generation and cross them to a calico instead of sibling to sibling?

The mottleds from the second generation crossed back to Calico would make roughly equal numbers of mottled and calico offspring, but that would not help at all in improving the amount of color leakage in the mottleds.

It probably would be simplest to wait until you get a Mottled from a different line and cross to it instead. Or, unless you're wanting to make Blue Mottleds from all of this, you could just get a foundation group of Mottleds instead and work from them. Then you wouldn't be fighting against color leakage in your birds from the Calico in the background of some of them.

 

[lilwanderer]

The mottleds from the second generation crossed back to Calico would make roughly equal numbers of mottled and calico offspring, but that would not help at all in improving the amount of color leakage in the mottleds.

It probably would be simplest to wait until you get a Mottled from a different line and cross to it instead. Or, unless you're wanting to make Blue Mottleds from all of this, you could just get a foundation group of Mottleds instead and work from them. Then you wouldn't be fighting against color leakage in your birds from the Calico in the background of some of them.

Well I would like some blue mottled- I like blue birds in general so blue mottled would make me feel pretty great!
When you say "unless you're wanting blue mottled" after you mentioned just find a group of mottled birds- Are you saying that because you can't find blue mottled cochins?
I would imagine it would be harder to find and probably more expensive due to it not being as common as black though. I'm also in North Florida, don't think there's many mottled cochin breeders in general near me unless I have them shipped.

 

[pipdzipdnreadytogo]

Not necessarily, it's just Blue Mottled is a lot harder to find than plain ol black Mottled in my experience, mostly because several hatcheries carry black Mottled Cochin bantams whereas none that I am aware of have Blue Mottled. Blue Mottled likely would end up being more expensive as a result, yes, primarily because they'll mostly be breeder birds instead of hatchery birds as with the regular black Mottleds.

That statement was more intended to mean that if you're specifically trying to get to blue mottled, then you could use those birds to get there. But, you could also get there by crossing plain Blue to plain Mottled, then crossing the resulting Blue offspring from that cross back to Mottled. That would also bypass fighting against leakage from the Calico ancestry, assuming that your Blues and Mottleds don't have any leakage to start with of course.