Awesome! So you mean that both parents would need to have this auto-sexing trait, correct? CCL roo x Rhodebar hen = sexable at hatch but CCL roo x Blue Andalusian = not so much...?
They are sexable at hatch. At least the ones that was sold to me and later I found the guy had the CCL roo with the rhodebar hens. Of course I have no idea what else was mixed in there. I was not happy. But yes they have the dots and stripes.
Barring is the key to auto sexing and sex links . Barring has a dosage effect on color . Due to barring traveling on only 1 of the sex chromosones . The hen only has one copy that she passes only to her sons . This makes sex links possible . A rooster has 2 of the same . So he can have 1 or 2 barring genes . So with 2 copies he is lighter in color and has a larger head spot = auto sexing . Dominnique are considered semi auto sexing as black chick down does not noticeably lighten . So you use the larger head spot to tell . Plus pullets may have a dark cast to the legs where cockerels will not .
Let me tell you a story about my RB/CCl roo over welsummers last summer. The hatch was good and the chicks looked like welsummers with the stripes and everything. I was planning to put the roo over these pullets so the roos can be double barred. Well, The girls had darker tinted legs and I had them all seperated out by the welsummer markings. The boys had nice orange/yellow legs and lacked the eye liner. I then decided that I did not like the tinted leg chicks and sold them as straight run. I kept every orange/yellow legged chick which ended up to be 18. Out of 18 chicks there were no pullets. Ended up with a freezer full of chicken.
I was only referring to the barred Rock method for sexing chicks . Dominique would be the same . Different crosses can give different leg colors . There is some sex linkage in leg color associated with the id gene . Inhibitor of dermal melanin . This is probably what happened in your case . So your cockerels had the dermal inhibitor which kept any slate/black pigment from showing in the legs.
Very cool. I'm pretty excited to see what we get for chickies from this mix - they should be blue layers! Unfortunately not sex-linked though. So when you wrote leghorn, you meant legbar, right?
unfortunately, the only legbar pullet I had died a couple weeks ago :-( she didn't even have a chance to lay a pretty blue egg yet. That's another set of hatching eggs I'm going to buy, some more legbars! The breeder I got my pair from didn't have very good birds. Colors are off and both of my birds had white legs, while my friend's pullets from the same breeder flock had yellow.
