Cream Legbar questions for breeding.

[dheltzel]

This is another set, cherry picked from a larger number of eggs.
The top 2 (larger) are from pure Welbars. The bottom ones are pullet eggs from the f5 flock.

Progress is being made slowly. Non-breeders have no idea the time, work and money involved in making a new color.

 

[RememberTheWay]

It would be hard to tell for my eyes. Cream would make the diluted gold tones a little more diluted but not much.
I work with leghorns so cream didn't come into play with me. I did work some with lavender and barring on gold duckwing but I wasn't excited with them so I went back to lavender gold duckwings. I wasn't super enthused with the gold tones and how they looked when diluted so I wondered if I'd be more happy with lavender on silver duckwing.
Imo they looked better. More crisp and clean looking. Lavender silver duckwing are all I have now but I've moved on to working with blue instead of lavender so I've not been doing much with lavender except keeping a few.

What your describing is how this played out in my mind. When another breeder had explained that when I buy my blacks for the projects I'm starting that I would do good to make sure they were silver and not gold based. It made perfect sense to me. I took do not particularly enjoy how the color dilution on the other tone. But of course everyone is different
Looking at self blues who I think are better colored I imagine when I compare the two that the ones I don't particularly like may actually be on a different base? I see some very smooth and even self blues and others that are not as nice imo. The color is uneven and has changes in tone. Maybe I'm just imagining that it has something to do with the base? Or it's caused by something different altogether

 

[RememberTheWay]

Those in the pic did not lay dark enough eggs, so I didn't feel right about releasing them. This year has seen better egg color, but it is still rather unstable IMO. Releasing a new color variant of an existing breed requires some tradeoffs for sure. I have been years with this and sometimes I think I should be farther along, but breeding for quality is not for the impatient. I hae worked with several new colors of existing breeds and usually I come to the conclusion that the original breeder released them too soon and left much for me to fix.
When I release them, I hope to have 3 final lines from this 1 project:
1) Isabel Crele Welsummers - the dark egg counterpart to the Opal Legbar
2) Isabel Crele Olive Eggers - autosexing, lavender and homozygous for the blue egg gene
3) Crele Olive Eggers - gold variant of #2. Will probably carry lavender in some.

Either of the Olive Eggers will be popular in the local chicks sales as purebreds, or their pullets, crossed to a dark egg line of Copper Marans, would make black sexlinks with even darker egg color. Lots of breeders are making olive egg sexlinks with Cream Legbar X Marans, imagine if instead of starting with light blue, you could start with dark green and then add the even darker shades of the Marans.

As for the Opal Legbars, I have pics and a somewhat out-of-date writeup on my website: http://welbars.com/index.php/legbars/opal-legbars/
I feel like this year I made progress on the cresting. Time will tell if an outcross to the very docile Creams has made progress with the Opal cockerels getting a bit nasty at times.

Very interesting
Do you still breed from the nasty boys? From what I understand aggression is a genetic and hereditary trait that can be selected against or for (American Game). Personally, those birds are not welcome on my farm or my breeding program. I select for temperaments and personality traits. I am currently looking for males that help with the littles.

I choose to not use a Marans in my OE cross as they usually aren't that great of layers. I went with Welsummer. But that part of my cross is the male too. I have him over legbars. Which creates a sexlink cross. So far the hen I am hatching from is creating very easily sexes males and females. I've heard that trait can lost if not selected for carefully

 

[RememberTheWay]

This is another set, cherry picked from a larger number of eggs.
The top 2 (larger) are from pure Welbars. The bottom ones are pullet eggs from the f5 flock.
View attachment 3933731
Progress is being made slowly. Non-breeders have no idea the time, work and money involved in making a new color.

I agree- it's definitely a long term commitment and you have to have a love/passion for it or you will give up before you reach completion!

 

[RememberTheWay]

I probably bit off more than I should have with adding Rosecomb brown leghorns. The number of spin-off projects from them is mind-boggling.
Sometimes I get a new breed and quickly decide I don't like them. Leghorns have never been my favorites (no offense intended - the poultry world needs diversity of likes). These are "supposed" to be the more docile of the Leghorns. We'll see. In any case, they are scarce in my area and worth a look for someone that wants a more frost hardy but high productivity layer.

I kind of regretted getting rid of mine but I am totally with you on this! I found leghorns to be very flighty, skittish, and hard to contain birds. Which is why I got rid of them all. Now I have projects that they would be useful for and regret getting rid of them. But I think I would like a mix of lavender and white birds this time for the LHs

 

[dheltzel]

Very interesting
Do you still breed from the nasty boys? From what I understand aggression is a genetic and hereditary trait that can be selected against or for (American Game). Personally, those birds are not welcome on my farm or my breeding program. I select for temperaments and personality traits. I am currently looking for males that help with the littles.

I choose to not use a Marans in my OE cross as they usually aren't that great of layers. I went with Welsummer. But that part of my cross is the male too. I have him over legbars. Which creates a sexlink cross. So far the hen I am hatching from is creating very easily sexes males and females. I've heard that trait can lost if not selected for carefully

Genetics is definitely a big part of cockerel aggression. Not 100%, but it clearly can be selected for or against. When I first raise the Jill Rees Legbars from Greenfire, the roosters were a bit more aggressive toward me than my other breeds. I raised every chick that first year and ended up with literally dozens of cockerels that all looked the same. Very little reason to cull based on leg color or cresting. So, I kept them all with the pullets and every time a cockerel so much as flared his hackles at me, I grabbed him and removed him from the gene pool. That proved to be a "once and done". I never had any of the cream legbars cockerels in that line ever show any aggression. With the Opals, if felt like I was starting over. Really, they were worse. For that reason I keep a lot of cockerels and try to cull quickly for aggression. This is proving to be harder, but I am outcrossing to the creams every other generation to make the future Opals more like my line of Creams, which I think are nearly perfect in every way