Cream Legbar / Welsummer mix ?

[pinewoodacres]

The trick is looking at the chipmunk markings, any “eyeliner,” and the triangle on the head. Muddy and/or absent markings are boys. The females’ markings are more clearly defined. Some are more ambiguous but wild type e+ base color should be autosexing if people are aiming to retain that quality when breeding.

Sex-linked barring can be sexed at hatch as well. Note this is different from autosexing and is not retained in future crosses of such. Anyway, double dose of barring lends to a large yellow head spot in males only. A single barring gene shows as a small, less conspicuous yellow head spot and can be on males or females. Females can only have one barring gene as it’s on the male chromosome so they will never have two copies or a large yellow spot.

A Legbar roo over Welsummer hens: he is passing a barring gene to ALL progeny regardless of sex, so all will have one copy. The Welsummers are not barred and thus will not pass a barring gene. This is not a sex-linked mating and all babies will be single barred.

The reverse (Welsummer x Legbar) is a sex-linked cross as the Welsummer male again has no barring gene to pass but the Legbar female has a barring gene on her male sex chromosome so that gets passed to all male progeny. So, all males in that cross will have a small yellow head spot (it can be hard to see if their chick down is on the light side) and no females will be barred/have head spots.

Learn to go by the wild type dimorphism and you’ll be good to go either way. I am working with both breeds in my project birds and I’ve only been wrong on sex once so far (and it was ambiguous).

Here’s a pic from last week’s hatch. The one on the left is a girl and the middle is a boy. The right is more ambiguous and I marked it as a boy. We shall see in a few weeks when the combs start coming in on the boys.

The second pic is two more in the incubator. You can pretty clearly see the sexual dimorphism here. Boy on left, girl on right. This boy is also double barred - you can see the large yellow head spot.

P.S. All the first generation females of either cross will lay green of some shade. She will carry only one blue shell gene, though, so she is not for sure going to pass that along to her babies. It’s a process to make them breed true.

 

[Chicks n stuff]

I have a Cream Legbar rooster who I believe is covering my 2 Welsummer hens.

Both are auto-sexing, but I'm wondering if that would come through in the cross chicks?
I have 4 that hatched, 2 were almost totally yellow, and 2 were dark brown chipmunk. I believe they are what the colors suggest (they are gone now and I don't have pictures of them, sorry).

What do you think? Do 2 auto-sexing breeds still make a sex-link chick? I can not find a thread or web search on this cross or the genetic possibilities even though it's likely a common cross. Thank you everyone.

Yes, and if you want you could keep the females and breed them to a cream legbar rooster and their chicks would continue to be auto sexing.

 

[Chicks n stuff]

I think if you had it the other way around you’d have a sexable cross, because you’d need the hen to be barred, correct? You will have olive eggers though!!! excited to see baby chicks from this cross though!

 

[Chicks n stuff]

Last year I hatched this cross. Legbar (rooster) X Welsummer. The chicks were not sex-linked. (You have to reverse the cross to have a Welsummer rooster over Legbar hens for sex-links) However, there was slight variation in the chicks and we were able to successfully pick out a few females based on markings. They now lay beautiful Sage green speckled eggs. Hens look just like a Legbar hen with copper leakage. This year we have reversed the cross as mentioned above and are now producing chicks that should be sex-linked.