Cream Legbar Working Group: Standard of Perfection

[GaryDean26]

If you are going to hit the breed standards both the cockerels and pullets should be getting close to a pound at 6 weeks and right around 2 pounds at 10 weeks.

If your flock is like mine you are going to be way under weight, so you will need to establish your own bench marks and work towards larger birds by raising the cut off weight every year.

 

[WHmarans]

If you are going to hit the breed standards both the cockerels and pullets should be getting close to a pound at 6 weeks and right around 2 pounds at 10 weeks. 

If your flock is like mine you are going to be way under weight, so you will need to establish your own bench marks and work towards larger birds by raising the cut off weight every year.

Wow so far I'm way off at 10 weeks shes 1.41 lbs and the six week old is about .68 lbs. they are from the same cross. I'm sure the others six weeks old are nearly the same size. those girls are just alike at this point.

 

[normanack]

I just noticed today the more green CL eggs are whiter inside but the bluest egg is the same color all the way through. Is this usually the way it works? Is this a way to judge egg color?

Missed this post --
Did you peel off the membrane inside? For awhile I peeled it off before crushing the eggshells to feed back to the hens as it's a lot easier to deal with the shells that way (they dry more quickly and crush more easily).

I learned three things:

1. You can pretty much get the membrane ou,t in one piece, from each shell half if you're careful.
2. There is a second, thinner membrane that is easier to remove by rubbing it off than by peeling it. If you can't see the membrane, rub the inside of the shell and you should feel it.
3. I'm a nut.

 

[WHmarans]

Missed this post -- 
Did you peel off the membrane inside? For awhile I peeled it off before crushing the eggshells to feed back to the hens as it's a lot easier to deal with the shells that way (they dry more quickly and crush more easily). 

I learned three things:

1. You can pretty much get the membrane ou,t in one piece, from each shell half if you're careful. 
2. There is a second, thinner membrane that is easier to remove by rubbing it off than by peeling it. If you can't see the membrane, rub the inside of the shell and you should feel it.
3. I'm a nut.

That is a good tip for feeding back egg shell I've wanted to but afraid they will learn to eat their eggs. I've heard of baking the shell to make it unrecognizable but seems a lot of hassle for two eggs at a time.

 

[enola]

I collect my egg shells for a few days. Then I take them to hen house, dump them on the ground and step on them. It is like shark frenzy for a few seconds. They are gone! Have been doing this for years.........

 

[GaryDean26]

Wow so far I'm way off at 10 weeks shes 1.41 lbs and the six week old is about .68 lbs. they are from the same cross. I'm sure the others six weeks old are nearly the same size. those girls are just alike at this point.

Well, they are 32% under my crude benchmarks then and will probably end up about that much under the breed standard when mature too.

Standard Weights
Cock…………………………7 lbs. Hens…………………………6 lbs.

 

[enola]

Will choosing the larger chicks as replacements increase size in following generations?

 

[Laingcroft]

Regarding Jill or anyone in UK intentionally introducing silver to get to the correct look, I seriously doubt that. what they may have done is introduce silver to add size or perhaps an araucana to make eggs bluer, and unwittingly selected for silver - by selecting the silver-looking chicks. If the Cream Legbar is gold based as we all agree, then the chicks would be as the golds- as Pease had stated in his quote.

Regarding the possibility of the UK SOP being incorrect, such things have happened. After all by that time Punnett was in his 70's.

Selecting the chicks that were silver could certainly introduce a silver to a flock, if silver was there...and it probably was introduced not based on coloration but by an outcross to do something such as increase egg production. ETA Thye may even have introduced silver via barred bird to attempt to regain the autosexing that they were loosing over there.

QUOTE by Steen:

at the time the British a sop was created the lagbars we're in complete disarray or was all that later on I can't remember. The people who tried to bring Legbars back to what they should be I would have no doubt they could have used a silver bird to correct color.


I wish I had saved a page of links when I first began researching this breed. Like Steen, I seem to recall that the breed was accepted by the UK poultry organization sometime in 1958 at which point Dr. Punnett was still alive (he died in 1967). At some point after that (70s? 80s?) the more productive breeds came into favor and the CCL numbers started to decline. Following a resurgent interest in blue eggs for commercial production, the breed was, in part, recreated by using some of the original breed crosses. What some of those persons didn't understand if they don't read Dr. Punnett's original papers in 1940/41 Journal of Genetics, was that he used Gold Pencilled Hamburgs as the barred parent, not just the Barred Rock. And all SILVER birds were eliminated from the F1 crosses. I believe in attempting to re-populate the CCL, silver based barred rocks, being easier to obtain, were used instead of going through the longer process of using gold pencilled hamburgs --- particularly as the genetics were better understood by the 70s -- the 'eb' base and 'db' pattern genes in the Hamburg having been "discovered" in 1965.

Now, that I have read the papers (cited below) by Dr. Punnett, I have a clearer understanding of where I should aim in my breeding of the CCL.

The primary thing to remember is that Dr. Punnett's goal for the Legbar was an autosexing LEGHORN. It is clear from his own words in his paper on cream plumage, "The object of this cross [of the chilean/hamburg cream offspring with the Brown Leghorn] was to ascertain the appearance of the birds when cream was substituted for gold in the Brown Leghorn type of plumage."

F2 mating resulted in chickens that could be "divided with fair accuracy into two classes. For the [females] the distinction was breast colour which was either full or nearly full salmon, or else was either pale salmon or only tinged salmon...[males were either] splashed as in the male parent, or approaching nearly to the Brown Leghorn type..."

And this paragraph is the most important for our purposes, at least in my mind:

"From these was ultimately established a strain with Brown Leghorn plumage, but on a cream ground instead of a gold one. In such a strain the hen closely resembles a silver grey, though close inspection shows that the general tint is just a shade warmer, though less warm than in the Brown Leghorn, and that the neck hackles are straw tinged. In the cock, however, with his more abundant hackles, the distinction is far more obvious. For the white edging of the feathers in place of the normal gold brings about a very different appearance. Again, the chestnut (what we are calling autosomal red) of the wing covers (coverts?) is not so intense as in the Brown Leghorn. Nevertheless, though less intense, chestnut in the Brown Leghorn remains chestnut in its cream counter-part. The difference in ground colour between cream and gold offers a chance of distinguishing in a black-red (Brown Leghorn cock color) between coloration due to gold and that due to chestnut. Such a test is the outer web of the secondaries which in the Brown Leghorn is of a bright gold-brown. The bright brown outer web (secondaries) of a normal Brown Leghorn is replaced by white in the Cream. The inference is that in the black-red male, this part of the colour scheme is dependent on the development of gold pigment, and is independent of chestnut."

The parts above that are emphasized, to me, indicate that the autosomal red in the coverts at least, were not undesirable to Punnett, unlike the modern fancier as it would seem from the proliferation of phenotypically silver birds we see now. So for me at least, I'm aiming for a WARM silver gray colored hen with barred cream on crest and hackles, somewhere between the warm gold of a Brown Leghorn and the cool gray of a Silver Leghorn. For the males, I'm not going to worry about AR on the shoulders/coverts of my cockerels anymore. Some chestnut i.e. autosomal red is permitted per the UK standard and I believe we've left it in too.

Also of interest is Dr. Punnett's position with respect to cream as being different from that of a colleague (competitor?) L.W. Taylor who "regards the 'cream' gene as an inhibitor of gold (which we now know to be correct, hence the 'Ig') [while Dr. Punnett] prefers to look upon gold as being due to a gene which intensifies cream." That would indicate he believed every gold bird carries cream plus an intensifier and therefore, it makes sense that he would remove any silver birds from the breeding pool. Of note, the silver/gold (S/s+) gene was 'discovered' in 1912 and presumably well understood by the 30s.


For anyone who hasn't found his papers and wants to read them, here are the links to the Cream Plumage paper www.ias.ac.in/jarch/48/327.pdf and Blue Egg paper www.ias.ac.in/jarch/27/465.pdf

There are also papers on the Legbar and Barring genes and a later paper by A.G. Cock (yup, that's right) on the Interpretation of Autosexing for which I did not jot down the links. A Google search for Journal of Genetics with the subject matter and authors should turn them up since that's how I found them.

 

[ChicKat]

Thanks Tru!
good insights and research conclusions!!

 

[KPenley]

Thanks for your input Tru!

For everyone: Please keep in mind that the Cream Plumage article alluded to above was pertaining to Leghorn crosses, not Cream Legbars. The Cream Legbar that was standardized and accepted in 1958 was a descendant of these birds when crossed with Pease's Cream Legbars (at that time uncrested and white egg laying). So while Punnett's goal in his paper was transferring the cream to the Brown Leghorn, this was not the end game bird for us.