Cream Legbar Working Group: Standard of Perfection

[MnMPoultry]

If I'm reading this right, are we looking at making a physical standard and a color standard for a couple varieties (red and cream)? What about the white legbars that GFF Line A (I think) is throwing?

 

[Flaming Chicken]

nicalandia---

What an amazing demo for us.  Thanks.  In our virtual future club, at our first virtual convention-- you will have to be our virtual keynote speaker on the topic of 'where IS the cream in the cream legbar!'  

Seriously -- THANK YOU for that information and assembling the photos with descriptions. Eggs-elent. 

ETA - I do have questions though.  Punnett states that (or was it SOP from uK) some chestnut is allowed in the male feathering.  So would it really be something that would disqualify a bird as a breeder...basically was the genetic knowledge in the 1940's unequal to the present day knowledge?  

And..... if we are trying to establish the breed for the APA qualification -- would we even want to talk about any out-crossing at this Point?  Or would we want to be sure that we had purebred birds.  

I too appreciate the information that Nicalandia shared. Very interesting but I hope that it was meant to be informative and not an expectation for us all to follow. i

am a bit alarmed that we might go to a breed standard that disqualifies all of our current stock that is available. Out crossing for a color standard might also create problems with egg color for generations to come and also bring us under fire for not having purebred cream Legbars.

I like our many colored whimsical blue egg layers. I hate to see us go to pale anemic bland looking cream Legbars

 

[ChicKat]

Ok, I wish to be tactful.

In my novice opinion, my cream legbars do not meet BPS description. Although I am wishing to see more USA examples, what I see on Greenfire Farms, the parent stock, look remarkably similar to mine. Although, ChicKat's bird may have a lighter look, it is still flooded with autosomal red. If I understand Nicalandia, either closer to ideal males are needed or a several year process of cross-breeding of other stock is necessary to recover the proper base for cream to be placed on.


1). Knowing this, we can move to drafting the cream legbar from its original description into a form for consideration of APA. We can import or ask those who import professionally to move towards the correct ideal. Some may choose to complain about paying high prices for a bird that does not appear to be a cream legbar and may be years off-mark.

2). Then there is some portion within this forum that like the flamboyant feathering (as described on Greenfire Farms website). Admittedly even I like this look. This could be called the American red legbar as I don't see a lot of cream.

I'm OK with either, or other options, as the purpose and intent is to draft a standard. Perhaps, both should be written. Again all comments welcomed. Do you wish to retain and improve a heritage breed or do you wish to forge a new breed?

Hey redchicken9

I think you have uncovered something very basic and important. And at first glance, I am saying that we take the degrees of our flamboyancy - and make a new American standard. I will go back and dig up Punnett's quote where he talks about the rooster being very impressive, and I think it was regarding the coloring. -- I will be back with some more on this.

 

[ChicKat]

I too appreciate the information that Nicalandia shared. Very interesting but I hope that it was meant to be informative and not an expectation for us all to follow. i
am a bit alarmed that we might go to a breed standard that disqualifies all of our current stock that is available. Out crossing for a color standard might also create problems with egg color for generations to come and also bring us under fire for not having purebred cream Legbars.
I like our many colored whimsical blue egg layers. I hate to see us go to pale anemic bland looking cream Legbars

I think that Flaming Chicken and redchicken9 have just zeroed in on what we need to do.

We have good healthy birds..that are "darker" than the ones in UK..... but most of us like our USA birds better than the ones in the UK.

I also would prefer that we don't go bland and pale, and that we keep the blue eggs.

There are so many unknown variables that could creep in with any out crossings that I would say -- we work with exactly the stock we have now -- and accept more color than they do in the UK and go from there.

I'm fine with the bird that has the middle level coloring in the three that blackbirds13 posted. The darker one--breed away from that, the lighter one, breed away from that.

I wonder if we got the genome sequenced what we would get for 'perfection' of the cream gene and the barring.

Hopefully the alarm will go away and we may come to our senses....(LOL) and appreciate what we have.

ETA - darker than the lightest and lighter than the mid-colored bird is "perfection" - but perfection is where you go not where you start...and Walt advised us to NOT put something in SOP that isn't achievable and that would disqualify all our birds. I think we need to consider the range of colors that we have.

In a long ago post...I said the lighter the better was the word I heard for roosters...BUT, I think that the too pale roosters loose a lot of the cream legbar dazzle.

 

[ChicKat]

I will type this out later...but please go to this link-- scroll to the picture of the pullet and read what Punnett said about the color -- it is written between the picture of the pullet and the picture of the cockerel

http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/41/1.pdf

so, I will say again that UK sop has it wrong. sorry UK...but Punnett is the originator. He mentions gold and chestnut...and I think that is what we want to keep. I think he also mentions that the barring is NOT as distinct as the BPR.

wouldn't that solve a lot of the problems? What if we used Punnett's descriptions of the plumage for the USA standard. (poor man--do you think he is spinning in has grave because no one knows what he intended with these birds) -- I can make spooky references with Hallowe'en coming can't I...I used to work near the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland.... BOO

ETA - IMO, to directly answer redchicken9's question about the standards to be forged for the bird in the USA.... we would be better off describing the bird that resides here. Since crest is dominant genetically (correct me if I am wrong, folks) we would want to have crests, since we don't have any olive eggs, we can drop that from the standard, the body type is leghorn like, yellow legs and beak, white earlobes, or cream but not red, eggs that demonstrate the blue-egg gene without any brown bloom....so white eggs would not be selected for...I'm real clear in my head that we wouldn't out cross and we wouldn't eliminate the majority of our stock.

The expression I wanted from Punnett was for the male "Brilliant and quite unlike that of any recognized breed" - and that would certainly incorporate the colorations and dismiss the birds that are too pale and washed out. Could we substitute the above quote for the 'stiltiness' from the UK standard??

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot one of the biggest advantages of all that we are now so getting used to and not thinking it is so remarkable...autosexing -- as we shall see on our logo, and when we wear a T-shirt with it on...we will be arrested by the local police and sent to jail. -- (that was my joke with Omaeve.....)

 

[normanack]

I will type this out later...but please go to this link-- scroll to the picture of the pullet and read what Punnett said about the color -- it is written between the picture of the pullet and the picture of the cockerel

http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/41/1.pdf

I'm trying to make sense of that article, as well as this one:
http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/48/327.pdf

and have been thinking about a paragraph-by-paragraph read-a-long. I.e. we'd all read a specified -- fairly short -- amount of the text, put it in our own words, and then ask and answer each other's questions about it before moving onto the next chunk.

I'm much better at understanding stuff if I try to recreate it in my own words. It becomes glaringly obvious when I hit a term or concept I don't understand, when before I would have just read over it and figured I knew what it meant.

It would be an extra commitment on top of the club work, but may be worth it. Then again, I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and many or all of you may simply have to read the articles through once or twice to understand them. I'm not that clever. ;-)

 

[lonnyandrinda]

LOL about Punnett...

I don't read Punnetts paper as indicating chestnut on the saddle though, his paper says chestnut on wing coverts, does that mean shoulder? It does say GOLD for the hackle, though, and British standard definitely eliminated birds with gold (not cream) hackles! I am slightly confused now!

I am also in agreeance for a more colorful standard, or at least more color allowed. Eliminating ALL our stock with an unattainable SOP or having to immediately outcross and create who-knows-what problems are NOT appealing to me.

Rinda

 

[redchicken9]

I will type this out later...but please go to this link-- scroll to the picture of the pullet and read what Punnett said about the color -- it is written between the picture of the pullet and the picture of the cockerel

http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/41/1.pdf

so, I will say again that UK sop has it wrong. sorry UK...but Punnett is the originator. He mentions gold and chestnut...and I think that is what we want to keep. I think he also mentions that the barring is NOT as distinct as the BPR.

wouldn't that solve a lot of the problems? What if we used Punnett's descriptions of the plumage for the USA standard. (poor man--do you think he is spinning in has grave because no one knows what he intended with these birds) -- I can make spooky references with Hallowe'en coming can't I...I used to work near the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland.... BOO

I was told that this is not describing the cream legbar as it does not reference the chilean hen, it's an earlier cross.

I'm headed to the mailbox to see if the British Poultry Standards have arrived. Truly there are nuts to crack here. Someone says, let's go with what we have and instantly I think the opposite. It's only two years in. According to GFF it took almost 2 decades to produce a bird that was genetically stable. From Punnett and Pease to then a first showing in 1947 to receiving a written standard in 1958, I think this is heritage. The cream legbar has a legacy, which should not be ignored. With a better guideline of what it is we want (cream legbars that are cream), we might all have stock that fits this with careful new importation. I do not have the skills or desire to re-make the cream legbar from my current stock, plus the aspect of stabilizing the retrofit. The best viable option seems to be improving stock with a non-red enhanced roo. The current disappointment in the GFF stock is that I'd want the genetic capacity to produce a cream legbar. As advertised a "supermodel" does not need to show up at the door, but a model that holds the genetic potential towards improvement is expected.

On the other hand, I think we have beautiful birds here. Ok some things like form can be improved, but can we stabilize the red enhancement? or is it too unknown? My birds are rusty or mottled, they do not seem crisp. A white feather in the tail may look flashy or fun, but white splashed in the primaries or rust mottled in many places seems without consistency. Since it can take decades to produce a genetically stable bird, I wonder if even with a vision of a red/rust/chestnut within our birds can it happen or if it is even more painful than the alternative to begin anew? Is red enhancement a desirable or undesirable trait? Can anyone speak to this?

Truly I could champion either position. More than being an instigator, which is also great (Omaeve), I'd like to be an explorer on this. Overall, neither exactly matter to me, my pure short term intent is to draft a standard we can move towards. This is a draft, not final, even if not accepted by all parties. In terms of drafting, it is easiest to draft a cream legbar standard that is based on all aspects of the official UK cream legbar. Tweaks like egg color allowed. However, there is no reason why we couldn't try a second version of a better ideal of what is seen in the US currently. White, well, white seems easy as cake. Plumage: Web, fluff and shafts of all feathers, in all sections, white.

So maybe the form could be cream legbar or legbar and the color be cream, all white, and this third color we see many versions of? For this third, we probably do not have the consistency of color and type to garner recognition. We may not even have cream legbars, but they are not unicorns they do exist. Please, please, if you have what meets the UK standards of cream coloring here in the US, please step up. Ultimately, we do need to make a move towards a vision. Maybe, just maybe, more than one could exist.

One added opinion is I do not like silver, to me it is the incorrect form of cream and bleached out.

 

[normanack]

Feel absolutely free to skip over this post. It's an example of what I meant by reading something and putting it in my own words so I could pinpoint what I don't understand.


# Reading Punnett's Genetic Studies in Poultry: X. Cream Plumage

In his study of the genetics of blue eggs, Punnett encountered a new plumage color: cream. Mating a light yellow-brown Chilean hen to a Gold-Pencilled Hamburg produced an F1 generation of gold birds with irregular penciling. These Chilean-Hamburg chicks, when bred to each other, produced some F2 cream birds ("birds with a very creamy ground colour") in a proportion indicating cream as a simple recessive to gold. (The proof of that is in breeding cream to cream and getting cream.) The cream birds had a uniform ground color (cream), but had great diversity in development and distribution of melanic pigment; i.e. their markings varied. The question at this point is as follows: assuming cream is recessive to gold, is the cream gene an inhibitor of gold? Or is gold an intensification of cream? Punnett sees the gold gene as an intensification of cream. So his experiment is to create a cream form from an existing plumage. He chose Buff and Brown Leghorns which have Columbian plumage. [What is the definition of Columbian plumage?]

Punnett crossed a Buff Leghorn cock with two cream hens. All the resulting birds -- F1s -- were light gold. Breeding these pale golds together resulted in the F2s: golds and creams in a 2:1 ratio (approximately). Those F2s with the least melanic pigment (i.e. those with the lightest markings? Or does this refer to the base colour having less dark pigment? Or both?) were bred together. The resulting F3 generation were all cream with very little melanic pigment (except for one). There was some variation:

1. The hens with more melanic pigment had a slight gold tinge in their cream base colour.
2. The cocks never had a gold tinge. Instead, their cream colour was so faint that they looked silver (white), with the hackle feathers a faint straw colour that wasaccentuated as the feathers aged. [Here he goes all Columbian again and I need to know what that means.] Punnett notes that he has never seen a Columbian cock with the female's cream ground color. Nor has he ever had a hen that looked silver like the cocks. He wonders what would happen to a castrated bird of this strain. [Why?]

That's the first two paragraphs. I'm not sure I've got the F1s, 2s, and 3s correctly labeled.

 

[ChicKat]

I'm trying to make sense of that article, as well as this one:
http://www.ias.ac.in/jarch/jgenet/48/327.pdf

and have been thinking about a paragraph-by-paragraph read-a-long. I.e. we'd all read a specified -- fairly short -- amount of the text, put it in our own words, and then ask and answer each other's questions about it before moving onto the next chunk.

I'm much better at understanding stuff if I try to recreate it in my own words. It becomes glaringly obvious when I hit a term or concept I don't understand, when before I would have just read over it and figured I knew what it meant.

It would be an extra commitment on top of the club work, but may be worth it. Then again, I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer, and many or all of you may simply have to read the articles through once or twice to understand them. I'm not that clever. ;-)

Wow, in that quote on plate 14 figures 1 and 2 is our elusive cream {and of course it is black and white....but someplace on this earth there is an original.