Cream Legbars

[chicken pickin]

I will try to be back on later to give Rangechicks some feedback, but I wanted to take a second to educate on keel length. Jelly has a proper length keel and nicely rounded breast from the side. If you look at Peanut you can see a slanting from the top of the breast to the legs indicating a short keel. They are young and will get more flesh over the next year, but this 20-24 week time period is ideal for checking width of heart girth, length and straightness of keel, and tail angles. You can also wait until 12-18 months if you want you choose breeders based on how well they flesh out. I hope that helps! Best wishes!

I think this is great information, thanks for sharing. A lot of us Im sure still have a hard time with body type and important things to look at, like the keel for one, so It is helpful when more knowledgeable people can jump in and give us a lesson or two.

 

[RangeChicks]

I will try to be back on later to give Rangechicks some feedback, but I wanted to take a second to educate on keel length. Jelly has a proper length keel and nicely rounded breast from the side. If you look at Peanut you can see a slanting from the top of the breast to the legs indicating a short keel. They are young and will get more flesh over the next year, but this 20-24 week time period is ideal for checking width of heart girth, length and straightness of keel, and tail angles. You can also wait until 12-18 months if you want you choose breeders based on how well they flesh out. I hope that helps! Best wishes!

Thank you for this input. It really does help. I look forward to a more detailed assessment on them when you can KPenley. Caychris, thank you for your input also. Your eyes saw something different and sparked a great discussion. This is what I was hoping for! Thanks everyone. I love what all I am learning through you.

 

[RangeChicks]

Just reviewed the comments again & saw that I missed a couple of questions from you guys.

Yes, Kraker does have a crest. It is on the smaller side, but definitely present.

The hens all have crests, too. Some are just smaller than the others. I would like to see larger ones down the road.

I don't know how to take pictures of the wings, so no, I haven't done that yet. I am also not clear on where the wing triangle is. If someone would answer these things for me it would be great & I will post.

How do I measure the width of heart girth?

I will also get some side shots of Butter. She was way too interested in checking out what I was doing yesterday. She was up close and in my face the whole time. She rode on my back the whole time I was bent over taking pix of the others.......

As for color, yes, Cookie's salmon is very muddy. I'm also concerned that Peanut is too gold (does she carry the cream?). I will attach a couple of pictures of her with Jelly for comparison.

How is the color of the hackles on all the girls? Are they all over melanized? What about the color of their heads & crests? To me, Cookie & Butter have the best cream, while Jelly is a little darker cream & Peanut is too gold. Is the dark in Cookie's hackles a flaw?

Jelly is in granddaughter's lap (quite happily) and Peanut is on the ground asking to come up...Sadly, they've grown too big for both to fit there any more....

 

[chicken pickin]

The wing triangle is literally the triangle you see at the end of the wing when the wing is closed and the chicken is just going about its normal business.
Here you can see a white wing triangle


Here are some open and closed wings
Here you can see a barred wing triangle which to me is more correct in terms of SOP
This is an open wing shot of the barred wing triangle male above and to me is what the SOP is looking for in terms or wing color and barring


and a wing triangle that is white with slight barring


this is the same male as the pic above


This male had a pretty white wing triangle with minimal barring

open wing from the male pictured above.

I hope this helps a little. Some one please jump in if I didn't give enough detail or explain well enough

 

[KPenley]

Great job chicken pickin! Just to add, the wing triangle is made up of secondary flight feathers. If you imagine the wing as a hand with the axial feather (the little one in the middle) as the middle finger and the feathers toward the front of the bird as the thumb (primary flight feathers), the long feathers toward the back are the secondaries or secondary flight feathers.
To measure heart girth, find where the wing connects to the body. Slide your thumb and middle, or pointer, finger down behind the wing along the sides of the body. This is measuring the width of the body where most of the internal organs are. The wider it is, generally the healthier the bird because they have more room for organs. You can also measure the base of the tail this way. Hope that helps!

Oh look, I had a simple diagram saved

 

[dretd]

The wing triangle is literally the triangle you see at the end of the wing when the wing is closed and the chicken is just going about its normal business.
Here you can see a white wing triangle
Here you can see a barred wing triangle which to me is more correct in terms of SOP
This is an open wing shot of the barred wing triangle male above and to me is what the SOP is looking for in terms or wing color and barring
I hope this helps a little. Some one please jump in if I didn't give enough detail or explain well enough

I think you did a fantastic job! You can also do the same with the females to get a rough idea on the colors they will throw. I am not quite sure yet what the male wing SOP means to me. The base duckwing pattern has a gold (or cream) leading edge to the secondaries/wing triangle, so I think that having a solid or only mildly barred wing triangle (aka bay) is ok, but thats my take.

@Rangechicks. I think you have a wonderful start to your flock! There has been quite a lot of discussion about the dilution cream and how it shows up in the birds. Cream Legbars are a very complicated bird to breed because you have many variables that influence the end color and its the balance of these separate colors that can change from generation to generation until you get your flock's genetics stablized. Factors influencing color:
1)The base saturation/intensity of the gold
2)Whether the barring is a dark barring or a light barring
3)Melanizers--I am seeing at least two separate melanizers in my flock and I am not sure of the inheritance of them yet
4)Red (sometimes called autosomal red) this will end up being described as chestnut when the birds are diluted
5)Dilution status--whether the birds carry two copies of the cream gene

Its like each of these color factors can be dialed up or down depending on how they are expressed in each flock. You may have a bird that is Ig/ig (only carries cream) that can look very, very similarly to an ig/ig (expresses the cream dilution) because the carrier has lighter barring, fewer melanizers and no red. They superficially can look very similar to one another.

The SOP is a description of the bird that is really a recipe for how to make the bird a good example of the breed without knowing the actual genetics of the bird. In Cream Legbars, the SOP allows for chestnut in many areas, it does not allow for chestnut in the wing triangle (aka bay)--those feathers are called the secondaries. Punnett also reported in one of his papers that chestnut did not appear in the secondaries and that only gold was responsible for the brown color in that area. Because of this many breeders are looking in particular at the secondaries to help them understand if their birds are expressing cream or not. It is impossible for me to know if the color in the back, saddle, wing or crest is gold or chestnut but because chestnut is not allowed in the secondaries, I think it is really helpful for me to use this area as a guide to understand my birds. Some breeders don't go by this and that's fine, too. Because cream is pretty pale and the secondaries are barred white and grey, the wing triangles will end up looking white and grey in cream birds.

Here is an example of barred Cream in my flock:

And here is a wing that has gold/tan/brown barring visible in the leading edge of the secondaries

And another example of the gold/tan/brown in the leading edge of the secondaries:

Here is what the one that lacks the gold color looks like in a folded wing I like this boy a lot although he is a little too melanized. His type is pretty good and I like that he has a fair amount of chestnut on his wing and some in his saddle:

And here is an example of a bird that has gold in his wing triangle from my flock. His wing triangle is more of a buff color:

As you can see I have both cream and non-cream Cream Legbars in my flock at this point. I am working on building my barn before painting it and for me it is useful to breed a lot, even the ones that I think are not expressing cream when I like their type. Every breeder has their own take on how to approach their breeding project. Some breeders may even disagree with my assessment that I have non-cream in my flock and believe that all of my birds are cream or even that my lighter birds are silver based. I have done some test breedings and am fairly confident at this point of my assessment of dilution status within my own flock.

It can be very hard to assess color from photographs, so I would recommend that you look at your own flock and try to figure out what you have genetically. I especially like Uncle Kracker's very crisp barring on his breast--that is something that I do not have yet and think that it is great to see you have in your building blocks!

 

[tdhenson86]

Quote: What is it about this guy that you believe is too melanized? Other than his lack of barring on the wing triangle, I thought he was a great looking guy. Help me understand what you're breeding toward and away from in an example like him.

 

[tdhenson86]

Also, I remember the discussion about silver, cream, and gold. There are some theories on the colors. Can someone help me with examples of hens that are considered silver, cream, or gold. I have two coloration patterns in my current birds. I have bred out or sold off the gold hens--basically a yellow/gold in the hackles. I now have only silver and what I would consider a cream color and I'm trying to figure out what is considered SOP and what's not since the SOP is a little vague on explaining what they mean by the coloring.

Thanks in advance!

P.S. Any pictures would be great!

 

[chicken pickin]

Also, I remember the discussion about silver, cream, and gold. There are some theories on the colors. Can someone help me with examples of hens that are considered silver, cream, or gold. I have two coloration patterns in my current birds. I have bred out or sold off the gold hens--basically a yellow/gold in the hackles. I now have only silver and what I would consider a cream color and I'm trying to figure out what is considered SOP and what's not since the SOP is a little vague on explaining what they mean by the coloring.

Thanks in advance!

P.S. Any pictures would be great!

These pictures below are of my flock and of my opinion only, other may have differing ideas on color.

Here are pictures of what I perseve as a gold pullet and a Cream pullet (though the hackles look more silver ish)
notice the one I consider gold has yellow gold in the hackles and the breast is more rusty orange than salmon







Here is an example of 2 cream pullets side by side, one more silver(and not too my liking) and the other more of a buttery cream(this is the color I hope to breed forward)


Here is a better few of the pullet I consider to be a good cream







and a hen that I think shows good cream



This is a pullet I have that I think falls into the silver gray body area, with the silver/gray barred tail


And here is a pullet I have that shows gray through out her body and now signs of the warm browns that show up on most pullets but should not be there. She lacks the barring needed though






So these are a few examples from some of my birds and they are far from perfect but I hope I helped a little

 

[dretd]

Quote:

What is it about this guy that you believe is too melanized? Other than his lack of barring on the wing triangle, I thought he was a great looking guy. Help me understand what you're breeding toward and away from in an example like him.

Thanks for the question--I have to agree that I think he's a pretty good looking guy too!

The picture of this fellow was taken several months--I forget his age, but maybe about 5 months old. I haven't been able to get him to pause long enough to get a quality recent picture.

If you look at his secondary coverts--instead of being the cream and grey they are supposed to be, he has one small section that is mostly black--the barring is not strong enough to override the melanization there. I would prefer to see crisper barring on his chest and have the barring carried farther down the breast as well. So instead of black and white barring I am getting basalt and light grey barring. Other than that, on color anyway, I am hoping to capture him in his offspring. I like the chestnut and hope that I can preserve that color moving forward. I love that he has only a tiny amount of positive white in his greater sickles. His comb is very straight with only the tiniest fold in the front and not overly large. I would like to see a little more depth in his body, but its not bad. His tail angle is ok, but needs to be a little lower. He has a nice mellow personality which is really super--not as flighty as some of his hatch-mates even though he was raised by a broody.

Hope this helps!