IoneDexamene
In the Brooder
- Jul 20, 2017
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The only chicken that breeds true for a remotely dark green egg is the Swedish Isbar, an expensive and hard-to-find variety which often lays disappointingly pale eggs. To remedy this, I've come up with a strategy to quickly create olive eggers that are homozygous for the blue shell base gene, but without the huge quantities of test crosses usually suggested for this sort of breeding program. I'll give the TL;DR here first, but I can give more information on how and why this cross works if anyone is interested.
In short: take the darkest-laying pea-combed olive egger hen you can find (must lay a green egg, not brown!) and cross her to a cream legbar rooster. The vast majority (around 94%) of the offspring with pea combs will be homozygous-for-blue-shell-base olive eggers, and their eggs will be about half as dark as their mother's. You can use these birds to start a flock of relatively true-breeding olive layers. The recessive white shell base will still be lurking in your flock, to some extent, but not in any great quantity; as long as you remove the rare brown layers that pop up from your breeding program, the trait will continue to fade from your population. At this point, you can also start selecting for darker eggs if you want, the same way you might with a marans flock.
If anyone has any questions about this, wants/plans to do this cross, or has ever done (or even heard of!) projects similar to this one, please let me know! If there's interest, I may also have hatching eggs available in the future.
In short: take the darkest-laying pea-combed olive egger hen you can find (must lay a green egg, not brown!) and cross her to a cream legbar rooster. The vast majority (around 94%) of the offspring with pea combs will be homozygous-for-blue-shell-base olive eggers, and their eggs will be about half as dark as their mother's. You can use these birds to start a flock of relatively true-breeding olive layers. The recessive white shell base will still be lurking in your flock, to some extent, but not in any great quantity; as long as you remove the rare brown layers that pop up from your breeding program, the trait will continue to fade from your population. At this point, you can also start selecting for darker eggs if you want, the same way you might with a marans flock.
If anyone has any questions about this, wants/plans to do this cross, or has ever done (or even heard of!) projects similar to this one, please let me know! If there's interest, I may also have hatching eggs available in the future.
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