Cross breeding outcome silvers

[silver-quail]

I have a male pharo brown quail and I have a female silver quail does anyone know what the eggs will hatch?

 

[dc3085]

You might ask around on some of the UK poultry forums if you don't get an answer here. We don't have silvers in the US and thats where most of the people responding to posts on BYC are from.

 

[Weirdness555]

Hello from the UK. I don't actually know anyone over here with silvers, and I haven't been able to find an active UK quail forum yet, hence I hang around here

However, I know that silver is recessive in button quail, and I would be tempted to guess that it is in coturnix (all the nice colours are ******) which would mean that unless your brown male is a carrier and has a silver gene then all of the offspring will be brown (happened with our buttons), but about half of them will carry a gene for silver so if you crossed them between each other, a quarter of those offspring will be silver.

If your male carries a silver gene, you would expect half of the offspring to be silver.

However, no matter what the expected percentages are, the chicks could all hatch with only one genetic combination, so even if all of the chicks are brown the male might still carry a silver gene. The more you hatch the more likely that the expected percentages will be expressed.

I'm sorry if this is all worse than useless, I don't really know all that much about it. If you try Google Scholar, they sometimes have scientific papers on the genetics of the different colour mutations.

Good luck

 

[dc3085]

I read somewhere on the ever so reliable internet that all of the silvers originated from a single bird in belgium in the 70s

 

[silver-quail]

Yeah just hatched out six eggs from my silver hen 3 are silvers one is a tuxedo and two look like Tibetans lol. I have 11 more to hatch in 9 days we will see the percentage hopefully