1) My personal definition is: Cream is the color that is produced when a chicken has two copies of the inhibitor of gold gene that in its homozygous state will produce a feather that can range between off-white and a pale buttery color, depending on the other genes (barring, autosomal red/chestnut and melanizers) the bird also has in its makeup. If you try to put a color swatch in place you will disenfranchise anyone who things that cream is lighter or darker. Who gets to make that decision? Because if you ask 10 experienced breeders I doubt you will get anything close to a consensus. What do you suggest for how cream should be defined--do you have a definition you think would be accurate and not divisive? Yes I know there is no ring-side genetic test but hopefully a breeder will have hatched enough birds to figure out what cream looks like in their flock. My personal goal is to get a male with maximal expression of the Cream coloration but still be ig/ig which I am determining by looking at the secondaries until I figure out a more accurate method--its all I've got for now. If another breeder doesn't agree with the wing triangle that's fine by me and if a breeder prefers a whiter shade of cream, that's fine by me. I don't want to tell someone else how they should interpret a color since I wouldn't want someone to tell me that my richer cream is wrong. Not sure the solution on how to define a color when there are so many views on what it is? Reminds me of the discussion on the blue vs green egg--colors are very definitely in the eye of the beholder!
2) Unfortunately people read that the bird is based on a (British) Leghorn and since we are in America all they know is the American version and the reality is that the birds that were used were actually of Danish origin. Not sure how to un-ring that bell--folks will skim history and assume things then pass that information on to others. How do we combat that other than to have the original history in there that clearly states that the birds are developed in England and the English Leghorn is different than the American one? I have seen numerous postings on FB taking about trying to get 'the swoop' or to just look at the Light Brown Leghorn as a reference --but if they would bother to read the SOPs of each bird, its clear the descriptions are quite different. IMO the CLB is closest to the Andalusian. When I reference that I pretty much get crickets and so trying to inform doesn't seem to make any headway. What would you suggest?
3) In my flock I think that the whiter a cream the bird has, the less of a mismatch there is. Also I am seeing that birds that are split for cream have more of a mismatch and birds with more chestnut have more of a mismatch. Although a mismatch is not as close to the SOP as a match--most of the colors in one bird or another have incongruities with the SOP sine it is an ideal and there are not perfect matches anywhere--you just do your best as a breeder to get a balance.
4) If you refer back to the British Standard, it says "back and shoulders cream with dark grey barring, some chestnut permissible....coverts grey barred, tips cream, some chestnut smudges permissible". Ours says: Fronts and bows: dark grey, faintly barred, some chestnut permissible, coverts: grey barred, tipped in cream, back: Cream, barred with dark grey, some chestnut permissible" both say cream and grey, some chestnut permissible. We have morphed the coverts from the Brits into wing bows as there is a difference in terminology. The original indicates some chestnut smudges so if you go by that, it would be hard to conclude that a solid chestnut block or bow would be appropriate. Just the fact that the description talks about the cream and grey/darkgrey first then has a comma and has a qualification that says some chestnut is permitted indicates that the Brits thought the default was without chestnut but they would allow 'some'---I like chestnut so I am not trying to eliminate it but rather retain 'some' but avoiding a large color block. I know that this is not ideal according to standard but since I like it it stays in my flock. We are leaving the 'some' up to the breeder but a solid chestnut wing bow would cross over into the 'too much' IMO.
5) I agree there is variation in size--I suspect there may two two genetic variants out there. Plus the males have a small and the females have a medium, so there is a slight incongruity there. In my males with the larger variant (the heads are rounder and there is a thicker fleshy pad behind the comb at hatch), I have serious issues with a wonky comb. In theory I have some chickens who are heterozygous for crest (sires are crested and hens were not) and the one roo with the larger crest and wonky comb sires offspring with the exact same comb/crest combo and the smaller crested one sires straight combs and smaller crests. There clearly seems to be some variance and also my guess is some epistasis going on for sure. I think the crest is actually pretty open to interpretation in the SOP as written. We did remove wording in the female that said the crest was attached at the forefront of the skull--we came to the conclusion that the longer feathers on each side of the comb were not part of the actual crest and there was another unknown gene that influences their size (and maybe influences the size of the larger crests as well). Do you think that the wording of the SOP is inadequate or too strict as it is written?
