This is my latest enigma, a male out of some jumbo ginger eggs. I bred him to some pearl pansy hens and got 4 pansy or pearl pansy males. So I figured out he’s ginger pansy, but I was still a bit curious about those whitish streaks, several of his chicks were likewise ‘frosted’ but wasn’t sure what, if anything it meant. I have some 4 week old chicks I was trying to sex today, just random flock chicks, and several of those were streaky as well and feather sexing was a bit tougher today. Part of that was the American Pansy, males have red heads, unless they are ginger or roux or silver or something, then the whole bird is ginger or whatever! Oops, so much for being feather sexable! So some were pansy with a color modifier but the streaky ones were also tough, why? A bit of digging on pipsnchicks and i think I have an answer: sparkly Italian. Sparkly expands the black spots which makes the lighter areas more vivid as well as playing havoc with chest spots making feather sexing fun, add in a color modifier like ginger that turns your black to beige and voila! I think he’s also got fee in there as he’s much lighter than the typical ginger birds. Sparkly and American pansy also share the same gene location, he can’t be homozygous for both. Back in genetics class it was just black crossed with white, but quail have like 70 different color genes and modifiers! So we have a jumbo ginger fee heterozygous American pansy and sparkly. I’m getting some fun chick colors but trying to name them is a tongue twister!
