Investigating a Mysterious Tailless Sport

[Der Vogelhof]

In 2023 I crossed one of my blue Maran hens to a hatchery Black Jersey and one of the chicks had some odd characteristics. It was extremely late-feathering, moreso than I’d experienced before. I suspected some sort of T late feathering gene had popped up. When she finally did feather out, she was completely normal. Except she didn’t have a tail. She had all the normal caudal bone anatomy, and a normal pygostyle, just no follicles for retrices.

I crossed her with one of my non-related line-bred project roosters to see what I could find out about this mysterious bird- Araucana? Hongshan? What is she!?

She hatched 14/16 of her eggs herself on 12/7/2024. 7-8 appear to have mostly absent remiges, a noticeable smaller tail and rounded rump. It seems that the genes are inheritable, and may be codom or dom.

I’ve attached photos of the hen, both as an overgrown downy and today as an adult, and a few of her chicks from this batch. I will bx the line in the Summer to investigate further.

K

 

[Reave]

That's really interesting, especially that she still has the appropriate tailbones and everything!
Looking forward to seeing what you learn from the summer backcross, there could be some really fun gene(s) to play around with in there.

 

[Der Vogelhof]

That's really interesting, especially that she still has the appropriate tailbones and everything!
Looking forward to seeing what you learn from the summer backcross, there could be some really fun gene(s) to play around with in there.

I’ll post updates of the chicks here to show the late feathering gene. There seems to be three wing feather expressions not two: absent, reduced, and normal. I’ll know more about caudal anatomy in a week, my birds are bred very small, hens reach 3-4lbs and lay a Small grade egg size, and roosters stay under 8. The chicks are too little for me to really be able to tell about that yet. Like I mentioned above, the Hongshan breed from China has normal caudal anatomy but have a gene that deletes the follicles for retrices, so it could be that.