ISA browns vs. Starlight Green Eggers

[Goatlover09]

All mine, and the adult chicken they picture on the website, have a single comb.

Mine have that too. They are part prarie blue egger so maybe they are supposed to have pea combs. But i don't know, all my chicks from hoovers hatchery are kust weird. My one cream legbar has crooked toes.

 

[FunClucks]

I'm gonna say, I think the Hoovers website about their SGE comb type is wrong, or they're not telling the full story about the mix of the chickens used to create the SGE.

I've done it myself, crossed the prairie bluebells with a single comb brown egg gene rooster (Production Red). Based on the number of pea comb progeny I got, it turns out many if not all of the PBEs parents may have been homozygous for pea comb also. I had 6 PBEs that I incubated eggs from, only one of which has some greenish tinge (indicating presence of brown egg genes and possibly single comb in genetics). I only had one chicken out of 18 babies that ended up with straight comb, and that one lays peach (no blue egg gene). All the rest of the chickens had pea comb (modified pea comb, obviously heterozygous cause they're huge and floppy, while their parents' combs are small and close to the body) and all the ones that had pea comb laid green eggs (as expected). So I just don't see them getting from PBE to SGE quickly if at all.

Note: That cross produced GORGEOUS and sweet and in my case super soft green egg layers that were mahogany red with occasional gold and black lacing. Body size more like their father than smaller like their mother. And if the moms were silver based, the progeny was sex-linked. The roosters were also gorgeous but some of their tails were confused (moms had short blocky tails, dad's was long and curling and full, that didn't always mix well, at least up to 3 months). So if anyone is wondering if breeding the SGEs to get green egg layers is possible, it's totally possible, and they make more of a mint colored egg than a light olive egg like the SGEs did.

What I think is that Hoover's found a blue egg layer where blue is linked to straight comb (there's a few out there, or they bred a lot of PBEs to get these specific traits as a sport), and then bred the blue egg layer with straight comb to a brown egg straight comb roo to create repeatable green egg progeny, and they keep two parent lines to do this. Because all the SGE I've ever seen or heard about are single comb, and you can't select for colored eggs based on comb type when your blue egg gene is tied to single comb. There's at least a 15% chance (per Hoover's) that your chicken could lay tan (I have one). The tan egg layer and green egg layers look similar enough that you can't select by comb type.