Mating pair?

[SC_Hugh]

Question #1: can brother and sister chickens be a mating pair? (I don't know if mine are from the same parents or not, but I would like to know the answer anyway).

Question #2: Anybody hatching eggs from two "very different" breeds? Mine are Blue Cochin and Dominique - that seems like an awful looking combo if they were to cross.

Question #3: What are good breed choices that BYC'ers are crossing? Pics please.

I am a total chicken newbie, so please excuse my naive questioning.

--Hugh

 

[Judy]

If you'll go to the Breeds, Genetics and Showing forum instead of this one (click on index) you'll find a lot of discussion of crosses and breeding. There is something called "line breeding" which is done commonly -- I believe it is crossing parent and offspring rather than brother and sister, the latter being evidently a little more likely to result in problems. (I don't know a lot about this but the info is there.)

You might get a sex link if you cross your two breeds -- again not sure but I believe the hen has to be the Dom.

I could do some searches and make more definite statements, but you'll want to look around there anyway.

Lots of folks have mutts (cross breeds) -- nothing wrong with that. The terminology is roo over hen, so that "RIRXBR" means a RIR roo mated with (over) a BR hen.

And you will find lots of pics of the results of crosses.

You might also find Feathersite interesting if you haven't discovered it yet. They discuss sex links, and show what happens when chickens are crossed with other birds:

http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/BRKPoultryPage.html

While I'm at it, Henderson's is the other commonly used breeds chart, which doesn't talk about crosses but gives a lot of info about each breed:

http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/chooks/chooks.html