I Like Turkeys
Crowing
Silkie rooster over calico hens would be best, in theory. The only difference between a silkie male/Cochin female cross and a Cochin male/silkie female cross would be leg color.Thank you for all your replies! This was so helpful in narrowing down what I need to do. Which combo do you think would be best to start with? The silkie roo to the calico hens or the calico roo to my black silkies? The silkie roo has a ton of gold leakage, so much that when I saw him I thought he might be partridge. I’m not sure how this would effect the crosses?
if anyone is interested in this project I’ll continue to post updates!
Pullets from the silkie male/Cochin female cross would have the correct slate legs for a silkie, but males would have white legs, and carry the gene for slate legs.
All birds from a Cochin male/silkie female cross would have white legs, the females hemizygous for the white leg gene, and the males carrying the recessive slate leg gene.
This leg color conundrum would just make it more difficult to get the right leg color going on your silkies, unless you choose to backcross to pure silkies to try and remove the white legs.
In your case, i don’t know which pairing is better. Does the paint silkie have leakage? Definitely not the first choice for a breeder, but paint is black with one copy of dominant white, so as long as you only selected black f1 chicks to keep from breeding him to the calicos, you could get past the issue of white very quickly. Maybe it’d be better to get a new black male for breeding purposes, if you’re worried about that though. Thing with leakage is males express it more adamantly, but hens who don’t show it will still carry it, so breeding out leakage has a fair bit of dependence on the male bird, unless you can guarantee the hens don’t carry the genes for leakage. Breeding in a leakage heavy male would just make it a pain to get rid of leakage.
If the paint male does have leakage, I’d just go with the calico Cochin over your black silkie hens. Do you have any photos of the black male?