Need help with turkey breeds please

[Crickett B]

This is Pearl:

On her nest



And this is Reggie:

He looked sooooo much better until about a month ago, when he decided to go visit my catahoula dog, who is chained up FAR away from the bird free range area. Stupid turkey.


This was a baby from the first clutch of eggs the had (had two, both did not make it

)

These are babies from the 2nd clutch (just hatched out Saturday)

The brown ones

Why in the world do the babies look so different, since they had the same parents?
Thank you for any help with this.
Crickett

 

[Denninmi]

Quote:
Just genetics. Kind of the same way that Labradors can have yellow, black, or brown puppies in the same litter. You don't know what kind of genes were back in the family tree until they show up.

 

[chickenlover54]

OMG your tom is the most beautiful turkey i've seen! What color is he!?

 

[onthespot]

No kidding! If he could reproduce consistently that color, you'd have a new breed.

 

[Thomasturkey]

Your tom is heterozygous (one dominate gene) for the black gene. He would be split for bronze or blackwinged bronze. He is a molted with a red gene or two. The first poults where bronze based. The second poults where black based rusty blacks.

 

[Thomasturkey]

This young hen should be the same color. Molting increases with age. Also those last poults should be molted too.

 

[Crickett B]

O wow. That is a pretty bird! What kind is it? ( I have a weakness for spotted or molted patterns)

I am clueless when it comes to genetics, unless a census report is involved

(Been dabbling in genealogy for 11 years)

I have no idea what either of the parent turkeys are. Just from looking at pictures on the web, Pearl, I thought might be a Narragansett and Reggie at one time I thought was a Bronze..... but then he started changing colors and patterns on me.

The pictures I posted in the originial post are from yesterday. The below pictures are each month since I bought Reggie. I think he is close to a year and a half old now.

February 16 2011
First day at home
He had NO big feathers, as he had been kept in a cage WAY too small for him, and they had all broke off.

March 1 2011 (to show how short he was back then)

March 29 2011
He started getting the whitish bar colors

Then he started getting dark again
April 15 2011

So now I have no clue WHAT he is

So every time Reggie and Pearl have chicks together, each clutch is going to be different? But within that clutch each one will be the same kind? Meaning there will not be in the same clutch a few like the striped baby, and a few like the white masked ones?


And thank you for all the replies!

 

[Denninmi]

Quote:
No, genetics doesn't work like that. I had to take it my senior year in college, and barely passed it. I was totally lost after Gregor Mendel and his pea vines. But, I do know this much -- each egg and sperm is a unique and separate roll of the genetic dice. So, each chick will be unique genetically. You may not get the same mix in each clutch.

 

[Crickett B]

Thanks for that crash course, though I am still lost

So it was just a roll of the dice that cause the first batch to be striped, and the second to be white mask? That perhaps her next clutch will have a tad of both (or another variation) if I can get more than 2 to hatch at a time?

 

[Lagerdogger]

Quick genetics lesson...

Your hen is a bronze-based bird like most narragansetts. You can tell by the barred wings. But yours is not a typical narragansett. (Interestingly, someone else just had some pictures of similarly grey birds).

Your tom has a black gene and a bronze-based gene. These work like brown and blue eyes. If a person has one or two brown genes, they have brown eyes. A person has to have both eye color genes be blue to have blue eyes. A brown eyed person with one brown gene and one blue gene can only pass one of these genes to each child. The second color gene comes from the other parent.

SO your tom passes either a black-based gene or a bronze based gene to the poults. The hen has two bronze based genes, so it always passes a bronze gene down. Since black is dominant to bronze, any poult that receives a black gene from the tom will look like a black-based bird, while any poult receiveing the bronze gene looks like a bronze poult.

Your first poult has the classic bronze patterning (which is also exactly what newly hatched narragansetts look like). It clearly has received a bronze gene from each parent.

The second batch of poults all look like black based birds (some received a red gene from the tom, and some didn't, so your tom only has one red gene. Your hen doesn't have any red genes). They received the black gene from the tom. Also by the way, red genes fdon't work like the brown eye/blue eye thing. No red genes is one color, a red gene from either parent is a different color, and two red genes is a third color. For example, a bronze with no red genes is standard bronze, a bronze with one red gene is a red bronze, and a bronze with two red genes is a bourbon red.

The weird thing is that both birds in your first batch got the bronze and all 5 of the second batch got the black. If the parents really are the same birds, then that was remarkable luck. The chance of getting a clutch of two 2 bronzes and then a second clutch of 5, all black, is the same as flipping a coin and getting two tails followed by 5 heads. It happens, but not too often. Try it and see how long it takes...

It would be reasonable to expect that future clutches will be mixed. You should also get some bronze-based birds with a red gene. These will look like my avatar.

Very beautiful tom