New to Lavender Orpingtons

[Serina81]

I just got some Lavender Orpingtons including a split lavender and I have no idea what all this really means. Will someone fill me in?

 

[hinkjc]

What you likely have are lavender orpington project birds. I don't know of anyone having perfected them yet.

As for what the color means, lavender is a recessive gene. If a bird has 2 copies, it is visually lavender in color. If it has a single copy of lav, the bird is black but carries the lav gene -which some call splits. If you breed lav to lav, you get all lav chicks. If you breed a lav to a split bird, you can get lav chicks and split black/lav chicks. If you breed split to split, you get lav, split and straight black chicks.

Because most of the projects are still a work in progress, I would recommend breeding your lavenders back to some great black orps to improve them. That is if you intend to continue working towards orpingtons.

 

[yotetrapper]

OK, the lavender gene is recessive. That means, in order for a chicken to appear lavender, it needs 2 lavender genes. If you bred a lavender chicken, to a black chicken, the resulting offspring would all carry ONE lavender gene, and one black gene. They would all appear black, and be called "split lavender".

Now, if you bred two of those split lavender chickens together... it would go like this. 25% of the offspring would be black with no lavender gene. 50% would be black with ONE lavender gene (split black) and 25% would be lavender with 2 lavender genes.

Now, if you breed a split black lavender, to a lavender, you will get 50% lavender, and 50% split black.

If you breed lavender to lavender, you get 100% lavender.

Hope this makes some sense. One of the main reasons for breeding black orps into your lavender line, is to work on improving the shape, comb, etc, and making them look more "orpish"

Any questions, please ask.

 

[yotetrapper]

Oops, Jody beat me to it, and she knows her lavender orps!!

 

[Serina81]

Got it. So why are the Lavendar Orpingtons not perfected yet? What is it about them that isn't as good as the black orps?

 

[hinkjc]

They're not perfected until they have enough orpington blood in them to call them pure and that typically takes 5 generations to accomplish. In addition, body conformation takes time to achieve based on the APA. At best, most have about 50-75% orp blood lines in them. If heavy culling and good selections are not practiced, the percentage could be even lower. If they are not bred back to orps they will not continue to be improved upon.

 

[flgardengirl]

What other breed are the lavender orps mixed with or is that a secret? Just wondering if I would be able to kinda see the other breed in my split blk/lavs.