question about color genetics and bearded hens (pictures)

[WarrenHound]

ok about a year ago i was given a poult i THOUGHT she was a bronze now i am not so sure...i was also surprised to find a few weeks ago that she is growing a beard now i know she's a hen as she has been alone in the coop and laid eggs and assumes the position rather frequently in my presence.

this is her tiny beard and laying down..please ignore the water bowl i have several young birds geese and ducks and everyone likes to dirty it up.







she appears more brown and white with faint greenish tinges to some feathers.

WELL my father was begging for a tom as a boyfriend for her and someone he could talk to with his calls so i found a man that was selling Bourbons, Rio's & Royal palms as well as bronze turkeys he would buy or exchange in favor of eggs and hatch them from various lines and breeders for breeding, he sold me a magnificent young 7 month old Tom that is supposedly a bronze as well? but his coloring is different... he has jet black coloring with white coloring at the tail and on the chest he has random white patches

day we brought him home
random patches





so what i am wondering is what colors are they? is my tom mottled?

is it likely my hen would throw bearded hens?
what would possibly be the outcome of breeding my tom with a Bourbon, Royal Palm or Mottled?
i was offered some poults that will be hatched out next year, both bourbon and RP but i am considering ordering some mottled eggs to hatch..and keep some hens

thanks for your time

 

[Lagerdogger]

The hen looks like a bronze (maybe broad-breasted? It just looks big, but perhaps the hand in the first picture is very small?). The beard is not that unusual. I have a Royal Palm hen with a small beard right now also.

The tom certainly could be mottled. It has the occassional white feathers in the breast and dark wings. You also say there is some white in the tail.

Mottled black turkeys are basically Royal Palms with black bases instead of black-winged bronze bases. Mottled ar BBcgcgngng, Royal palm are b1b1cgcgngng. So if you breed a mottled with a mottled, you get all mottled. If you cross a mottled with a Royal Palm, the first generation should look mottled because the black base is dominant over the black-winged base. However, if you cross this generation with Royal palms, you will get half mottled and half RP (half will get the Black based gene from the mottled cross and half will get the black-winged base gene).

Crossing the mottled with the bourbon red gets a little more confusing. It depends on which is the tom and which is the hen because the Narragansett (ng) genes are sex linked. Mottled toms have two ng genes, mottled hens have one ng gene, and Bourbon reds (bbrr) have no ng genes. The most fun case is the mottled tom crossed with the BR hen. In this case, all tom offspring will have a single ng gene which is recessive and won't be expressed. All hen offspring will get a ng gene, and it will be expressed, so tom and hen offspring will look different...maybe. The toms will be BbCcgNgngRr, which will look like a black with a single red gene. I've forgotten the name of that color, but it is very pretty. Hens will be BbCcgng--Rr, and so will look like black-based golden narragansett. But I don't know what that will look like. It might look just like the toms, or the body may get some Narragansett patterning. I'm just not sure how Narragansett genes are expressed through a black base. If you cross a Royal Palm tom with a bourbon red hen, all the toms look red bronze and all the hens look golden narragansett. When you start crossing the mottledXBR with BR or RP, then all kinds of things are possible.