Hi! First time poster, some time lurker who's had chickens for a little over a year now, and I have a bit of a mystery chicken situation I've been working on.
I started out by ordering 9 chickens, but two were DOA, so I've made do with raising a small flock of 7 for about a year now. My plan was simple: get some Silver Penciled Rocks and some Dark Brahmas, let them grow and breed, enjoy their cool color pattern, and gather eggs and harvest meat.
And that's as far as the plan got because I ended up with three Silver Penciled Rock hens, one Dark Brahma hen, two Dark Brahma roos, and one hatchery mistake who was supposed to be either a Dark Brahma or a Penciled Rock and is still a bit of mystery roo to me. At first I thought he might be a Barnevelder, but now I'm thinking he matches up much better with pics and descriptions of Welsummers -honestly though I'd just love to get the educated guess of someone with some real experience here.
I held onto him because he was the more assertive and agile roo, and I decided I trusted him with the defense of the flock more than I trusted the clunky brahma roos.
^Ms. Guinea's tail feathers have always pointed down like a guinea fowl's (hence her name) She lays regularly and seems healthy and perfectly functional. Just another oddity -but I digress.
(^we'll get to those pullets in a minute)
Earlier this spring I segregated the brahma bros from the main flock to stop the infighting which was intensifying (my roo to hen ratio is just terrible, even without them in the flock), and I hatched a total of 13 chicks in two batches some weeks ago (6 in the 1st group and 7 in the 2nd).
They were successfully sneaking some fun time in with the hens once in a while before their removal from the flock which was maybe 1-3 weeks before I began gathering eggs for hatching, but I doubt any of the chicks are theirs.
The problem is my top roo is the genetic oddball in the bunch and likely the sire of all these chicks, but because I don't know what breed he is, it makes understanding the patterns these chicks are beginning to show even trickier. If he was a SPR or DB I'd expect the penciled pattern to be maintained as I had initially planned, but as he's clearly neither of those breeds, things are getting interesting. I don't mind the strange patterns too much as I said, it's all interesting to me, but I'd just like to better understand what's going on. I was casually dipping my toes into how the genetics work by reading responses here, searching on youtube, playing with the kippenjungle chicken calculator and reading the explanations on the calculator site a little on and off pretty early on, but since hatching these chicks I've been digging more seriously, trying to find answers, so I'm gaining a grasp of some basics now.
At this point I feel fairly confident in saying that I think these chicks/pullets are sex links as it seems likely that the handful that hatched with a more blonde colored down (now looking more grey) are looking to be all males, and the chicks with more of a dark brown color seem to possibly all be females. Given the silver genetics that I think should be on the hen side and the red or maybe mahogany color on the roo side, the slightly differing down colors of the chicks I hatched makes sense to me, but the feather patterns they're developing now do not. The pullets seem to have a cuckoo/barred pattern on both their bodies and wings and a laced pattern in the hackles.
Similar to the pullets, the adolescent roo from the first hatch has (what seems to my newb eyes) a messy barred/cuckoo pattern on his wings. Also, black feathers with a green sheen are coming in on his chest and neck now.
These are from the 2nd hatch, so they're slightly younger. One of the two young roos here was a double yolker inside a rather regular sized egg (probably the slightly smaller one on the far right down below). He had a partially formed twin attached at the umbilical cord. Just a set of fuzzy legs and hips. Named the survivor Mcdouble and the pair of legs Chernobyl. Figured you kinda have to name something like that.
The brown chick here isn't quite representative of the others like it; this one is actually particularly brown and makes the difference seem a little more obvious. That said, the blonde-ish color was pretty distinguishable at hatch.
So, any thoughts/ideas as to what my roo is? Does my Welsummer guess seem correct?
How can these adolescents have what seems to be a barred pattern if there's no barred/cuckoo pattern in the parents' plumage? Since the barred pattern is dominant, shouldn't it be exhibited in the parents, even if they only have "Bb"? And if they both have and passed on "bb", shouldn't it have remained hidden? Can "Bb" be covered over by something else even though barring is dominant? Is this actually not a barred pattern and I've missed something very basic? I'm very open to that possibility; it feels like I've been drinking from a firehose since I've upped my research to try and figure out what's going on with these chicks.
If you've made it this far, congrats, and thanks for bearing with me. I just have so many questions, and so many details seem like they could be entangled. Sorry.
I started out by ordering 9 chickens, but two were DOA, so I've made do with raising a small flock of 7 for about a year now. My plan was simple: get some Silver Penciled Rocks and some Dark Brahmas, let them grow and breed, enjoy their cool color pattern, and gather eggs and harvest meat.
And that's as far as the plan got because I ended up with three Silver Penciled Rock hens, one Dark Brahma hen, two Dark Brahma roos, and one hatchery mistake who was supposed to be either a Dark Brahma or a Penciled Rock and is still a bit of mystery roo to me. At first I thought he might be a Barnevelder, but now I'm thinking he matches up much better with pics and descriptions of Welsummers -honestly though I'd just love to get the educated guess of someone with some real experience here.
I held onto him because he was the more assertive and agile roo, and I decided I trusted him with the defense of the flock more than I trusted the clunky brahma roos.
^Ms. Guinea's tail feathers have always pointed down like a guinea fowl's (hence her name) She lays regularly and seems healthy and perfectly functional. Just another oddity -but I digress.
(^we'll get to those pullets in a minute)
Earlier this spring I segregated the brahma bros from the main flock to stop the infighting which was intensifying (my roo to hen ratio is just terrible, even without them in the flock), and I hatched a total of 13 chicks in two batches some weeks ago (6 in the 1st group and 7 in the 2nd).
They were successfully sneaking some fun time in with the hens once in a while before their removal from the flock which was maybe 1-3 weeks before I began gathering eggs for hatching, but I doubt any of the chicks are theirs.
The problem is my top roo is the genetic oddball in the bunch and likely the sire of all these chicks, but because I don't know what breed he is, it makes understanding the patterns these chicks are beginning to show even trickier. If he was a SPR or DB I'd expect the penciled pattern to be maintained as I had initially planned, but as he's clearly neither of those breeds, things are getting interesting. I don't mind the strange patterns too much as I said, it's all interesting to me, but I'd just like to better understand what's going on. I was casually dipping my toes into how the genetics work by reading responses here, searching on youtube, playing with the kippenjungle chicken calculator and reading the explanations on the calculator site a little on and off pretty early on, but since hatching these chicks I've been digging more seriously, trying to find answers, so I'm gaining a grasp of some basics now.
At this point I feel fairly confident in saying that I think these chicks/pullets are sex links as it seems likely that the handful that hatched with a more blonde colored down (now looking more grey) are looking to be all males, and the chicks with more of a dark brown color seem to possibly all be females. Given the silver genetics that I think should be on the hen side and the red or maybe mahogany color on the roo side, the slightly differing down colors of the chicks I hatched makes sense to me, but the feather patterns they're developing now do not. The pullets seem to have a cuckoo/barred pattern on both their bodies and wings and a laced pattern in the hackles.
Similar to the pullets, the adolescent roo from the first hatch has (what seems to my newb eyes) a messy barred/cuckoo pattern on his wings. Also, black feathers with a green sheen are coming in on his chest and neck now.
These are from the 2nd hatch, so they're slightly younger. One of the two young roos here was a double yolker inside a rather regular sized egg (probably the slightly smaller one on the far right down below). He had a partially formed twin attached at the umbilical cord. Just a set of fuzzy legs and hips. Named the survivor Mcdouble and the pair of legs Chernobyl. Figured you kinda have to name something like that.
The brown chick here isn't quite representative of the others like it; this one is actually particularly brown and makes the difference seem a little more obvious. That said, the blonde-ish color was pretty distinguishable at hatch.
So, any thoughts/ideas as to what my roo is? Does my Welsummer guess seem correct?
How can these adolescents have what seems to be a barred pattern if there's no barred/cuckoo pattern in the parents' plumage? Since the barred pattern is dominant, shouldn't it be exhibited in the parents, even if they only have "Bb"? And if they both have and passed on "bb", shouldn't it have remained hidden? Can "Bb" be covered over by something else even though barring is dominant? Is this actually not a barred pattern and I've missed something very basic? I'm very open to that possibility; it feels like I've been drinking from a firehose since I've upped my research to try and figure out what's going on with these chicks.
If you've made it this far, congrats, and thanks for bearing with me. I just have so many questions, and so many details seem like they could be entangled. Sorry.
then again, there seems to be a lot to this game and since they're all hatchery birds of unknown origin and I'm only a year into all of this, I don't have a good enough grasp of things to fully understand what's possible or probable, so I don't fully trust my judgment. Haha!
