Someone on one of my poultry pages said they would have colored Silkie eggs for sale next year.She says they r pure silkies and that a women in CA started raising them.I have done a search and can't find anything.Has anyone heard of this?
Silkie eggs are cream colored, some are lighter and some are darker, that’s it. They must be mix breeds.
I saw silkied easter eggers for sale on my pet chicken, but they were different than regular silkies.
Thts exactly what i was thinking! I have light almost white eggs as well as dark cream/brownish eggs so anything else has to be mixed
It all depends what you want to call "pure" silkies. If its to mean that you couldn't tell them apart from regular silkies by looks but lay blue or green eggs then it is possible but would take a long time and a ton of selective breeding to get to that point. You would have to breed in the blue egg gene then maintain the gene while breeding back to silkie type until you got them back to that. That is a huge task. And I mean huge. You'd have to keep breeding towards the silkie type by either breeding the best offspring together or breeding back to pure silkies. Short answer is that every time you do that you end up with about 1/2 of all offspring losing the blue egg gene with every generation when breeding back to a silkie then at some point you would have to breed for birds with two copies of the blue egg gene for them to breed true for colored eggs. A little better to maintain the blue egg gene would be to breed offspring together. That will produce higher % of blue egg gene birds and be able to produce offspring with two genes for it. But that route will take longer to get back to silkie type so you would have a give and take no matter how you go and a long road. Another problem with breeding for colored eggs that way is that you would get some with the blue gene and some without. The only way to know what you have is to wait till the offspring lay and see. Then when you get to the point of wanting to know if they have one or two genes for it you have to wait till they lay and test bred them and wait till those chicks lay. Its possible but highly unlikely that someone would stick with it to completion. I'd bet you'd get a mix of colored egg layers including brown and that they may be silkie feathered but very lacking in silkie type.
There is a breeder on here that has silkies that lay blue eggs. I believe they mixed silkies with Ameraucanas and then bred them back to silkies until they actually looked like a pure silkie.