Silver x white leghorns

aldk

Chirping
9 Years
Jun 12, 2013
51
8
84
north dakota
any idea what you would get by crossing white and silver leghorns, I am trying to improve the silvers, is this a good cross?
 
I think someone once told me that white is dominant and usually covers up other colors pretty well. I have crossed a white leghorn with a RIR and with an EE and all of the offspring were either solid white or had little amounts of leakage of red and black. There was one exception though, a cockerel is over 50% red, he looks very nice, he has lacing on his breast feathers and his hackle feathers are barred. But I think white will block out most colors.
 
In theory you would get white with a few black specks here and there. Females usually get some salmon breast leakage as well.
As mentioned white leghorns are dominate white. Problem is what's under the white. That's the million dollar question and will determine how easy/hard it'll be to get back to your pure silvers.
Dominate white doesn't do much for covering gold/buff/red etc. but does great at covering black, blue, brown etc. So your whites could carry things you don't want such as barring, mottleing or even blue that you would need to breed out.
I've had whites that didn't carry much of anything and I've seen whites that carried a few unwanted genes. The white is dominate so even one gene for it shows. That will make it easy to breed out and know its gone. If they're extended black that will work the same when mixed with the wild type of the silvers.when you get chicks hatching chipmunk striped you'll know the black is gone and you're back to two copies of wild type. Barring can be bred out pretty easy as well but something recessive like mottled can be a real pain.
Problem is if you get too many stacked up unwanted genes it takes a lot of chicks hatched to get ones that lose every unwanted gene on the same bird.
They're always a gamble but it can work and there's a lot more quality whites that can be picked up.
The other poster has the better option. Light browns. There are some good show light browns available if you search hard enough but don't know what's available to you.
What you want is some nice brown hens.
Crossing a silver rooster over brown hens will give you 100% silver pullets in that first cross.
Male offspring will be split. One silver gene and one gold gene. You can continue breeding the pullets back to silver males and all offspring will then be pure silver.
Or you could use the silver/gold males but they'll pass gold to half their offspring so about half their offspring will be throw aways because of the gold.
Using a brown rooster over silver hens will get you next to no where. That cross will produce all brown pullets and silver/gold split cockerels. You can then use one of the cockerels to get some silvers in the nest cross but I'd only go that direction if I had to because of no silver rooster available. That direction is far slower then silver rooster over brown hens.
If you do go with the whites if be interested what you get in the second and third generations.
Its early here so hope this makes sense.
 
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