Spaldings

[Pratik1234]

Hello, looking to buy new peafowl for my flock.
I’m trying to setup 2 new new pens for high Spaldings and java greens.

I’ve been thinking about this visually Blue looking high spalding Male with bright yellow and blue on face, no barrings, long legs.

My question is what type of peachicks he will produce with a high% green female?
Will they all look blue or he will have ability to make greens too as he has green blood in him.

Is it better to put him with low spalding hens? Or should I put him with the high percentage green females?

 

[Midnightman14]

The chicks will be all over the map appearance wise when you breed spaldings. hard to breed for certain "looks" due to their hybrid nature.

 

[Rosa moschata]

If you put enough years into it, you can develop a relatively pure-breeding line of Spaldings, but how they'd look would be a bit up to you, and a bit up to how things balance out on their own. The thing about Spaldings is that the first generation "look" is the result of being heterozygous at every chromosome, and being heterozygous isn't something that can, by definition, breed true. To breed true, you need to decrease heterozygosity. That would mean some traits will be more Blue, and others more Green, as the later generations become homozygous at various points. The tricky part is in figuring out which phenotypes are the result of increasing homozygosity -- unless you're able to do chromosome analysis in a lab, that's hard to do when just looking at birds. It is possible, but it'd take a long time. There are "species" out in the wild that developed from hybridization, and while they do display a mix of traits from the original species, they also breed relatively true. Off the top of my head, the prime example would be the Adelaide Rosella -- a hybrid population derived from interbreeding between the Crimson and Yellow Rosellas. Today the Crimson and Yellow are united as one species because of this hybrid population where their zones meet, and because the Adelaide will also breed back with either the Crimson or Yellow occasionally. But in the captive "cage bird" trade, Adelaides are relatively stable in appearance, and sort of "bred to a standard" that matches early depictions of the population, as intermediate between the Red and Yellow.

If you really want to try, you'd have to put together a few unrelated pairs of birds that each approximate the "look" you want, and start a careful linebreeding project over several generations. Basically, you'd start off breeding the unrelated birds together, then choose the "best" (according to you) offspring of each sex from each pairing and set them up with their opposite-sex parent, and repeat, to create lines from each original bird. Then periodically you'd swap lines. It'd take a lot of culling, and a lot of years, but you could eventually create a relatively pure-breeding line of Spaldings this way.