- Sep 18, 2010
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mcrooke: I'm lousy at sexing Sumatra until they have male feathering in, although I am going to try to start feather sexing at hatch to see how accurate that is.
I have been trying very hard to capture the difference between the dun and black Sumatra chicks on camera now that I have both of similar age and there's been questions about the chick coloration (there are exactly zero pictures of dun Sumatra chicks out there for research). While I can tell the difference visually, the camera just doesn't seem to show the colors well at all - but I think I succeeded (finally).
In the first photo of chicks in the hand...the black chick is out of shipped eggs from forum poster flyingmonkeypoop. The dun is by jeremy's platinum rooster and from my black hens. In the SECOND photo, the dun is out of FMP's shipped eggs and the black is out of my own black stock. A platinum hatched from Jeremy's rooster also, but those are easy to spot given they are so light. The dun's feathers are basically a dark brown instead of black as they grow in....something you can just barely see in the second picture, whereas dilutions like the dark blues (which I confused with possibly being dun last year) seem to have a slate cast to the feathers instead of brown.
I'll be breeding the duns back to the blacks until I get good type at which point I'll go for khaki, but getting the multiple spurs and feathering on the duns first is a priority. I'm not sure how much success you can have with double dilutes having a dark face, but I expect that the single dilutes should have fully dark faces before trying for the doubles.
I have been trying very hard to capture the difference between the dun and black Sumatra chicks on camera now that I have both of similar age and there's been questions about the chick coloration (there are exactly zero pictures of dun Sumatra chicks out there for research). While I can tell the difference visually, the camera just doesn't seem to show the colors well at all - but I think I succeeded (finally).
In the first photo of chicks in the hand...the black chick is out of shipped eggs from forum poster flyingmonkeypoop. The dun is by jeremy's platinum rooster and from my black hens. In the SECOND photo, the dun is out of FMP's shipped eggs and the black is out of my own black stock. A platinum hatched from Jeremy's rooster also, but those are easy to spot given they are so light. The dun's feathers are basically a dark brown instead of black as they grow in....something you can just barely see in the second picture, whereas dilutions like the dark blues (which I confused with possibly being dun last year) seem to have a slate cast to the feathers instead of brown.
I'll be breeding the duns back to the blacks until I get good type at which point I'll go for khaki, but getting the multiple spurs and feathering on the duns first is a priority. I'm not sure how much success you can have with double dilutes having a dark face, but I expect that the single dilutes should have fully dark faces before trying for the doubles.
