The "Ask Anything" to Nicalandia Thread

[nicalandia]

Only through selection, and in my experience, chocolate fades about a month after molting. No huge surprise for a TYPR1 mutation.
I had a chocolate turkey once. A lot of duns look like off-black, too.

True

 

[SourRoses]

Do you guys think that extra melanizers might help keep Chocolates from fading?
We live in sunny Florida and I've been watching Cocomo here for signs of sun fading, but I kinda think she looks the same as her first adult feathers.
She has Black Ameraucana parentage which seem heavily melanized (to me anyway), whereas our other chocolate hen doesn't and appears light in comparison.

These are from this spring, so she'd already had a full year of sun exposure:

And here she is recently. She's just starting her first adult molt and only now looking ratty and washed out.

I'm looking forward to seeing her new feathers come in to see if there is a big difference or not.

 

[nicalandia]

Do you guys think that extra melanizers might help keep Chocolates from fading?
We live in sunny Florida and I've been watching Cocomo here for signs of sun fading, but I kinda think she looks the same as her first adult feathers.

Yeah, absolutely

 

[Amer]

Do you guys think that extra melanizers might help keep Chocolates from fading?
We live in sunny Florida and I've been watching Cocomo here for signs of sun fading, but I kinda think she looks the same as her first adult feathers.
She has Black Ameraucana parentage which seem heavily melanized (to me anyway), whereas our other chocolate hen doesn't and appears light in comparison.

These are from this spring, so she'd already had a full year of sun exposure:

View attachment 3904781
View attachment 3904782


And here she is recently. She's just starting her first adult molt and only now looking ratty and washed out.

View attachment 3904783


I'm looking forward to seeing her new feathers come in to see if there is a big difference or not.

Interesting mottles on her back.

 

[SourRoses]

Interesting mottles on her back.

Oh, I forgot to mention she is split to Mottled.
She's an F1 of my project and we have chicks from her growing out now. I'm going to make a thread about the project and will definitely welcome input

 

[Amer]

Chocolate is still not my favorite but that is 10X better than my chocolate turkey looked. I don’t think turkeys really have sufficient melanizers to achieve that. My mom was like “she’s so cool, it’s a rare color!” Meanwhile I would have preferred almost anything else.

 

[SourRoses]

Chocolate is still not my favorite but that is 10X better than my chocolate turkey looked. I don’t think turkeys really have sufficient melanizers to achieve that. My mom was like “she’s so cool, it’s a rare color!” Meanwhile I would have preferred almost anything else.

Totally understand! My mom wants them to all be chocolate and mottled and whines that most of our chicks come out black. I'm like "black is a foundation" and I really love the contrast black mottled have, with a good sheen it's gorgeous.

 

[pipdzipdnreadytogo]

I thought it had to do with how much shade my birds have in their area, but my Chocolate hen also does not seem to fade much, at least not nearly as badly as I've seen in some others. I actually don't notice much fading at all in her until she starts molting and her fresh feathers come in darker than her old ones.

My dun-based birds do fade quite visibly, though. I don't know if that's a difference between the two genes or because the Chocolate is E based and the duns are e+ based, however.

That all said, it seems like all the brownish colors in my flock fade to an extent. My partridge-based Easter-eggers that are brownish, but not diluted by choc or I^d, also fade enough that their fresh feathers come in significantly darker than their old feathers at molting season.

I love chocolate, but I don't think I'd ever have a full flock of just them. I like variety. That's what I love about breeding my BBS Cochins, they've got variety built in.

 

[NatJ]

@NatJ can you explain to me how one would go about "creating" from scratch a mill fleur patterned satin? Even if it took several generations? I am considering starting a showgirl project. I currently have black satin showgirls and probably recessive white silkied showgirls. I have a red silkie roo. As well as MF d'uccle mixes, mottled on buff/gold d'uccle mixes, MF d'uccle x Serama and MF bantam Cochins. I am mostly just wanting to intellectually understand how this color is creating and what the different breeding plans would look like in reality. Not detailed just basic overall color to color and what generation crossed with what. Also have a mottled houdan roo if that would work at all

To create a Mille Fleur patterned Satin, I would probably start with Mille Fleur d'Uccles plus Silkies. I would use Silkies that show a lot of gold/red/brown/buff in their coloring, not whites or blacks (for this purpose, "black" also includes blue, splash, chocolate, lavender/self-blue)

I would use a two-generation breeding pattern. The first generation, cross a Mille Fleur to a silkie. All the chicks will carry mottling and the other genes to produce the Mille Fleur color/pattern. All chicks will carry the genes for silkie feathers (recessive), and should show the dominant genes that are usually typical of Silkies: 5th toe, black skin, crest, feathered feet. Pick one or more chicks that have all those traits, and breed them back to the Mille Fleur. From these second generation chicks, pick one or more that have a good Mille Fleur pattern, to use as the "Mille Fleur" parent when you cross to Silkie again. Try to get one with really nice Satin traits if you can (crest, 5th toe, etc), but the color & pattern are the more important points here, along with satin feathers (not silkied feathers).

Keep repeating those two generations until you have nice Satins with Mille Fleur color/pattern, then you can breed them among themselves instead of continuing to cross back to Silkies. At some point after that, you will probably want to remove the recessive gene for Silkie feathers. You can check for that by test-mating your Mille Fleur Satin birds with Silkies (any that produce silkie-feathered chicks are carrying the recessive gene for silkie feathers, so you can either cull them, or keep breeding from them but test each of their chicks until you have enough that do not carry the gene for silkie feathers. Any chick with an actual Silkie parent will have to be carrying that gene, so don't waste your time testing them.)

 

[Amer]

@nicalandia do you have any sources (studies or something) that explain what a chicken with a simple E/E genotype would look like?
I believe this would be a rusty black phenotype but my friend thinks it would be solid black. I pointed out that this is Henk’s opinion and the general consensus but she wants a source since she found a study with the exact opposite opinion. Unfortunately, I tried viewing this study and could not because of paywalls. I haven’t been able to find these studies or figure out how people decided that a black with no additional melanizers would be rusty black.
It makes sense to me though because B/B turkeys require a decent amount of selection to not have any bronze or silver leakage, since B/B is the only melanizer found in turkeys.
Additionally, I had black d’Anvers that would get leakage, though I guess I cannot prove this wasn’t caused by heterozygosity at the e locus.