Would you elaborate why the Silkie screws up everything? Can you not get proper black melanistic color ? Or is it more not obtaining the Indonesian type? I am not questioning the truth of this, only curious for an explanation. Thank you.
Thousands of years ago and I mean Thousands- Poultiers in Indonesia started taking these frizzle silken stunt morphs produced in the selective breeding for black boned and put them aside. They bred them together and eventually ended up with the silky.
They bred Austronesian blood - (Ganoi/ Malagasy) in as well- introducing a crest- originally the birds were naked necked- the whole breast was naked- and the head save for the top knot due to the Austronesian genetics- the Chinese- living in colder conditions select bred for more completely feathered birds and those with truly silken feathers versus frizzled silken.
Extra toes eventually popped up and feathered feet- Silkies are a universe unto themselves. That said, DDD has this Grey Lady that appears to have everything but the kitchen sink= chicken sink in her genes and looks about perfect. I don't know if her progeny will have silky traits but there is always the problem that once you begin backcrossing- and backcrossing is necessary to increase the expression of eumelanins, those traits will emerge. I just like to keep silkies out of separate black boned stock - I don't use silky for anything actually.
Love the little buggers and the silken mutation does arise in Huastec and Nikkei -I even hold back those birds and breed them to one another to produce more of the same. But I've never procured silky to add to that equation as I don't believe I'd be improving the carefully bred silky and I know I'd be muddying up the Huastec and Nikkei- and that stock is irreplaceable.
I also learned that black silkies and white silkies and Japanese silkies are different from one another- arrived at separately- from different founder stock- related somewhere along the line so even crossing different silkies with one another has created a composite that could endanger the purebreds.
-With these "New Sunda" ( as in New World Sunda -Sunda being a technical term for Indonesia)- I'd like to be able to eventually purchase stock from poultiers to use in my own selective breeding initiatives but if it has silky blood I won't be able to use it - except maybe the Grey Lady...- no actually I don't think I'd be using the Grey Lady - but if her progeny were to be included in a line I'd document that very carefully and keep a close eye on it. So I'm being selfish basically- and looking out for the collectors out there that want black boned birds as close to the true Indonesian morphotype as possible- the lineages carefully select bred- by definition and a matter of responsibility culling all silken mutations that arise in close inbreeding - -
from the bloodlines. I personally like those mutations and may hold them back and breed them together- but as selective breeding experiments- their genetics are no good for future breeding.
I think I could have more succinctly written- silken frizzled mutations arise in close breeding of Indonesian black boned stock that has exactly no silky genetics to begin with. They lack crests. They lack extra toes. It has been the tradition for the longest time to not use those birds for breeding.
Adding silkies which are themselves descended of these culled birds, outcrossed early on with the completely unrelated race- the oldest Austronesian breed- the Malagasy/Ganoi- then carefully refined for thousands of years- breeding silky to silky- producing a perfect breed almost a species unto itself
- adding silkies a highly refined breed carrying all the traits culled out of traditional breeding to the lineages of New Sunda would be counter productive -even irrevocably damaging the bloodlines of composites with rare imported genetics.
There are a very few cemani/dragonbone in the USA and I've suggested they be used to breed with a very conservative handful of related breeds that share the genetic taproot of the original Indonesian strains- and am confident everyone if working together collectively and cooperatively- will arrive at the same place -predictably- and be able to trade and sell their respective stock of F1 and F2 and so on- safely- because there is no guess work involved-
i think that a composite that will eventually give rise to a North American Cemani/Dragonbone- one that has used only this discrete handful of genetics-
when that breed eventually is listed in the feathersite list of breeds the exact breeds to use to reconstitute the cemani would be listed- ostensibly with only that discrete handful of breeds used in the description of origins-
A separate breed type could be produced out of Grey Lady with its own story- maybe a blue black boned that is a parallel breeding arriving at a very similar conclusion - but with it's own genetics- that would be very interesting because our generation would know that two different cemani morph strains exist using different genetic founders- just as there are in Indonesia- different breeds producing the cemani morph- independently- along with the Korean and Japanese Crow fowl- and so on.
sorry- convoluted as ever - coffee on an empty stomach- back is out still