The Legbar Thread!

[dretd]

Quote: Hi Stake! The Cream Legbar standard is still being written in the US and we are going through (at least) a 5 year process of getting the standard accepted into the APA. The standard is almost entirely based on the British Standard with revisions necessary to make American English gel with British English.

Cream Legbars were quite clearly flawed and had strayed from the British Standard as they came over to GFF. If they had been all perfect examples of the breed, there would not be the problems with lack of Cream ie gold, and lack of Crests. In order to express the Cream, two copies of the gold inhibitor are needed, so all of the birds would appear Cream had the imports been Cream instead of Gold. The folks over here are actually trying to breed back to the British Standard.

So in a nutshell:

-The Gold is the non-inhibited base color and breeders are trying to get Cream back into the Cream Legbar. This is complicated because there is mixing of lines which reveal hidden genetics from the original lines. These include melanizers, red enhancers, light and dark barring among other things. So some birds look lemony and we are unsure if they are a light gold (lacking Cream) or if they are Cream with color modifiers making them appear more yellow.

-The white is a recessive sport that cropped up and a few people are breeding what they hatched to see what happens. I don't foresee anyone trying to standardize them anytime soon.

-No one is intentionally breeding beards and muffs to my knowledge--this is an accident, if you will that occasionally crops up and gets reported.

-There is one breeder who is working on a Rose Comb Cream Legbar. The typical comb for a Legbar is large to overly-large. This is presenting a problem for people in cold, wet climates as the combs will get frostbitten. The idea is to have a bird that matches the standard in all ways except the comb. He is not trying to get this Rose Comb Cream Legbar into the APA Standards at this time, nor is the Cream Legbar Club. Eventually this may happen, but for now the Club has its plate full with the traditional Cream Legbar and the Rose Comb is considered a project bird. I am excited to see how he progresses with the breed and I honestly think it keeps with the spirit of Punnet and Pease as they experimented and developed several types of Legbars and played with genetics.

As for the different threads, there was talk of locking one or more several months ago, but I think the consensus was to let them live or die on their own. They are both very active and I find it easier to follow two different topics on different threads that can happen simultaneously rather than have the two sharing one thread and losing track of the topics. I have tried to follow other breed threads and found them hard to follow when there are several over-lapping conversations happening simultaneously. So follow one or all, whatever makes you happy!

 

[ChicKat]

thats usually done by lifting a leg....lol

On another note...I am a newbie to chooks and know even less about CCLs ....seems a number of folk are doing some interesting breeding: goldens, muffs, rose combs, whites, etc...I know there's no formal standards for US, but, if you are changing what a CCL is(according to the Brits and what GreenFire imported), isn't the progeny a mixed breed /flawed bird...I hope I'm not offending anybody...its also a bit confusing because there's three separate threads for CCL, CL, and Legbars....are they considered different? TIA!

It must seem really confusing.

To my knowledge the olden-days name for the Cream Legbar was "Crested Cream Legbar" - and in recent times the Crested has been dropped--- however some folks still use it. In the UK, they established their standard for "Legbars" - and within that breed they have varieties of Silver, Gold and Cream. -- Only the Cream Legbar has a crest and lays blue or green eggs. The other Legbar varieties lay white or light cream eggs to my knowledge.

According to some of the history write-ups, only the crest allowed R.C. Punnett and Michael Pease to distinguish the Cream Legbar from their Gold or Silver legbars (you can check the history of the Cream Legbar on the Club's webpage.....https://sites.google.com/site/thecreamlegbarclub/20-history-of-the-cream-legbar/

Theoretically there are no Gold or Silver Legbars left roaming the earth..although they can be bred from exisiting breeds. Someone in Australia is working on Silver Legbars over there. I know some folks strongly favor the Cream Legbars that are very light - and look silver to my eyes.... but I'm fairly certain that there are a lot of fine Cream Legbars running around out there that have been labeled "gold legbars" - however, they have crests and the blue egg gene.

The number one factor that attracts people to this breed IMO is that they are autosexing. This means right at hatch time you know if your chick is a pullet or not.

Some of the people who are mixing up the breed and indeed creating hybrids as you notice are experimenting to try to determine the genetics of their own birds. Probably someone should start a thread for these unusual combinations to help avoid confusion as the breed is getting established. Some people working on the breed are creating a 'project' for their own environment. One example is Michael's Rose Comb Cream Legbars that are designed to avoid the frost bitten combs of a large single combed bird. So his plan is (as I understand it) to be true to the CL genetics with one exception. In otherwords, he will keep autosexing, keep blue egg gene ....etc.

One reason that the club was started long ago is to help people avoid getting a 1/2 Cream Legbar that is called a Cream Legbar...because there once were some unscrupulous people - or people who mismanaged their flocks to sell hatching eggs on eBay that, sadly, were NOT Cream Legbars for very high prices when the birds first became available. Fortunately, there is a lot of education and available knowledge since that time -- so hopefully that practice has died out.

Gold and Silver Legbars are considered part of the make up of Cream Legbars. Here is a quote from the above link:

"The offspring resulting from the fusion of the two cream lines were selected for crests to distinguish them from Gold and Silver Legbars, blue egg laying ability, and clear markings for the auto-sexing feature. Punnett introduced these Crested Cream Legbars to the world at the London Dairy Show in 1947."

Here is something that R.C. Punnett said about Cream Legbars:


“It may be described as a Brown
Leghorn on a cream basis, to which has
been added the barring factor causing
it to be autosexing. It is also crested
and lays a blue egg”
R.C. Punnett 1957

HTH

 

[1muttsfan]

Some of those Ebay birds are awful

Having said that, I got some really lovely eggs off EB that hatched out very nice birds. Let the buyer beware!

 

[ChicKat]

Some of those Ebay birds are awful

Having said that, I got some really lovely eggs off EB that hatched out very nice birds. Let the buyer beware!

Good philosophy. If someone gets a bad eBay deal -- they should really speak up. (By The time the EGGS hatch a long time has gone by. )
Glad that you got good birds from eBay. --

 

[stake]

All:

Thanks for the clarification(s)...I guess, because of the AKC, where both parents are registered, I have a different view of what 'full breed' is...and that gets projected onto chickens...thanks for a lots of lessons learned boiled down to a couple of paragraphs....

 

[ChicKat]

Same here..we can trace pedigrees of our Registered cattle back for decades. I wish we had the same thing for our chickens!

 

[dretd]

All:

Thanks for the clarification(s)...I guess, because of the AKC, where both parents are registered, I have a different view of what 'full breed' is...and that gets projected onto chickens...thanks for a lots of lessons learned boiled down to a couple of paragraphs....

Same here..we can trace pedigrees of our Registered cattle back for decades. I wish we had the same thing for our chickens!

It is for sure a paradigm shift from other species that have those pedigrees. Think of it as a registry where they don't close the book. There are several examples where the animals need to be qualified to be registered--some Warmblood horses for instance have to go through a qualification process and don't need to have been bred from stock registered within that group. They are looking at the quality of the individual animal.

There is an upside to there not being a closed book. You can still reinvigorate the line with outside blood if the stock is drifting from the standard or losing productivity. As long as the results match the APA Standard, that is fine. The strange thing to wrap your head around is that a chicken from two quality chickens of a good type may not be considered 'pure' ie no crest in the Legbar, yet that bird could be used for breeding and the babies may be all show quality once again. The most vocal group in my mind are the Ameraucana breeders. Any bird that is off-color but otherwise meets breed standard is called and Easter Egger or frequently 'mutt' even if both of its parents were purebreds of two different approved colors.

 

[normanack]

It is for sure a paradigm shift from other species that have those pedigrees. Think of it as a registry where they don't close the book. There are several examples where the animals need to be qualified to be registered--some Warmblood horses for instance have to go through a qualification process and don't need to have been bred from stock registered within that group. They are looking at the quality of the individual animal.

There is an upside to there not being a closed book. You can still reinvigorate the line with outside blood if the stock is drifting from the standard or losing productivity. As long as the results match the APA Standard, that is fine. The strange thing to wrap your head around is that a chicken from two quality chickens of a good type may not be considered 'pure' ie no crest in the Legbar, yet that bird could be used for breeding and the babies may be all show quality once again. The most vocal group in my mind are the Ameraucana breeders. Any bird that is off-color but otherwise meets breed standard is called and Easter Egger or frequently 'mutt' even if both of its parents were purebreds of two different approved colors.

Perhaps the chicken world should use the terms "show quality" and "pet quality" to distinguish birds within a breed that meet or don't meet standard. In other words, those wrong-colored Ameraucanas would retain Ameraucana status, but be called and sold as pet quality. Doesn't really solve the issue of pedigree, but provides nomenclature for a common situation.

 

[madamwlf]

They do use those terms for certain breeds like Silkies.

 

[1muttsfan]

In Sweden they have a registry for breeds, scroll down to post #12 for an explanation on how it works -

https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/748417/helping-the-swedish-flower-hen/10