Those who need help in sexing peafowl

[new 2 pfowl]

Oh, Thang! I'm on his team too!

The universe does revolve around his peabrain!
I wonder if it's time to start a new Thang Thread???

 

[Arbor]

If I recall,  It is possible to loose  colors or patterns when dealing with splits for a number of generations ? Maybe some one can comment on this ??? connerhills

In what way do you mean? The same pair of splits shouldn't lose the ability to potentially produce a given type of bird. There is always the possibility that your pair never produces a single offspring that is the colour/pattern that the parents are split to. I know a guy who tried for over 8 years to get bronze BS with zero success with birds split to both. It in some ways boils down to luck. The loss of colour/pattern shouldn't occur if good record keeping is used, but this should also be based on what was actually produced each generation.

 

[connerhills]

My thoughts are,, say you had a pair of wild pattern blues both split to midnight and split to BS and breed them together and produce some B S Midnight and some wild pattern and then you breed the wild pattern birds back to the wild pattern siblings and you may not produce birds that carry either or the midnight color or the B S pattern... Seems like I seen this in a punnitts square one time, and that may be the same on all colors and patterns when working with splits on down the line with the mixing of the generations. Most of the time a new mutation will show up in the females and you have to inbreed to establish it. ie, : one of the reasons for breeding siblings together. I think some of the genes hang around for a long time but I don't know where they stay. I bred a high percentage spalding split to peach for 3 yrs before I produces any peach from him . I knew it was there . I had a male split to silver pied, split to BS and , split to peach and bred over spalding split to white and some of them split to white and pied .. and ever once in a while they would produce a good peach pied female. These kind of things just get me to thinking "Well if I could only see it happen for myself , then I might could figure it out." I am looking for food for thought................................connerhills

 

[KsKingBee]

FBC thanks for that information! I will have to reread it a few more times, very interesting.


Connor, good luck in producing a good peach pie!

 

[connerhills]

done that also... good with ice cream on it , george

 

[frenchblackcopper]

George,over in the new Genetics thread I asked Rosa on the punnets square about going back 2 generations or more,he deemed it not necessary but I too hatched some IB split to Peach birds 3 years ago,,and realized early on what you write about not getting the splits to come together in both parents to produce the split colored offspring. I wound up selling 2 males as just plain old India Blues,at 2 years old,,$75 each. Suppose their new owners hatched several peach chicks last summer to my shigrin. Oh well,my peach pied male will get his first chance this year,,he has great color,hope it carries on.

 

[Rosa moschata]

Losing splits after a few generations? The problem is that with recessive mutations, the IB splits and the IB non-splits look the same. If you breed two IB split to Midnight birds together, you'd statistically get 25% Midnight and 75% IB, and of those that look IB, 2/3 will be split to Midnight (you may have seen ads for birds listed as "2/3 chance split to ___" and that's how they originate -- from IB split to ___ X IB split to ___ breeding). But you won't be able to tell without test-breeding which of those IBs ARE split. If you think one of the splits is just a regular IB, and it gets bred back to "real" regular IBs, you'd have 50% of each offspring in each generation inheriting one copy of the recessive mutation. Those which don't inherit the mutation will thus "lose the split."

But, again, unless two birds split to the mutation are bred together again, you might "forget" that there was a Midnight ancestor a few generations back. You could be breeding what you think is IB X IB for generations, when in reality, one is split to Midnight. You'd never know until one of those "secret" split to Midnight birds was then bred to either a Midnight or another IB split to Midnight, even if that doesn't happen for many generations. I think that's what happened with the rabbits in the example given a few posts back. At the same time, however, you might not see ANYTHING, since IB X IB split to Midnight will also give IBs (that are NOT split to Midnight), and again, you wouldn't know just by looking which are which.

Something similar can happen with Whites, which can be genetically split OR genetically homozygous for other mutations. Someone could breed White X White for a bunch of generations, and "forget" that those Whites carried other mutations, which are "masked" by the bird being White. Then someone breeds a White to a Midnight, and lo and behold, all the offspring are Midnight split to White. How'd that happen? Well, the White was masking the Midnight, and a new owner might not be aware of what's "under the white" until surprise offspring get produced. Such a White pea which is genetically also Midnight would result from Midnight Pied X Midnight Pied. In such a breeding, 25% would look White, but they'd also be genetically Midnight. Hence the need for keeping records.

Going off-topic, I often wondered about there being other colors "hidden" among white Jersey Giants, considering the breeds which went into them. All sorts of things could be going on there "under the white", since the whites seem to be bred only with other whites, despite both colors being the same breed. I once said that if someone bred them to black Jersey Giants, we might see some surprise offspring there as well. The difference there is that (as far as I remember) the white in Jersey Giants is a recessive color -- white X white always gives white in that situation, even if the white is also erasing some other color. Crossing white X black would result in birds split to white, and any color not completely covered by the bird being heterozygous for extended black could "leak through". Or, if the white birds are already genetically "black" but with a double-dose of recessive white which erases everything, then we wouldn't see anything new. But we wouldn't know until we tried.

 

[KsKingBee]

If you don't mind I have a couple of newbee questions;

When you talk about black shoulder are the feathers really black or are they really such a dark blue they appear black?

And could I get a good definition of the term 'split'? I think I understand but some of the talk here gets pretty deep and I think I may be missing something.

 

[Birdrain92]

Black Shoulders usually have black shoulders, literally black like this. Male. Females are usually white with dark spots on the back. A Split is when you have two different colors that are in one bird's genetics but they only show one of the colors while the other remains hidden. It's like a recessive to a dominant gene, the bird has two color but the dominant one will show while the recessive remains hidden. Spalding has a green peafowl breed to an Indian peafowl. Pied is when there is white mixed with white and they show both white and the color. Sometimes breeding a white to a color will make a peafowl look like a Pied but I don't think that would make it a Pied genetically but not all the time will it show white with color. If it was a guarantee that when a white is bred to a color peafowl it will show white then you couldn't have a Color split to white. Sometimes the color and white will show just breeding white to color but like I said I don't know if that makes it Pied genetically. In my head it would but I don't know if that the official. I've read that sometimes you have to have 2 generations of white. It depends on who you listen to. Some say when color and white breed that you have a chance of getting a Pied and others say you have to have 2 generations of white to make a Pied. I've seen peafowl look like Pieds when a color and white breed together.
My neighbor's BS Peacock.

 

[frenchblackcopper]

My 2 Black Shoulder Silver Pied Peacocks don't have any noticable "Black" on their shoulder.Bronze black shoulders are also not "black",nor is Opal "black" shoulder,,nor is Purple "black" shoulder,,purples are a rusty,dark tan wing covering color,IB and Midnight are the only two "black" shoulder varieties that indeed have "black" shoulders