i love that we're working on basically the same thing just different sizes haha.
i found this post on facebook from a lady that seems insanely knowledgable about chicken colors.
AUTOSOMAL RED, BLESSING & CURSE
Autosomal red is a mystery, first coined somewhere in the 1950s by Hutt and Jeffreys. Autosomal red is the pest in silvers, causing red shoulders in S/S cocks (girls stay clean so you don't know they can give sons with it).
In other cases autosomal red is a blessing, for example in silvers with orange shoulders (cocks, often combined with blue for more beauty). Here you see 'lemon'. Lemon can be gold with columbians Co, Db and gold diluters like Di and ig to make gold as light as baby yellow, or by adding autosomal red to a silver bird. One photo shows a Frisian cock lemon pencilled (Citroen pel). The second is the early stage of creating lemon columbian Wyandottes by Danny Stindt (NL).
It is very difficult to get autosomal red evenly, it is always blotchy, either on a single feather or over whole feather fields. If a chicken has a pattern, it is less obvious. But if the chicken has nothing to distract your eyes from the blotchy distribution of autosomal red, you can see its character.
Anyway, a curse and a blessing, you can use it or hate it.
And no, there is no 'cure' or 'trick' to get rid of it if it is a curse to you, other than breeding to 'clean silver' - sometimes for several years - and hoping for the best.
Nobody knows if autosomal red is one gene or several factors
(me included).
For books on less mysterious colours:
www.chickencolours.com