Walnut comb on a hen?

[desstheblessed]

It appears my turken hen has a walnut comb, defect maybe? She’s also the only one with black skin. For breeding purposes should she be taken out of the flock? I have some chicks from them already, but they’re too small to see what the combs will be, from what I understand, naked necks don’t generally have walnut combs, right?

 

[desstheblessed]

Then one of my white hens has a rose looking comb

 

[Amer]

They're all mixed breeds so they all look different, there's nothing in particular wrong with her.

 

[sourland]

They're all mixed breeds so they all look different, there's nothing in particular wrong with her.

And you can bet that part of her DNA comes from a silkie.

 

[AinaWGSD]

The APA standard calls for a single comb, it also doesn't allow for dark/black skin.

As for breeding purposes, that depends on your breeding goals. If you are wanting to breed to the standard then she probably wouldn't be a good choice. If you and/or potential chick buyers don't care if the birds are show quality then it's fine, nothing wrong with that.

 

[desstheblessed]

Do you think with a silkie roo they could possibly make show girls with these hens?

 

[desstheblessed]

Or a resembling bird to a show girl,since they’re mixed breeds.

 

[AinaWGSD]

It could be a good start to a showgirl breeding program if you're looking for a project. She seems to have the correct combination and skin color and is almost certainly carrying the gene for silkied feathers. If you bred her with a silkie rooster you'd probably get 50/50 silkied chicks. And some of those chicks would also be NN.

Or you could use her in a breeding program to work towards silkie feathered naked necks. Single combs are recessive, so if you bred her with a NN rooster I would expect her chicks would have a 50/50 chance of a single comb. If you crossed the single comb chicks you should have 50/50 silkie feathered single combed F2 birds.

Again, it depends on your personal breeding goals. A side note on chicken breeding, it doesn't work anything like dog breeding. "Pureness" is significantly less important than whether or not a show bird meets the written standard. There's no breed registry or studbook requirements and no detailed pedigree required to consider a chicken "purebred." The two most important things when breeding chickens is that they resemble the breed standard and they breed "true" (meaning you can reasonably expect their offspring to inherit standard traits of the breed). How you got there is not particularly important.