Barred Rocks are silver, so I got both silver and gold early on. Selecting for gold was easy because it is recessive, but the silver hens only produced silver cockerels, all their daughters were gold because their mate was gold (so homozygous). Essentially, a silver hen and gold cock made "red sexlinks" in that generation of Welbars. I kept a bunch of those cockerals, they are very nice looking. I am now breeding both color cockerels over a mixture of gold welbar and welsummer pullets. I get only a very few silver chicks (I think the gold cockerel is getting more action in that pen), but I don't need many, just a few pullets to breed back to their father. Their progeny will produce a lot more silvers, but determining which cockerel is homozygous for silver is going to be the trick. I think I will have to employ a test mating with each cockerel until I get one that produces 100% silver daughters. That cockerel will be the foundation of the line of Silver Welbars. Breeding him to silver pullets will create more double silver cockerels and silver pullets (or I can even use the silver pullet progeny of untested silver males).
Yes, exactly. I have both, just not a pure breeding line of silvers yet because silver is dominant and therefore harder to fix in the cockerels.
There are so few Welbar owners/breeders. even in the UK there is no organization that I've ever heard of. I believe the original creator wanted to just get them designated as a different color (crele) of Welsummer. Welsummers already come in partridge and silver duckwing, Welbars would just have been a 3rd color. With that in mind, any SOP would logically be exactly like a Welsummer except in color/pattern.
