What breed/gender are these?

[donrae]

Second bird is birchen cochin (rooster). A nice one I might add.. hens of that line probably have a lot of that white "lacing"....

Are the birchen's supposed to have lacing? I've never seen that before......just the light hackle and saddle feathers, and the hens with the light collar area.

 

[Kev]

Are the birchen's supposed to have lacing? I've never seen that before......just the light hackle and saddle feathers, and the hens with the light collar area.

It varies by breed standard. Some call for that amount of lacing on hen's breasts, others much more restricted like what you described.

Some color standard are impossible to achieve in a single line so what they do is develop a "cock" or "hen" lines bred separately with the cock line bred to color standard for roosters, with hens bred to the hen standard. The side effect of those double lines are roosters with "too much" lacing in the hen line and "under marked" hens in the rooster line. I don't know what the cochin standard calls for in cochins, it was a pure guess based on the rooster having unusual amount of lacing, so I assumed the cochin calls for fair amount of lacing in birchen hens...

 

[donrae]

Thanks Kev. I've never seen that lacing, it's very pretty. I wouldn't have guessed it was birchen! That's why I love being on here, still learning stuff all the time.

 

[Kev]

Yeah it's attractive and the few roosters or hens with lacing this crisp and spread over the body get a lot of attention. There is a picture of a rooster- not cochin with very nice 'lacing' over the body somewhere on the net that was very striking.... But for some reason it's not more widely bred for, with the restricted ones like birchen modern games being the preferred type.