What color and pattern is this Muscovy pair?

[Barney47]

keeper,

I have one chocolate out of the same mating as the blues that now is getting white on the head. I also have chocolates I hatched from eggs on ebay and they are solid but some have a very little white on the wing. You can see this in the pics I posted. They appeared this way when they hatched. Some were solid dark and some had a few spots of yellow. Here is a pic soon after hatching. I hatched about half under this hen and the other in an incubator.

 

[rollyard]

Quote:
As others have mentioned, your young birds likely have inherited the gene for whitehead (Canizie), so will probably become progressively whiter on head & neck! I can see @ least one blue-fawn in there; did you hatch any silver (very light blues)? I can see one in the group of four pic I think? Looks like it has brown on the head? Any chance of a better pic?

Because your young blues are relatively solid coloured (not pied/blue & whites), @ least one of the parent birds should be pied as a result of pattern/inhibiting genes other than the recessive duclair gene (although it is highly variable reportedly).

I love the chocolates & wish we had some here

 

[rollyard]

Just saw your last post with the choc ducklings. The ones that are solid are atipico, the ones with the eye-stripes, dorsal spots, ventral yellow are wild-type. It would be worth your while to mark them so that you can identify the pure for atipico as adults.

Cheers

 

[Barney47]

Rollyard,

Here is a better pic of the one you thought might be silver. Also a pic of my chocolates, I think I can tell the atipico from the wild type. When they hatched I had about 2-1 wild type. I ended up with only 2 drakes and they were both wild-type so I will have to wait this year to get any atipico males. I will separate at breeding time so would have eggs if interested.

What do you think the last pic is? I think it started out a light chocolate but is a light blue now on most of the body except head and neck which is the light chocolate. Looks like a white head too. The last two are young, possibly 3 months. I don't understand genetics too well on the Muscovies. I also raise peacocks and to me genetics is easier to understand on them.

 

[rollyard]

Hi Barney, thanks for the better photos, they are excellent. Your chocolate is so different to our bronze, very nice. Looks like one drake & four ducks in first pic if they are all the same age?

The second two photos are almost perfect side-by-side like that, because those two birds have both chocolate & blue genes. The first of the two with blue (a duck I think) very possibly has two doses of blue (& one of choc because females are hemizygous for X-linked colour genes), & if so, that would make her a Lilac. You could test her by crossing with a black drake & if all progeny bred had blue (but not necessarily true blue due to possible influence from other factors), then she is pure for blue (N/N, ch/-).

The last bird looks like a bit like a young drake (not too sure though from that pic). He looks to only have one dose of blue but also has chocolate (so N/n+, ch/ch) & is typically Blue Fawn to me.

They could well turn out to be white-heads, the lilac duck particularly. The problem with that gene is that expression does take some time to show itself fully & quite variable, & there are plenty of Muscovy around that don't have the Canizie gene but do have some white on the head/neck.

They are excellent comparable photos; thank you for taking the time to post them

 

[rollyard]

Oh, & thanks for the offer of eggs (I think that was intended for me?) I would be very interested, but as I live in Australia, unfortunately that would be a little difficult.

Thanks again

 

[Muscovies]

Pretty muscovies