@nicalandia can you check whether the birds in post #5 are splash, or whether they are blue paint? I'm not good at telling those apart, especially when they are silkies.
I'm using a desktop computer, so it might be different if you are accessing it differently.
When the quoted text is inside a blue box, I can click inside there and hit "enter" to divide it into multiple boxes.
There is an option in the little symbols at the top of the reply, to "Toggle BB code."
The image looks like little brackets [ ]
If I have trouble making the blue box behave, I turn off BB code and copy/paste the correct bits (brackets or otherwise) to where I want them in the reply, then turn BB code back on to make sure I got it right.
(What you did was also fine. I like playing with some kinds of effects, so that is a large part of why I do it.)
https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...ue-barred-rock-rooster.1567879/#post-26640128
Here is a link to a post where I listed some books and online pages.
http://kippenjungle.nl/chickencalculator.html
This is a chicken genetics calculator. You can change the genes in the dropdown boxes, and the little pictures of the chickens change too. It can calculate possible offspring, but I mostly use it to model what genes do what.
The default for each gene is the version found in the wild Jungle Fowl. Those are marked with + (which makes them easy to recognize, if you want to put it back the way it started.)
Each gene has a name, and an abbreviation (usually one letter or a few letters that somehow relate to the name of the gene.) Dominant genes have a capital letter abbreviation, recessive genes have a lower case letter. When there are more than two genes, I'm not sure how they decided which middle ones would get capital letters vs. lowercase letters.
For your specific chickens, change the first box to E/E
I'm not actually sure if your chicks are pure for E (Extended Black), or if they are E with something else, but the images will look the same either way.
Partway down the list, I is the symbol for Dominant White (it "inhibits" black, and the letter I wasn't already being used for something else, so that's why it got that symbol.) Each of your paints has I/i+ and the ones that are plain black or blue or splash have i+/i+. Two copies of Dominant White (I/I) will turn a black chicken completely white, without leaving any black spots. So that makes a white chicken rather than a paint. Your white chicken might have that, although there are several other genes that can also cause a chicken to be white. So I'm not entirely sure about her.
Further down the list, Bl is the symbol for Blue. bl+/bl+ is a chicken that can show black, Bl/bl+ is a chicken that has all black turned into blue, and Bl/Bl is a chicken that has all black turned into splash. (On an all-black chicken, the black or blue or splash is all over. On other patterns, like black tailed red or black laced gold, the black is changed but the red or gold is still present.)
You can play around with the various combinations of Bl and I to get paints with black, blue, or splash markings.
For mauve, your hen would be E/? and i+/i+ and Bl/bl+ and choc/-
That means Extended Black base color, no Dominant White, one copy of the blue gene and one not-blue, and one copy of the chocolate gene. Chocolate is on the Z sex chromosome, so it behaves a little differently. Roosters have two Z chromosomes, but hens have ZW. So a hen can only have one gene there, not a pair like with other chromosomes. The - after the / is showing that she has not got a second gene there.
Yes, that would be why. I think actual black skin may be black from hatch, but other versions of dark skin (like the slate-colored legs on Ameraucana chickens) can definitely start out light and get darker. Actual black like in Silkies and Ayam Cemanis requires a special gene (fibromelanosis, often shortened to "fibro"). Fibromelanosis is a dominant gene, so a chicken shows black skin if it has even one copy of that gene. That means a chicken can show black skin but also carry the gene for non-fibro. If a chick inherits non-fibro from both parents, it will not have actual black skin. I suspect that is what happened with your chick.
That is a possibility. I'm not very good at telling paint from splash, especially on Silkies, so I've tagged someone else to check that. (I put that at the beginning of this post.)
I think he just has leakage, which means bits of color showing (in this case on an otherwise-black chicken.)
He might be black split to something (some color pattern that allows red or gold to show, rather than just black). But the gene that turns a black chicken into a paint chicken is Dominant White, which is dominant. He is not split for that.
The gene that causes naked neck is incompletely dominant. One copy of the gene makes a chicken with a naked neck, and two copies of the gene make the chicken even more naked. I have seen them referred to as "bowties" (because the less-naked ones have a tuft of feathers at the base of the neck, as if they were wearing a puffy bowtie) and "strippers" (the more naked version.)
If your showgirl has two copies of the naked neck gene, all of her chicks will inherit one copy (so she would be a stripper, and all her chicks would be bowties if they had a non-naked father.)
If your showgirl has one copy of the naked neck gene (bowtie), then she will give the naked gene to half her chicks (making them bowties too), and she would give the not-naked gene to the other half of her chicks (making them look like normal silkies, with no naked neck.)
It might become more obvious as they grow up.
For now, I am guessing they are showing a different color pattern (like e+ wild-type or E^Wh Wheaten), which could be carried by a black chicken without showing it (even if the black chicken then has genes turning it into a blue chicken, or a splash chicken, or a paint chicken, or a mauve chicken, or a white chicken.) If one rooster and one hen carried other genes like that, you could get chicks that do not have E (Extended Black) at all.
A splash baby would have to come from the splash father, not the black father. You are correct about that.
Whether to allow father/daughter matings in your flock is up to you. But some amount of inbreeding does not seem to be a big deal for chickens: their chicks will typically be fine anyway.
If you want to keep some daughters but do not want to let them have chicks with their father, you could keep them as a separate flock. Or let them run together most of the time, and only separate them when you want to collect eggs for hatching (just collect eggs from the older hens, not the ones you have hatched.)
what color will this mauve baby chick be if it’s not white but a silver white and how do I know who fathered who and what hen is mom? Trying to understand how silkie coloring works.
