what color is she?

duckielove

In the Brooder
11 Years
Aug 31, 2008
43
0
32
New Hampshire
Here are some of my runners. You can see I have black's and fawn and whites but what the heck color is the grayish one considered? Its hard to tell but she does have some dark feathers (not black or blue) here and there on her.

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That could be, these are the first colored runners Ive had. My other ones were all white. I have brown ones as well, and the black ones have the irredescent blue and greens in the feather, as a matter of fact i have one male whos head is all that nice green. I just figured that the black ones with the colored feathers where the blues. Hmm now I dont know what i have anymore
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Blacks are black. I just learned that all blacks have at least some of the green irridesence and depending on how the light refracts can show as green/blue/purple.
 
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Looks like blue to me too. Blue will often have black "ink spots" bleed through. The genotype for blue is two "extended black" genes (the black gene) and *one* dilution gene. If you have two dilution genes, you get an even paler gray called "silver." Dilution is only partially dominant, so black sometimes shows through.

Now, I don't know how this works, but one of my blues has quite a lot of brown on her, which made me wonder whether she might not have some other colors in her. But her genotype appears nevertheless to be regular old blue, because the breeding between her and my blue drake resulted in a black (which means the baby didn't get a dilution gene at all, which will be the case for 25% of blue x blue offspring) and a silver (which means the baby got a dilution gene from each parent, resulting in two dilution genes--also happens for 25% of blue x blue offspring). I didn't get any blues out of the mating, but I only set 5 eggs, only three hatched out, and one of those was from a different mating. I have another six eggs in the incubator from that same mating, so we'll see how her genotype plays out in a larger batch in about four weeks.

So, anyway, the main point is that you apparently can have what appears to be brown in a blue duck, and it's still genotypically blue. Also, due to the variable action of the dilution gene and its only partial dominance, blues just tend to vary A LOT.

So I would say you've got a blue there. But I have been known to be wrong, probably more often than not.
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