What color is this Ameraucana?

[MaeIstrom]

Either an Ameraucana or a home-spun attempt at recreating one by crossing Araucana to OEG bantam which is how I presume the original was done since they come in the same colors as OEG apparently. I realise the legs are the wrong color which I why I suspect it was local recreation but definitely hatched from a blue egg. Apologies for the bad picture quality but I have an old phone and he's a fast one.

 

[HuffleClaw]

Not a pure Ameraucana. Looks like an Easter Egger..

 

[MaeIstrom]

Kind of in between a pure-bred and an EE I think, since the original breeder has been crossing back for several generations and culling out the non-ameraucana chacteristics so if you define Ameraucana as a guaranteed blue egg layer minus the lethal genes of the Araucana it counts. I wouldn't say that in America but here in Australia the Ameraucana isn't officially recognized as a separate breed to the Araucana and lacking the ability to import US stock this is as close as we can get. Saying that out of 9 chicks 3 had cross-beak and 1 had a bung leg so she seems to have recreated Ameraucana defects as well. As luck would have it she finally had a blue-legged cockerel hatched but not ready to breed when I got these eggs so her next batch should be indistinguishable from the SOP, but I suspect she's leaned pretty heavily into inbreeding to get this far so I'm probably going to breed the hens back to an Aracauna and call the offspring that or even Austraucanas since the current labeling of blue-egg layers is such a mess that even if you know the difference between Araucanas, Ameraucanas and easter eggers it's unlikely the person selling them to you does.

 

[Frazzemrat1]

if its a cross, then its an EE. I have an ameraucana crossed to araucana... she's an ee.
I didn't know that UK SOP araucana had the lethal gene... which is associated with the tufts on ours... as apposed to muffs.

 

[MaeIstrom]

Ah yes but in Australia your ee would be considered araucana crossed to araucana since that's what the ameraucana is classified as. Not saying it's right, just how it's done here. I don't know much about the UK SOP but the only Araucanas to be found in my city are lavender araucanas like the one in my profile pic and even he had 5 toes leading me to suspect silky ancestry in their somewhere. They definitively have the lethal gene though and I even read somewhere the entire Araucana line in Australia started with 5 roosters from a single hatching which were crossed to Marans. At any rate I'm more curious about whether the actual color is a recognized one than what breed I should call it. I *think* the breeder called some similar colored chicks gold duckwing or partidge wing or something but as he's grown his gold has turned to mahogany red and white flecks are appearing on his head and neck.

 

[Frazzemrat1]

He does look similar to a gold duck wing araucana, color wise... A young one at least. But, he doesn't have the gold coming in over the back in the saddle... how old? Also, we don't have a partridge wing as a color.
Here's a page for our SOP colors...
http://www.araucana.net/sop/

 

[MaeIstrom]

2 months old. I've been checking out the wikipedia page on chicken colors and I see a partridge colour that looks very similar to golden duckwing, in fact I can't tell the difference between the hens. Still nothing really matches so I guess he's a mongrel in that regard to. Just interesting that he started out looking identical to the golden duckwings and is slowly turning redder by the day, it's actually a very pretty color when he's running through the grass next to his siblings.