What do you get if you cross...

[PatS]

Male Midget Whites with female Bourbon Reds?

We ended up with 2 male MWs, 2 male BRs, and 3 female BRs and are thinking ahead to this holiday season's possibilities. Since we don't have a breeding pair of MWs, I was thinking they might be chosen to come to dinner as our guests of honor. Then again, there are just two of us, and if we wait a year to invite the BR boys to dinner, they will be huge.

Everyone ranges together for the most part, but when they do split apart for a little while, the whites tend to stick together and the reds tend to do the same thing. (Sometimes they split along gender lines for a bit, too.) And the 2 white males tend to display and do their dominance thing mostly with each other, as do the 2 reds. I am kind of surprised that they know which "group" they "belong to," but they seem to.

There hasn't been any mating so far, at least that I know of. Are the BR females going to prefer the male reds? If we kept the MW's till next year, would the BR girls take a fancy to them and accept them as mates?

 

[turkaholic]

Your BR girls will take to any type of tom, MW or BR. As for crossing BR and MW, I'm not sure what you'll get other than the possibility of a turkey somewhere between the two in size. I don't raise any of the white breeds, but Steve of Sand S does. Hopefully he'll be able to post an answer for you.

 

[PatS]

Thank you! I hope Steve sees this and can add to your answer. I'm glad the girls will (as the song says), love the one you're with.

 

[Frosty]

I am far from a genetics expert, but here is what Kevin Porter told me concerning crossing a White Holland hen with a Regal Red tom (the RR looks like the BR but doesn't have the white on the wings/tail).

'You could also use the white hens as well on the RR tom but I wouldn't really recommend it as you would be putting a white gene in the mix and that one is hard to breed back out without doing lots of test breedings to see if any carry it down the road.
But if you did want to do that too you would get rusty blacks and red bronzes in the f-1s, all offspring would be white carriers from the mother, but breed all the hens from this back to the regal red father and 50% would come out regal red , but half of these would carry a white gene, but you wouldn't know which ones did till you did some test breedings to a white tom.'

I don't know if the MW would be the same?