What is this breed?

[Tamrajh]

When we saved the 13 egg production girls we were told they were a mixture between RIR and White Leghorns. What is that breed called, or does it have a name?

 

[chickaddict]

red sex links - I believe golden comets

 

[pdsavage]

Quote:
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[Ridgerunner]

There is no sex link police running around issuing fines or in any way enforcing what sex link crosses are called. Different hatcheries or breeders call the same crosses different things or they give the same name to different crosses. The most common breeding I've found for a Golden Comet is a New Hampshire rooster over a White Rock hen, but no one is going to jail or breaking any patent laws if someone substitutes other parents, say a RIR rooster, and calls the offspring Golden Comets.

I'm not even sure you can make a sex link with a White Leghorn hen and a RIR rooster. A White Leghorn usually has a dominant white gene, not the hen's silver that is required to cross with a rooster's gold genes to make a red sex link. What you should get with that cross is a white hen, possibly with a bit of red leakage, that would be a great egg layer, but it should not be a sex link.

There are Silver Leghorn's that would appear white which would make a sex link. Since theses are production hens, I would suspect that the parent hen was actually a Silver Leghorn, not a White Leghorn. In that case the female offspring should be mostly red but probably with a fair amount of white leaking through. A Columbian Leghorn would also have the Silver gene and should make a sex link chick when crossed with a RIR rooster, but the mother hen and the offspring should have black tails and probably some black around the neck, with the mother being otherwise white and the pullet being mostly red, possibly with some white leakage.

If you could post pictures, we could probably give a better guess, but I suspect the parents are a RIR rooster with a Silver Leghorn hen, which should give you a great egg layer. I'm not aware of any standard name for this cross. It is not Golden Comet.