White chicks from brown bronze parents

[CartierChicken]

I have just hatched 9 turkey chicks, and 4 of them are solid yellow. Two of them are dark stripped and then two are lightly stripped. The parents were brown bronze, so I was not expecting the yellow chicks. Is this something that is common?

 

[Ridgerunner]

What that means is that your parent stock is not pure but both male and female are split for the recessive white gene. When only one of the gene pair is recessive white, that gene has no effect. You can’t tell it is there. But if the recessive white gene pairs up, then it is extremely strong and turns everything white. In theory, that should happen 25% of the time when the parents are split, but theory and practice are often different things, especially with small hatches. You have to hatch a lot of eggs for the averages to mean much.

With some of the other poults being different shades, that indicates to me that the white gene is not the only one that is split. It really sounds like your breeding stock is not pure.

 

[Lagerdogger]

Yellow poults could also be royal palm, calico, or red palm. The lighter brown markings could also be a single red gene. I wonder if the parents were bourbon red x royal palm. These would have looked like red bronze, but carried enough recessive genes to make a wide variety of colors.

 

[CartierChicken]

Thanks for the info. Interestingly enough, I had been looking for white turkeys, but could not find any, so now I'm happy I'm so in love with this guys already. Their temperament is so lovely. They are just so cool. I had to get rid of the tom and the 3 hens. I had them for 2 weeks, when 1 of my neighbours finally spoke up about the noise. They were raised in a rural area, with no real noises, so they were calm there. I live on the water, and there are boat noises, lawn mowers, and just noise they were not used to. This made the tom very nervous, so he gobbled a lot. I was told that if I raised my own turkeys, in this environment, they would be much more calmer. So I sold the turkeys within hours, as turkeys are hard to come by in Stockholm. I already had 16 eggs, so I put 10 in the incubator and sold the rest. So now I have these lovelies, and I am hopelessly in love.