White Sport Cream Legbars

[Sally Sunshine]

Quote: Just an update on this one, its looking like a girl, but again perhaps time will tell me its a boy! 3/19 had been hatch date I will update in another month!

 

[Sally Sunshine]

Quote: Just an update on this one, its looking like a girl, but again perhaps time will tell me its a boy! 3/19 had been hatch date I will update in another month!
I am still going with a girl, thoughts? was hatched 3/19 (but what do I know? ha ha ha the boys already have big combs and wattles, thats what I am going by lol)

 

[nicalandia]

looks pullet to me

 

[Thespoiledchicken]

Wow- how'd I miss this thread!

Sally yes that definitely looks like a girl to me


I was breeding my White Sport trio last year with VERY POOR results



If I crossed my Cream Legbar roo to a white sport female (or vice versa) the eggs hatched great and I noticed a lot of the chicks also seemed to have a lighter/ bluer coloring to them.

Now- When I bred White to White- every single chick embryo was White but none hatched except for one. The one that did manage to hatch passed shortly after hatching.

I incubated A LOT of white sport to white sport eggs and every single egg had a white sport inside- most embryos had major defects which led me to believe it may have just been an inbreeding thing.

I would love to see the Recessive White crossed into a completely unrelated line and see if the same happens. That will tell us if it's inbreeding or something lethal...


My Whites laid the bluest eggs- They were a sky blue with not even so much as a hint of green.


Trish

 

[Sally Sunshine]

Wow- how'd I miss this thread!

Sally yes that definitely looks like a girl to me


I was breeding my White Sport trio last year with VERY POOR results



If I crossed my Cream Legbar roo to a white sport female (or vice versa) the eggs hatched great and I noticed a lot of the chicks also seemed to have a lighter/ bluer coloring to them.

Now- When I bred White to White- every single chick embryo was White but none hatched except for one. The one that did manage to hatch passed shortly after hatching.

I incubated A LOT of white sport to white sport eggs and every single egg had a white sport inside- most embryos had major defects which led me to believe it may have just been an inbreeding thing.

I would love to see the Recessive White crossed into a completely unrelated line and see if the same happens. That will tell us if it's inbreeding or something lethal...


My Whites laid the bluest eggs- They were a sky blue with not even so much as a hint of green.


Trish

thats a bummer on the breeding, I am trying to figure out a way to keep our sports I dont have room to play around to be honest and thats a bummer

 

[KPenley]

Trish, white is hard because it can cover so much, but maybe crossing a white sport with a show quality white Leghorn would work without changing genetics too much.

 

[enola]

Using a white leghorn would definitely get white chickens. I have a black Araucana rooster that I bred to a white leghorn hen. I bred the resulting white pullet back to him. My 3/4 Araucana pullet that resulted frok that cross was white. I bred her back to the Araucana rooster, the resulting 7/8 Araucana pullet is white with 3 - 4 black feathers.

So.........yep you would get white!

 

[Brada Puhi]

Aloha,

Mahalo nui loa Trish for your insight and welcome to the thread!

People have said that breeding white to white results in poor fertility, and your experiences adds to that. I plan on doing the same when my whites get big enough but your experiences makes me even less hopeful of success. I like the whites but I am now breeding my white sport to the roo who does not carry the gene because I have 7 whites.

Aloha, Puhi

 

[Thespoiledchicken]

I really like the Whites and I would love to see them flourish

My thinking was just serious inbreeding because so many of the chicks had defects.

Would crossing them out to a white leghorn again lose the auto sexing? I know White Leghorn is already in the mix but I would hate to lose the auto sexing crossing back again.

Mine were easily sexable at hatch even though they were White- the girls had nice eye stripes and were more of a yellow color. The boy was Creamy (no yellow) with a definite headspot and back stripe that matched the headspot.

(Boy on the right)


(Boy in the back)



Now- here is a crazy question for the genetics gurus... What genes in their background could possibly cause feathered legs?

My Whites hatched out with lightly feathered legs

I probably would not even have noticed but since these were the first White Recessive Cream Legbars to hatch here I was inspecting every inch of them! I didn't even think they were legbars at first and thought maybe they were a crossbreed of some sort.

They did lose the feathers during the chick stage but very strange nonetheless!

 

[HaplessRunner]

Not a genetics expert but I think outcrossing to a white leghorn would create a lot of issues. First, the white that we have is due to a combination of recessive + recessive. The white leghorn has dominant white. This dominance would likely override the autosexing traits that we would want to maintain. From what I understand, white is normally a dominant color in chickens, with our noted exception in cream legbars. We would need some of our geneticists to weigh in here. I do think that we can do things to improve the vitality of these white sports and develop a distinct strain but it is going to take some work to do it.

I now have a white sport cockerel that is strong and vigorous that was hatched on February 28th and a vigorous white sport pullet that was hatched on March 8th that are growing out nicely. We will see.