This is Sweet Pea. She’s the matriarch of the flock. She’s the mother of Bacon and Ranch.
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What can you tell about Sweet Pea?
Where did you get her?
If hatchery or feed store, she is probably a particular color of a known breed.
If she came from someone's flock, they may be breeding specific traits or she might be a mix of quite a few things.
Given that she is the matriarch of your flock, knowing a bit of her history may be helpful in sorting this out.
I’ve got lots of pictures to share about my flock and what genetics might be hidden within. I can’t get a solid finger on many of the hen genetics and I’m hoping to learn from people who know more than me.
You definitely have mottling in your flock.
Mottling is a recessive gene, so you only see the white dots when a chicken has two copies of the gene (inherits one from each parent.) I'm going to call the other form of this gene not-mottling, because it is the gene you find when a chicken does not show mottling, but it doesn't really have a good name of its own.
Going through the photos you posted, and looking at specific genes:
**Mottling**
Sweet Pea shows mottling, so she has two mottling genes. That means she must give one to each chick she produces.
Serama Rooster 1 does not show mottling so he must have one not-mottling gene. He did produce a daughter that shows mottling (Ranch), so he must have one mottling gene. That makes him heterozygous (split) for mottling, with one mottling gene and one not-mottling gene.
Bacon does not show mottling. That means she must have one gene for not-mottling (inherited from her father), and she must also have one mottling gene (inherited from her mother Sweet Pea.)
Ranch does show mottling. She must have two mottling genes (one inherited from her father and one from her mother Sweet Pea).
For Mayo, he has white barring which makes it harder to tell if he also has mottling. I think he probably has one mottling gene and one not-mottling gene. I figure this mostly from the chicks from the 2nd clutch, which come from Sweet Pea and Ranch but not from Bacon. Both of those hens show mottling, so they each have two mottling genes, and gave one to each chick. Some of the chicks definitely have mottling, especially the 5th photo (cockerel with black and gold and white). That means their father Mayo must have a mottling gene. The pullet in the third photo shows a pattern of black/gray/white, but I'm fairly sure she is not showing any mottling. That would mean she must have one gene for not mottling, which must have come from her father Mayo. So he's got one gene for not-mottling.
Regarding the chicks from clutches one, two, and three: any of them that show mottling will obviously have two mottling genes. Any that have Sweet Pea or Ranch as their mother will have at least one mottling gene. Chicks from Bacon & Ranch have a 25% chance of having no mottling genes, a 50% chance of having one mottling gene, and a 25% chance of having two mottling genes.
**Barring**
Mayo has the barring gene, and so do many of his offspring. The chickens you had before that do not (Sweet Pea, Bacon, Ranch, Serama Rooster #1).
Barring is a gene on the Z sex chromosome. Males have two Z chromosomes and females have ZW.
Mayo has the barring gene on just one of his Z chromosomes, because he produced some chicks with barring and some chicks without barring.
The barring gene makes white stripes across the feathers, no matter what other color the feathers may be.
A chicken can show both barring and mottling, but I sometimes have a hard time recognizing when this is the case. First clutch, first picture definitely has barring but I can't tell about mottling. Second clutch first picture, I'm pretty sure has both barring and mottling. Third clutch first picture has mottling but no barring.
Barring is much easier to see on black-based chickens, and harder on some other colors. Third clutch second picture, I think this chick may have barring, but it's hard to be sure on the gold & black coloring. I'm sure this chick has either mottling or barring or both, and the situation may become more obvious as the chick gets older. Chickens with mottling will generally show more white as they get older (each time they molt, not changes in the feathers between molts.)
**Gold/Silver genes**
The gold and silver genes are on the Z sex chromosome. Because a hen has only one Z chromosomes, she can have either gold or silver but not both. A rooster has two Z chromosomes so he can have two gold genes or two silver genes or one of each. Silver is dominant over gold, so a rooster with one silver and one gold gene will look silver.
The gold gene obviously lets the chicken show gold (yellow, buff, red, brown). Sweet Pea and Bacon and Ranch are all gold.
The silver gene turns gold to white (same parts of the chicken, just removes the color from them.) Serama Rooster 1 has one silver gene (from looking at his color) and one gold gene (because he gave it to his daughters Bacon and Ranch.)
Looking at Mayo, I cannot decide how much of the white in his coloring is caused by the barring gene, how much by the mottling gene, and how much by the silver gene, so I keep looking at his offspring to try and figure it out.
Mayo produced some chicks that show gold and some that show silver, so he must have one gold gene and one silver gene. Each pullet is either silver or gold (just one of those genes). Each cockerel is either pure gold (two gold genes) or silver/gold split (one silver gene from Mayo, one gold gene from Sweet Pea or Bacon or Ranch).
**base color**
This is the color and/or pattern showing through underneath or through the mottling and barring, the pattern that can have gold or silver.
Many of the chicks are showing black. That is typically caused by a dominant gene called Extended Black (makes the chicken mostly black all over, subject to a few exceptions). Because Extended Black is dominant, it should be visible in each least one parent of each of those chicks. Bacon and Ranch do not show Extended Black. I'm fairly sure that neither Sweet Pea nor Serama Rooster 1 have it either. So either Extended Black is coming from Mayo, or the "black" is actually caused by a combination of other genes (this is definitely possible, just more complicated genetically.)
For what genes are recessive to Extended Black, there are about 5 of them that affect how colors are distributed on the chicken, and I'm not good at sorting out some of them. If you want to look at what kinds of effects they cause, I suggest the chicken calculator:
https://kippenjungle.nl/chickencalculator.html
It has little pictures of chickens near the top of the page, one male and one female. There are a bunch of dropdown boxes to change various genes. The first box is set to the wild-type color by default (e+/e+), but can be changed to have Extended Black (E/E is two genes for Extended Black, or E/e+ is split Extended Black and wild-type, or there are various other options.) When you change those genes, the hen color is different for each one, at least if the chicken is pure for that gene. For most of them, the rooster colors look quite a bit alike.
I think Sweet Pea and Ranch might be showing e+ (wild-type), and Bacon might be showing e+ (wild-type) with some other genes that increase the amount of black. But I'm really not sure about that.
If you are playing with the calculator, the other genes I have been talking about are further down the list:
mo (mottling, default calculator setting is Mo+ for not-mottling)
B (barring, default calculator setting is b+ for not-barring)
S (Silver) and s+ (gold, which is the default calculator setting)
A capital letter means the gene is dominant, a lowercase letter means the gene is recessive, a plus sign (+) means that is the form found in the wild junglefowl ancestors of chickens. The calculator defaults are all the ones with +.
Each dropdown box represents one locus, the place on the chromosome where the gene is physically located. For some genes there are two options, for some genes there are more than two. For any one locus, all the options start with the same letter of the alphabet, but it is capital or lowercase or has some other letters after it to distinguish which option it is. All the genes at one locus are called alleles.
