Yellow Legs: Understanding the Genetics, Breeding and Judging Criteria

[LeslieDJoyce]

Mine all hatch orange. Later they change.

 

[Yellow House Farm]

Personally, I'd give them to a week or two and then cull anything that isn't yellow.

I catalogue the traits in my strain that can be culled before the 6 month point, and I hatch large knowing I'm going to eliminate so many birds. I often recite to myself, "You get what you tolerate." Some traits like quality of rose comb are cumulative; thus each generation is a little better, and I decide what my minimum standards will be. Leg color is usually different. If the best your getting is turning yellow at 10 weeks, I wouldn't accept worse. Maybe next year you'll get it down to nine, maybe not. However, if you cull hard for nothing but yellow, in a year or two it's all you'll get save, perhaps, the random one or two.

Years ago, when I crossed the WD with SGD, the F1s were all slate shanked in the females with one or two random males; the vast majority of males were white shanked. So, I had blue shanked females; that's all I had to work with. Net year was a mix because the trait was so prevalent that I didn't want to cull too, too rashly. The following year I culled anything t hat blued up, usually about 6 weeks.

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

Last season, if I had chosen the most orange-yellow pullets at POL to be my breeders, I would also have chosen birds with very poor feather color. It's rather angst inducing.

I think in my flock I'd need to wait until about 20 weeks to have much clue about a more stable leg color. They all hatch bright orange, then they shift and shift as they feather. Of course they shift again after they've been laying a while.

@YellowHouseFarm I'm not quite following you. What breeds are you working with? What shank color is your goal? Are you saying you went from 100% the wrong shank color in your pullets to mostly the correct color in a season or two? If so, that's encouraging ... makes me less concerned I'll breed myself into a corner.

I think I'm going to roast a bunch of yams so we can begin to eliminate the super deadly dry pasture nutrient situation as a factor here. We use a wheat-based feed, so don't get any pigment boost from corn, and that does seem to be a factor in the yolk color here. I'll talk to my feed mixer about appropriate carotenoids ... we just picked up an order, so if there are going to be changes there, it will be several weeks. But we need to eliminate as many factors as we can, I think.

http://www.worldpoultry.net/Broiler...oids-on-yolk-and-skin-pigmentation-WP010752W/

I can't get the links for "Table 1" and "Table 2" to work in that article.

 

[Yellow House Farm]

Yes, Leslie. The goal would be to get rid of this trait. You certainly don't want a strain you have to raise out to 20 weeks before you get the shanks in shape. If you know that they will change to yellow at 10 wks. Hatch extra heavy. Then cull everything that doesn't have proper shank color at 12 weeks. They can be spatchcocked for broilers, etc., but the last thing you possibly want is to develop a strain where shank color is not discernible until 20 weeks. It wold be a doomed strain.

The following year, the yellow should predominate, and in a season or two, yellow shanks should be all, or the vast majority, of what you have.

PS: Don't worry so much about the richness of yellow, but that they all be yellow is imperative. You'll be able to fix the pattern. The hindsight piece is that this shouldn't have made it passed the 2nd generation of the original outcross.

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

I'm still trying to figure out if I have a problem. I have some vision issues, which makes this a bit less obvious for me (I can see stuff if I know what to look for, so I can do it). The chicks are with broodies, and that makes them a bit harder to observe.

The best leg color and the best feather color SEEM to be inversely related in my flock, so that makes decisions angst-y. I worry if I kill all the chicks that at any point show less-than-orange legs, I'd end up with just cockerels and a few pullets with very, very bad feather color by POL. I don't think I'd recover from that.

As a brand new breeder, I started with a young trio of F4s last "year" just before the pullets reached POL. My breeding partner picked them out for me, she is super picky and tends to cull hard and early. The trio's legs looked yellow to me, the two I sill have (hen and cock) still show yellow legs, though a paler yellow than during the first breeding season (the hen's legs are very light right now).

Right now I'm growing out my second season of chicks. I definitely starting to "see" variations in the yellow of the chicks' legs this season. I think that starts at about 4-6 weeks -- don't know if I could spot it earlier. I consider that too early to kill a chick, though I could certainly find a way to keep track of birds that shift leg colors in undesirable directions. I'm just trying to figure out what is actually undesirable, and what is part of the growing process (if anything).

As for shank color issues in this strain: I was told anything with bad leg color was culled in the previous generations. But it's a new line, starting from scratch as a hybrid, and there are a LOT of things to keep track of while figuring out how to make progress. I think I remember some talk about "green" legs in the F4s, including some talk that some of the pullets grow out of it, and some people saying they'd cull for it anyway.

Right now, I think there are only about 3 of us actively breeding this line forward from the F4s. This year we're working on F6s if you're talking a literal linear progression of generations ... I did use the F4 male again with the F5 females as one of my breedings. My partner is for sure making leg color a priority this year.