Onagadori - Long Tail Fowl and Long Crowing Fowl Discussion Forums

I have 2 self blue phoenix hens, want to get some better quality and some males.. what color would you recomend??? i do have one birch cockerel, but he isnt out of them.. and i have silver, b.b.red, golden and whites also.. please let me know the best match to get the self blue.. ive had them in with the whites and it pushes out some off the wall color, like a dirty white and a couple other colors that arnt true..

Hi, "Self Blue" not regular blue is recessive. To get a clean blue you need to breed to a black if possible. The gene turns red to straw color. Silver seems to be unchanged. I'll try to post a few pic of my self blues. If the blacks/birchens are not carring the gene none of the chicks will be self blue but will carry it. Then just breed back or brother sisters. Then you will get 50% blue and 50% blacks. I norm. get only about 30% blue from those mattings though. I love the color. Go to my web pages and check out the self blue Ohiki hen. I started with a lavender(self blue) O.E.hen a few years back and breed to phoenix. You will love the color. I call it my pastel colection. hahhah... Here is a pic of a F2. self blue phoenix project roo. He would have been a black red. Note how the gene turned the red to straw color.And black to blue...Blue to blue = 100% blue.(lavender)--(self blue)--(lav/lav) It delutes pheomelanin. Hope this helps a bit ......TMA.

i dont have any blacks, but i guess i will put them in with my silvers, then put the offspring back in with the self blue hens.. is that what your saying to fo?
also, im going to take a picture of these 3 black sumatra cockersl for you to look at.. send me your email and i can email you the pics.. they are all very nice..

If I were trying to establish Self Blue with just one sex, I would cross the hens both onto that Birchen cock. The idea being, the existing Self Blues are already made with solid black birds, the lav gene diluting the black. It is possible to make standard Black on the birchen (ER) allele, although it is usually made on the extended black (E) allele. Both are dominant alleles, so you should expect at least two years before you get back to the E allele where you'll start to see the proper Self Blue colour. If you cull at day 1 any chicks that don't hatch with E down colour, which is what you see on any purebred Black strain and they look like little penguins, dark above, whiteish below and no red at all, you'll be sure that all your 'black' chicks really are on the correct allele and not on something that you'll have to fight. You will probably lose some of the full melanization that your Self Blues have by doing this, but you should be able to get it back eventually if you just keep breeding birds with less and less pattern in the hackle and saddle together. Whatever you do, I would stay far away from the BB Reds, Goldens, Silvers and Whites. They won't do anything good for your Self Blues.

so if i cross the self blues with the birch, i may get some blacks? then i take any blacks and cross with teh self blues? is that right..

That's exactly right. Everything out of the first generation cross with the Birchen should carry the lav gene. So, if you get lucky and get some chicks with E down colour that have solid black colour (fully expect them to have coloured saddle and hackle the first generation, but hope they don't) it might only take two generations to get back to Self Blue. If you aren't sure what down you should be looking for, check out McMurray's pages on any breed of Black chicken. Here's the Black Cochin bantams, this is the down colour you should be looking for. http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/product ... ntams.html

For an example of the Birchen ER down colour, here's their Birchen Cochin bantam page, you can see that the pattern of the black and white changes, and often there will be some reddish colour to the head of these chicks. http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/product ... chins.html