Breeding Birds

Many seasoned breeders can recognise a valuable bird in their flock that won’t necessarily look good in the show pen.

- Grant Brereton

Many seasoned breeders can recognise a valuable bird in their flock that won’t necessarily look good in the show pen. And these ‘breeding birds’ are often undervalued by many and regarded as ‘waste’ by the majority of people.

It is well-established that Mendel’s law is easy to follow in many varieties of poultry, where the pen in question consistently produces half the desirable colour of offspring, with the rest being undesirable from a plumage perspective.

The best example is probably Blue and its inability to breed true, producing one quarter Black and one quarter Splash offspring. And many Fanciers soon realise that by crossing the two together (Black x Splash) produces only Blue offspring. This can be very satisfactory in long-established lines where there has been much selection by past breeders for the correct shade of Blue.

However, the danger lies in taking a little bit of genetics theory, seeing it in practice in a very specific line, and then professing to understand and know all about how it works. I can say this because I have been there, written the bold articles with sweeping statements, and then have the results of a similar cross suggest something more complex was at work.

2-1-0

The 2-1-0 effect, as I refer to it, can be seen in many exhibition lines of poultry where a particular gene’s level of inheritance is studied. It’s nothing complex. To use Blue as an example again - if you were to hatch eggs from a Blue X Blue breeding pen, then your offspring would be one of three combinations: 2 (inherited 2 copies of Blue and are Splash - 25% chance); 1 (inherited 1 copy of Blue and are Blue like the parents - 50% chance); 0 (inherited no copies of Blue and are Black in all the areas that the parents were Blue - 25% chance).