Poultry Talk Ontario (pto.ca)

White leghorns are awful if you're trying to cross to get a specific colour! The white hides a lot of unexpected secrets, colours and patterns that start popping out of the woodwork generations down the line. You're better off to source black leghorns. Breed them to exchequer, breed the F1 back to exchequer, and voila.

Yup I'm not going to do the white leghorns any more, I was using white show stock to try and improve my exchequer leghorns but too much time and money involved for me. Plus white leghorns are not the easiest to sell.

just thinking out loud here but I also lost my speckled sussex roo...wonder how a java/sussex cross would turn out?

WaupoosCowgirl wrote: ↑

Mon May 22, 2017 11:39 am

just thinking out loud here but I also lost my speckled sussex roo...wonder how a java/sussex cross would turn out?

I suspect they'd all be black mottled (assuming speckled Sussex are the way they are because of mottling gene), with white skin. I don't think you'd see any mahogany colouring in the first generation chicks, but you might. Where's Robbie with her genetics calculator when you need her? It wouldn't be hard, I wouldn't think, to get back to Sussex type and colour. But, I think Speckled is different from mottling?

I just like pretty feathers lol