Ameraucana Forum
The Official Ameraucana Forum => Breeding => Topic started by: Maria Betancourt on July 23, 2017, 09:47:33 PM
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Recently I noticed that my lavender pen is producing some chicks with beaks with no black at all or with a small amount of black. My breeders have black beaks so Im wondering how to fix it. Is it bad? Should I cull every chick that hatches like that.?
Also in the blues and blacks I hatched from shipped eggs I noticed that most have a partial black beak. If the breed standard says that the blues should have black beaks what I should do? So any information on how serious is this problem and how to fix it will be really appreciated.
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Lavenders should have "Swarthy horn" colored beaks according to my 1988 ABA Standard. I've always figured "horn" colored beaks would be like a typical cow's horn, with pretty much any grayscale color from white to black. I don't know that I've ever heard the word "swarthy" used in a sentence and had to look it up.
My ABA Standard defines...
SWARTHY: Very dark shading over horn or yellow in the beak and/or the shanks and toes.
Of course we are not dealing with yellow, so very dark shading over horn is what we want.
HORN: A term used to describing color of the beak, generally considered to be ivory tinged gray of low saturation and low brilliance.
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This is one of the extreme cases. in the cases of the chicks with beaks that are all white like this one....is that a cull? Or that color is still allowed? How I improve color in the beak? Should I breed back to a good black to fix this? Thanks for sharing your knowledge.