Author Topic: Lets talk about beak colors  (Read 2555 times)

Maria Betancourt

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Lets talk about beak colors
« on: July 23, 2017, 09:47:33 PM »
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.

John W Blehm

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Re: Lets talk about beak colors
« Reply #1 on: July 23, 2017, 11:05:55 PM »
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...
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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.

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HORN: A term used to describing color of the beak, generally considered to be ivory tinged gray of low saturation and low brilliance.

Maria Betancourt

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Re: Lets talk about beak colors
« Reply #2 on: July 24, 2017, 04:20:16 PM »
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.