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