Oh there are many colors... :-)
I had buff, white, black and "blue" (dark gray). There are also "splash" when you cross colors. I had whitish ones with patches of darker colored feathers.
There is an entire world of silkie breeding!
Oddly enough, the darker colors needed to be supplemented with additional amino acids to get a decent hatch rate. I can't recall off the top of my head which amino it was but it's documented somewhere. It's been several years since I've bred them. I think it's L-Lysine?
The black coloring in the skins and on the bones caused a problem if you were trying to breed black silkies.
The chicks would die in the shell at almost full development until I started adding additions to the adults diet. On opening dead shells with developed chicks, I was only able to get about 1/4th of the black babies to hatch. Odd that as black feathering seems to be a dominant trait so hatch rates were low. :-(
It's fascinating.
Neat birds too. Silkie hens are famous for being "lead butted" broodies! The best feathered incubators in the entire poultry world.
The silkie feathering is autosomal recessive so if you want to do cross-breeding with other birds, it takes two generations to get the silkie feathering and at only a 50% rate.
There are poultry lovers (and I used to be one of them until San Marcos adopted new ordinances) that played around with a cross between silkies (autosomal recessive), Turkens (aka Transylvania naked necks) naked necked feathering being Autosomal dominant, and polish cresting. The polish cresting is also Autosomal dominant.
The goal was to end up with a silkie feathered bantam with a naked neck and the large, fuzzy polish crest.
The new breed is called "Showgirls".
Looky here:
BTW, Feathersite.com is probably the most comprehensive poultry site on the entire internet. :-) -- Peace! Om
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a Son of a unpleasant woman" -- Jack Nicholson
