30 FItiST LESSONS IN POULTRY KEEPING. 



get the required color is a jet black with purple barring. This comes from an excess of color, 

 and results generally from too strong color matings. The muting of two jet black specimens 

 with fine green sheen is apt to bring the objectionable purple bars. So the expert fancier 

 breeding olack fowls avoids mating the finest plumaged birds of either sex with equally fine 

 colored specimens of the other sex. With a male perfect (approximately) in color he mates 

 females that, without being pronouncedly brownish, show a tendency to that color. Similarly 

 with his finest females he uses a male with a little less strength of color. 



Fine specimens having the purple barring are used in breeding with birds very poor in color 

 with black weak and showing quite brown and dull. They are also used with birds of correct 

 color. In the first case only a small proportion of the progeny is likely to come good in color, 

 for uniformity and soundness of color do not result quickly from such extreme matings. In 

 the mating of a bird with an excess of color with one of standard color some very fine speci- 

 mens are sometimes produced, though, naturally, a considerable part of the progeny shows the 

 purple bars. 



Mating Buff Varieties. 



A solid golden buff fowl is one of the most beautiful in plumage, and the perfection of colorin 

 buff fowls is most difficult to obtain. From the most carefully selected matings a proportion of 

 thicks come that as they grow up show white or black in wings and tails, or red across the 

 shoulders and backs of males, uneven mottling of different shades of buff throughout the plum- 

 age, different shades of buffin different sections. The proportion of such chicks if often dis- 

 couraging to the beginner, but by persistently mating from the best specimens he can procure 

 or afford to buy, he in time can develop a line of buffs that will give him a very satisfactory 

 proportion of birds as good as the best. 



In mating buff fowls keep as near as possible to the shade of buff you are trying to get. Good 

 buff being so very scarce even yet it follows that most matings will be of males :i little dark 

 with females a little light, or vice versa; but in making these necessary compensation matings 

 keep as near the standard color as you can, and if you have fowls of both sexes of standard 

 color, and in other respects suitable to mate together, by all means make such a mating if only 

 of a single male and female. 



In breeding for buff more perhaps than in working with any other surface color, undercolor 

 is of great importance. In saying this I do not wish to be understood as suggesting a neglect of 

 undercolor in other varieties, but I know of no other color in which surface faults may be over- 

 looked safely and reliance placed on sound undercolor to work the defects out of the surface to 

 the same extent as in buff. Get the best undercolor possible, a buff, but a little lighter in shade 

 and duller than the surface color. In undercolor, though, take a bird that is almost white, if 

 good in surface color, rather than one that has a bluish or slaty smudge or bar in the under- 

 color, for birds with such undercolor are apt to give you too much black in wings and tails, and 

 often give a great deal of lacing and ticking of black in the surface color of their progeny. 



In surface color a little white is less tolerable than a little black appearing in mealiness in 

 flights and tail feathers, but in undercolor black should not be tolerated. 



flating Red Varieties. 



In general what has been said of mating buff varieties applies to reds, though the ideas of 

 breeders of red varieties do not yet agree as do those of breeders of buffs, and therefore their 

 methods of mating are not so generally alike, and the fact that black is admitted in the wings 

 and tails, and to some extent in the hackle, makes the use of birds with smutty undercolor per- 

 haps a little less risky than in breeding buff color. The tendency in the development of the 

 reds, however, has been for the elimination of black and toward making it a solid colored bird. 

 The R. I. Red standard in fact simply recognizes and permits markings which in the buff breeds 

 were never treated as leniently in the Standard as they were in practice. It is because the 

 tendency in Reds seems unmistakably toward uniform color and the final elimination of black, 

 and because this tendency makes the breeders follow the methods of breeders of buff fowls that 

 I have taken the liberty of classing red as a solid color, though it is not strictly so in fact. 



