# Autosexing Question



## WeeLittleChicken (Aug 31, 2012)

So I am jumping back into the big bad world of chickens with some Bielfelder hatching eggs come Monday.  Now I know Bielfelders are autosexing, which is one of the things that made me want to try them, and I know they lay big brown eggs. What I was wondering though, is if could cross them to another barred autosexing breed would they retain this autosexing feature? I was thinking of eventually crossing a Bielfelder with a Cream Legbar to see if I could get autosexing green egg layers... would this work? All the information I could find was how to make an autosexing chicken from scratch. I found no such information on crossing already functional breeds...


----------



## Fiere (Feb 26, 2014)

I'm taking a stab in the dark here as I'm not entirely sure, but *in theory* if you cross a Bielefelder roo with a Legbar hen, you will achieve green eggs and the first generation might be sexlinked. 

Auto sexing and sex linkage are two similar, but very different things. Sex links don't breed true after the first generation, whereas auto sexing started with sex linking and after generations and generations of careful, selective breeding has achieved an auto sexing breed. Once you incorporate new genetics, that will theoretically throw all that in the toilet, even if the breeds were similarly developed and use the same sex-linked genes. When you out cross, you need to go back to square one, which is relying solely on that one sex-linked gene and that doesn't work past F1.

In this case, if my small knowledge base of Bielefelder and Legbar genetics is accurate, you'd have to toss the whole sex-linking gospel of barred hen to solid roo out the window and rely solely on the very basic premise that the hens are carrying the gene you want and the roosters are not. The gene you are wanting in this is the blue egg gene which is going to be carried by the hen (obviously), and while NOT a sex linking gene, that auto sexing ability should carry to those chicks. The moment you cross that generation with anything else, be it the parents or each other, you can't depend on it anymore. 

Hope this was at least somewhat helpful LOL!


----------



## WeeLittleChicken (Aug 31, 2012)

Well, you sort said what I was hypothesizing... so I guess that's helpful. This is all in the future at some point anyway. We just moved into the new place chickenless and I was going to wait until Spring but the "fresh eggs" they're selling down the street seem to have a 25% chance of any given egg being partially developed! Ewe! So I've lost my patience, ordered some Bielfelder eggs which will be here on Tuesday, and already have my incubator set up. Of course I'm not one breed kind of person so my mind started to wander a bit there.... I guess there's no harm in crossing them to see how it works. I mean I'd still get green egg laying hens, even if the autosexing thing goes kaput. I'll probably try it at that point... sex-links have their place but I am really looking for something more long term. (Especially since I have a few people who offered to buy my spare roos to feed to their cats if I didn't let them get too big...)


----------

