25/08/2025
I think it's important to know what you're breeding, and what your choices can and will eventually produce.
As some people might know, last year I splashed out and bought myself a quad of Buff Columbian birds from a wonderful breeder over in the eastern states and when I initially approached her, I asked if she had a boy to go with the girls. She was very open and honest with me, answered every question I had with pride and didn't hide or avoid any of my questions, which lead me to knowing that the boy I was getting is related to the 3 girls, he is their brother and they are from a 10 year old line that she was selling and getting out of. I'm no stranger to line breeding and inbreeding, my mottled were created from doing those two things and if anyone asked I can tell them exactly how they were created and with what birds (and who I outcrossed with last year), so I'm not entirely surprised with these 3 hen raised sisters.
They share the same mums, they don't share fathers. One big thing you can see is the size difference between all 3 of these birds especially between the black and the cream and I am fully putting it down to the fact that the buff and the cream are very related to the rest of their family. They were all hatched at the same time give or take a day and raised alongside of each other, but for 2-month-old birds the two in**ed birds are the same size as 4-week-olds. They have siblings that have grown to full size, but they did take a bit longer than our other birds so I have no doubt that with time these two will be just as big as their “siblings”.
*These 3 birds will be available to pet quality homes*
This year our buff columbian have been split into two breeding groups, I have acquired an unrelated buff columbian split to millefleur boy to go over our original buff columbian girls and millefleur girls to go along with our original buff columbian boy so I’m not entirely sure exactly what we will produce as there's not a lot of information on the genetics for these birds out there especially in Australia but I am pretty confident in what I have researched so far, this colour will take time. The hard part about dealing with rare breeds and colours is finding diverse enough genetics without needing to outcross to other breeds and lose type or muddy their lines with mixing colours. We will see how we go and hopefully in 3 years time we can do both the breed and colour justice.
