Celadon project

I have been trucking right along on my wild type celadon project!

This project started back in 2021, when I first ordered celadon hatching eggs from a 100% line. The birds that hatched were... unwell. BAD quality eggs, bad quality birds. I would spend the next 2 years carving off the bad traits, to forge a better line of healthier birds with better eggs- better size, better shell quality, better color, better everything. I eventually got to a point where I needed some outside information, as I had done everything I knew to do as a breeder in general. I now had a solid line of homozygous EB celadons, with the Roux, Fee, and White-wing Pied genes floating around in it, all laying large, solidly blue eggs.

But I HATED the fact that it took so long to sex them. I was struggling with the advancement of a jumbo line due to not being able to choose breeders at the right time.

So, in the spring of 2023, I ventured into the online community to look for information about making them into wild type feathered birds, which would allow me to sex them much sooner. Surely it would be an easy task! Just find someone who already has the wild type, and cross those into the CE birds, and weed the wild egg color back out!

I was WRONG. I was so dead wrong. I could not find anyone that had a wild type line. PLENTY of sex-linked brown jumbos, but no one with a solid wild type line. And forget a wild type celadon line. I found ONE person in california with feather sexable celadons, but she wouldn't ship eggs. Luckily, I had a friend in her area that picked up eggs for me, raised a generation to have a look at the birds, and eventually shipped me a couple of dozen to aid in the project.

But, before that, I purchased 60 SLB jumbo hatching eggs, hatched 62 of the 70 that arrived, slimmed the groups down into 2 breeding groups, and continued the hunt for any wild types. I finally found a breeder in Wisconsin in 2024, and made the 7 hours drive out to pick out 4 SLB het Roux boys (the breeder only had males available). Upon seeing them in person, I had serious doubts that they were actually wild type, as they looked identical to my SLB at home. But, the breeder was well-known, and I had come a long way. So, I took them home, and set up a project to get some girls from them.

While that was going, I found another well-known breeder was finishing up testing for her wild type line! I ordered 2 dozen eggs through a friend, in order to compare between these birds and the birds from the Wisconsin breeder. And Reader, let me tell you- there was no comparison. The two birds look starkly different. The new TN birds were very clear wild types.

By the time those new WT eggs were ready, I had used the het roux males from Wisconsin to pair to a group of CE hens from my EB line. This gave me my CEX jumbo line (all het EB roux birds, het for ce). The CEX breeders produced a large group of roux pharaoh birds, and a quarter of those hens lay blue. It's only about 3% of their total offspring, but I hatched hundreds and hundreds of eggs from the CEX birds, to get a group of roux pharaoh celadon hens to use for this project.

The roux hens are now under a pharaoh male from the California group. I do think that the cali birds could be wild types, or at least some of them are, but I don't trust the lineage enough to bet the farm on it, so I am crossing them to a roux pharaoh celadon hen group, and will breed back a male offspring from that breeding to get a roux pharaoh celadon male. From there, I will use the WT celadon hens I have gotten already from crossing the WT het CE male from the TN breeder (who included 2 celadon eggs, as her WT project did still have CE in it, the project was for WT feathering only). The Roux CE male over WT CE hens should give me WT het CE males, which I can then put back over WT CE hens to get some clean wild type celadon males. I will have to do some test breeding from there to see which ones actually are WT and which ones are het roux, but that is simply tedious, not hard.

Once I have the clean wild type feathered celadon birds, I will be able to use them to make the single-color lines I want: clean fee celadons, clean roux fee celadons, and clean fawn celadons. It will also be easier to make these lines jumbos, once they are created.

Here's one of the current het Fawn celadon males, who is almost certainly SLB. I'm hoping to clean the SLB out relatively quickly!