IMPORTANT INFORMATION

BASIC BREEDING GUIDE To start your project, you must select your best Silkie or Satin with all of the desired characteristics and pair it with a bird with the best mille fleur pattern you can find. The original lines for the currently established Mille Fleur Satins and Silkies project started with a combination of Mille Fleur D'uccle, Tolbunt Polish, Mille Fleur Cochin Bantam, Silkie, and Satin. Whether you choose to start your line from scratch using one or several of those breeds or to expand on existing lines, your best bet is to build a flock with as much genetic diversity as possible then mix and match to balance the flaws. It is easiest to work with one or more partners to swap back and forth as you tackle specific traits or incorporate different approaches individually. For example, one partner can work on skin color and combs while the other selects for color and type. Then, flaws can be counteracted by pairing walnut combed, dark skinned birds from breeder A with the mille fleur patterned Silkie type birds from breeder B. While both breeders are accepting of certain flaws in their projects for each generation, collectively, both projects see every trait improved upon from every generation using the balance of birds among you. General Mille Fleur Satin Breeding chart. New Blood Start with the best quality Silkie or Satin you can find for new blood. The original lines are extremely closely related so, it is critically important that new blood be introduced to the project and that each breeder makes it a point to create their own unique bloodlines rather than recreating inbred copies of someone else's birds. If you are using a bird from the original lines, you mist choose a bird for new blood that is completely unrelated to the mille fleur project. An outside Silkie is the best way to go. Colors Good colors to use include Wheaten, Mottled, Smutty Reds or Buffs (smut refers to the generally undesirable black tips in the tails or wings of many reds or buffs in Silkies), "Partridge", Gold Columbian, Gold Lace, or Blue Cream / Lavender (so long as they are lavender based and not blue or splash.) ***Crele and cuckoo are also good options for short term use if you need new blood for one generation. The barring gene is only present if all or pretty much all of the feathers have parallel white stripes across them. If you use a female with barring and breed her one of your milles, ALL of the barred offspring will be male. One thing to keep in mind if you continue using the barred offspring in another project, is the mottled gene. It is recessive so you will not see it but, if one of their parents showed mottling then ALL of the offspring will carry the gene. If you breed them to another carrier, their offspring could end up showing mottling. ***Colors to avoid are Blue, Splash, and Paint and Red Pyle in particular as each will greatly interfere with the pattern. F1 - Save only the very best. Keep hatching until you've acheived better type, combs, feet, etc than the original mille fleur. F2 - Save all of your F2 Milles and your best F2 Incomplete and your best F2 Mottled *Once you have F2 Milles to work with, you could swap some F2 Milles, F2 Incomplete, and F2 Mottled with other breeders to create more genetically diverse lines F3,4,5..... It's easiest to keep the pattern in your line by using Mille Fleur roosters. Select the girls that have the best type and the fewest amount of flaws. Even if they don't have perfect pattern, they contribute those desirable traits to their mille fleur offspring. Every generation, you should be getting a higher percentage of birds that have both quality and pattern. Further notes: From an old post (Thank you for finding this, Megan!) ~ I only use boys with pattern. So that guarantees that the offspring have at least one copy of the recessive genes that they need no matter what. And almost all of my girls are patterned. The few splits that I have still produce about 50% chicks that are mille fleur patterned. Definitely, prioritize your choice of boy. I have chosen for pattern above all else in boys - at least until you have a good bunch of patterned girls. Of course, you have to work out flaws as much as possible along the way. It is all a numbers game. You need to guarantee that you chicks at least have the recessive genes for mille. That means that one parent must have decent pattern. It works out something like this: Mille x Other (no mille project genes at all) = 1 copy of genes guaranteed from dad. Zero copies from mom : 100% "Split" chicks with necessary recessive genes for mille. (Zero mille patterned chicks!) Mille x Split = 1 copy of genes guaranteed from dad. 50/50 chance of 1 copy from mom AND, most important to know, it takes a COMBINATION of the right recessive genes to make mille fleur. The chicks have a 50/50 chance for EACH INDIVIDUAL GENE! That means the odds of getting actual mille is way less thab 50/50. One in 6 would be pretty lucky. So you have to hatch like crazy! "Split" to "Split" is outrageously difficult odds; hardly worth trying. That is why line breeding is necessary. So, don't let go of Dads and Grandpas too soon. You will want to breed back to them rather than breeding brother and sister if you can. Remember this: To be a responsible breeder and positively contribute to the color project, you absolutely MUST BRING IN NEW BLOOD. Reproducing someone else's bloodlines or combining birds from related lines just leads to more inbreeding and negatively affects the project overall. It would be better not to take the project on at all if bringing in new blood is not possible. If you can do multiple pens, that would help. Put your best boy with the best mille fleur pattern with a group of top quality Satin or Silkie girls that have no mille blood in them at all. If you have some good mille patterned girls put them in a different pen with a top quality Satin or Silkie boy (no mille genes) Then you can keep the splits from both pens and breed some to the original mille rooster and in the other pen, breed your best split boy to the original hens. One thing to also keep in mind is that they will change like crazy for a long time. I have some that look "Partridge" until they are just about ready to lay eggs. Then, voila! Flowers! AND, some of my best milles have lighter background color than I prefer for their first year or so. Then they molt and get darker, brighter colors and clearer pattern. So give them more time than you would normally before narrowing down too far. you will notice that there are several ways that the pattern can develop. Some come in light (with lots of white like the one on the left) and get more color as they grow - I've had good luck with those. Some are brown like partridge and stay that way for a looooong time before getting flower then more flowers then more flowers then more flowers. I even have some that hatch black or blue and about five weeks in (about the age of your two above) they start getting color on their chests, the week after they get some white coming in, then some flowers..... Sadly, some that look like they have good mille pattern coming in will lose it altogether. *************************************************** DEFINITIONS SATIN - "Satin" chickens are bred to look like Silkies in their type, comb, feet, and all other attributes other than feather type. FEATHER TYPES : Sizzles have "barbed" feathers like regular chickens. Curled feathers are called "Frizzled." Straight feathers are called "Smooth." Most Sizzle projects also produce Silkie feathered chicks. Those chicks are "Silkies" if their feathers are shredded and not curled or "Frizzled Silkies" if their feathers are shredded and curled. MILLE FLEUR - This project seeks to introduce this new color to a breed where it previously has not existed. The color is influenced by a complicated mix of genes including mottling, spangling, columbian, gold, black, and genetic bases including eb, eWh, and a combination of the two. Correct mille fleur pattern has a solid ground color, a white tip on every feather with black chevron. Typically "Mille Fleur" is black patterned gold mille fleur (gold ground, black chevron and mottled tips.) The addition of the lavender gene dilutes the colors and is called "Porcelain" (lavender patterned mille fleur.) The addition of blue to mille fleur projects dilutes the black color of the chevrons to blue but leaves the gold color the same (blue patterned gold mille fleur.) Duplicating the blue gene creates Splash patterned gold mille fleur. Additional ground colors include Wheaten, Mahogany, and Lemon. INCOMPLETE MILLE FLEUR - Incomplete mille fleur chickens have most of the components to make mille fleur pattern but the components just don't quite line up. Typically incomplete mille fleur patterned birds have all three colors - gold, black, and white- and are mottled but the patterned does not quite line up. There may be too much of one color, not enough of another, etc. MOTTLED - Any ground color with white tips. While black ground color with white tips is most common, mottled can apply to any color or variety of colors. HYPERMOTTLED - Excessive mottling resulting in too much white. Some breeds, notably, Cochins, call hypermottled mille fleurs "Calico." Beware of the general term "Calico" in Silkies as many breeders have adopted its usage to mean anything that expresses a mishmash of gold, white or (white looking), and black (or blue).Most often these are actually splash (two blue genes) with the addition of gold or red. SPLIT - The offspring of a mille fleur patterned bird and a bird that does not have the genes for mille fleur are called splits. That is because each recessive gene requires two copies in order to show. Splits, have one copy from the mille fleur parent and zero copies from the other parent. LINKS FOR GENETICS BASICS: https://kippenjungle.nl/basisEN.htm http://www.edelras.nl/chickengenetics/mutations1.html Also, try the chicken calculator for projected outcomes using different colors in new blood: https://kippenjungle.nl/kruising.html Compliments of Lauren Taylor