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West of England Tumblers – Page 27 – Purebred PIGEON
Breed of the Issue - West of England Tumblers
Adding IceTo
West ofEnglands
By Terry Brechbill
I
’ve long appreciated the ice coloration. I’m also a big fan of toy stencil
but on ice there just isn’t enough contrast to suit me.
About 20 years ago I bought an ice pigeon from the sale section at
Des Moines. I thought moving it to Wests wouldn’t be terribly difficult. All I
had to do was add pearl eyes, reduce the length of the muffs, get West type,
eliminate the toy stencil and keep the ice color which was said to be a partial
dominant. After three years I found that the difficulty of the project had been
grossly under estimated. Longer full muffs and poor ice color haunted me.
The good ice color seemed to be to be the result of multiple genes or perhaps
one gene and several modifiers. I gave up on the project.
Four years ago I began to notice clean leg ice being shown with black
bars and checks (forellen). These also had superior ice color. I purchased a
pair of black bars and a pair of forellen from Brian Goodwin in New Mexico.
My plan was to produce pearl eyed muffed ice to use in future crossings. To
do that I would make the initial cross and then mate F1 together saving those
young that were muffed with pearl eyes. Some of these young F2s would be
mated back to the ice and the process repeated. In a two year period I raised
nearly 100 of these F2s and got 3 to work with.
Simultaneously I would select F2s that had good ice color and breed
back to purebred Wests or the F1s, working on type with the hope of fair ice
color. As is often the case, plans changed, mostly based
on the lack of expected (read hoped for) results and even
once based on unexpected good luck.
I now find that I truly am making progress. I can
show birds with pretty good ice color that are mediocre
West type. Two or three more years?•