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Bimini15

Question about hens and rosters.

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I was at the South Florida fair this weekend and walked through the poultry tent where I saw some gorgeous birds. And that got me thinking about hackle...

 

Are specific breeds selected for genetic hackle, or are specific birds from any breed? Or maybe both?

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They have been bred over decades to get the hackle quality and length. The grizzly hackle is from barred Plymouth Rock for example.

 

Studio_BrdRkCk_7629_L2.jpg

 

 

 

Note the longer hackle on the Whiting Grizzly Rooster

 

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Coachman Brown and Furnace are probably from the Rhode Island Red Chickens

 

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Howard Hackle Rooster

 

Hackle2.jpg

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There's only two sides to this coin:

 

1 ... There's no such thing as survival of the fittest, evolution or selective breeding. Everything on this Earth was put here, exactly as it appears today!

 

2 ... Just the opposite as above ... and practically everything in captivity is different than the wild creatures they were bred from. Selective breeders have been helping evolution along for centuries. At this stage in chickens, as with most livestock, many breeds are completely evolved into new forms. Some near perfection, like Silver's example above.

 

Some ... not so much !!!

 

 

 

 

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More important than color in flytying is the thickness and stiffness of the stems and the length of the barbs. The genetic hackle has uniformly short barbs and very fine stems as can be seen in the pictures

My Barred Rocks have stems thick enough and brittle enough that a full skin would not tie more than 40-100 dry flies and barbs long enough that they are most suitable for size #10 and larger. The saddles would be best used in Decievers or such. My various Red chickens are similar. Of the hundreds of barnyard chickens that I've had or seen over the last sixty years, Game Chickens and some of the Bantam breeds would be the best choice for flies. Think Indian Necks or Indian Hen Necks.

 

Previous thread that talks a little about this; http://www.flytyingforum.com/index.php?showtopic=82762&page=1

 

Trout Unlimited resource; http://cgtu.org/documents/publications/genetic_hackle.pdf

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I have read somewhere the Whiting is trying to bred birds with longer legs to keep the hackles from dragging the ground.

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"Genetic" hackle is primarily bred for the freshwater fly-tying market... which has different needs than what guys (like me) who tie for the salt need to be able to produce quality flies... In recent years the breeders have learned that capons (neutered roosters) will provide the wide, webby saddles everyone in the salt is looking for... These days the biggest hassle for a commercial fly tyer is finding good, quality hackles that have the same dyed colors, order after order... not to mention full sized feathers in the 6 to 8" range for tying big flies. That's one of the reasons for the rise in popularity of synthetic tying materials...

 

That said, most saltwater feathers (both neck and saddles) don't come from genetic birds - instead they come from chickens in third world countries where birds are still raised on the ground and allowed to grow to maturity before harvest (unlike the western world where raising chickens for market means birds that never touch the ground and are harvested too early to provide any kind of feathers... The strung and dyed feathers that I buy by the bundle or the pound (yep, a pound of feathers is a bunch...) mostly come from China and are bought in bulk by processors here who import then prepare them (cleaning, bleaching if necessary, or dyeing them) and package them for re-sale...

 

Lots more about this topic but I'll stop here... with one last item - here's a pic of one of my signature patterns - those gorgeous bleached white, full length, wide, webby saddles are hard to find these days...

9rpjl3t.jpg

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Capt Bob is that a chickabou wrap in front of the tail feather that make up the body ?

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and crossing those 2 breeds you may get one of these a cree, along with other mutants

 

I thought Cree was a cross of grizzly with coachman brown but I was wrong. It surprised me to learn that Cree is a cross between 3 chickens. Here is what Dr. Thomas S. Whiting writes about Cree hackle in Poultry Breeding:

"And 'cree' is a rare, 'collector' color pattern that is quite beautiful, involving repeating barring of white, brown and black. Its problem is it doesn’t breed true, requiring instead a three- way cross. And only a tiny fraction of the terminal cross actually yields cree amongst the many other phenotypic segregants, and what cree does result even varies between good cree and barely cree. So cree is only available on a long waiting list, and probably a good portion of cree pelts sold never even get used for tying flies, but are just kept and shown off."

This three way breeding cross is described by Whiting in the April 2013 Whiting Hackle Newletter:

“From a poultry breeders’ perspective, the color pattern of Cree is not too much of a mystery. Obviously the “barring gene” is at work, the same gene that creates the classic grizzly feather pattern. This barring gene, which happens to be “sex linked’ (meaning it is on the X sex chromosome), causes the regular interruption of black pigment formation within the feather follicle as the feather is being generated. The sex linked aspect of the barring gene also causes the darkness of the grizzly hen feather as opposed to the considerably lighter grizzly feathers of the rooster. This is because the hen can only have one ‘dose’ of the barring gene because she is XZ, while the rooster can have a double dose of the barring gene be- cause he is XX. In addition, the barring gene is incompletely dominant so there is a dosage effect; two doses inhibit the production of the black pigment more than one dose. That is why the ratio of white to black in the barring of hen grizzly feathers has a wider black bar than white, while a rooster grizzly feather is lighter with about half black and half white.

Along with the barring gene the Cree pattern also has some brown genes at work. This is more com- plicated than what can be ad- dressed here, involving multi-allelic [the alternative forms and patterns] of ‘brown’ genes. But the basic combination of the barring gene and several types of brown genes are what create the Cree pattern. So these are the ingredients. Now, how to put them together!

The best way, or the only good way that I have found, is to cross a grizzly chicken with a brown one. And despite the recitation above about sex linkage, it doesn’t matter initially which sex is grizzly and which is brown. This is because you just want to generate a rooster that has only one dose of the barring gene, in combination with the genetic background of brown. The result is a ‘grizzly variant’, which looks like a regular grizzly but with a considerable number of non-grizzly feathers, such as badger and furnace feathers, interspersed through- out all the feathers. This grizzly -variant rooster is then mated to a non-grizzly hen, preferably a rich brown colored one but a black or red-necked black hen will also work. This is the ‘Cree mating’. Some would call it a three-way mating because an initial mating has to be done, and the yield of that mating mated to another type. Now this is where the rarity of Cree happens. Because of this three-way mating a wide host of all sorts of other color and pattern genes are stirred up. And as these genes segregate into the myriad of combinations that are possible when the genes of the mother and father are combining at conception, a whole array of colors and patterns are formed. These include, to name just a few: light ginger, furnace, golden badger, speckled variant, basic brown and more grizzly variants. And a few, a very few, will be Cree.

To make it rarer still, what few Crees come out will vary from good to poor to barely Cree. Generally, the proportion of Cree produced from this three-way Cree mating will only be in the single- digit percentiles. And truly good Cree will constitute only 1% or 2% of the output. That is why Cree is so rare.“

 

 

 

 

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For Mogup.... That maribou or chickabou effect is obtained by using as much of the "fluff" on the exact same saddles that the tail was tied with.... That particular "trick" was shown to me by Bob Kay maybe 35 years ago. Bob was a very prominent commercial tyer down here in paradise (south Florida) all those years ago. He's been gone a lot of years now....

 

 

As you can imagine the actual saddles used to make that tail (and it's a full eight saddles - four on a side...) are quite a bit bigger than the portion used to do the tail. For the body, which is mostly three saddles tied in at the butt then palmered forward as a single unit... I use as much of the fluff as possible left on the saddles to give that effect. You're only limited by the thickness of the feather stem when doing this -so I only get about one inch or so of the fluff wound on the hook shank, then simply continue with the rest of the saddles on forward, picking out any fibers that get trapped during the palmering to give the most dense feather body possible. You can see by the size of the body just how wide those saddles are.

 

Like I said, the saddles and neck hackles I need are a lot wider and webbier than the feathers needed for dry fly work.... Only in recent years have I seen the feathers I need when handling genetic necks and saddle patches. For grizzly saddles I used to order ten #2 Metz patches at a time to get mostly usable saddles for accent work - but by and large all I ever use are relatively cheap strung neck and strung saddles. Finding good quality feathers gets tougher and tougher over the years. I'm pretty sure that's one of the factors driving the rise in synthetics for saltwater patterns....

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Thanks Capt Bob for the info. Was at the Flyfishing show today and those saddles hackles were no where to be found. Too bad it's a very nice looking fly.

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there is a third side to your coin, but that would provoke too much of a debate off topic from the original idea of this thread.

 

Jeff

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there is a third side to your coin, but that would provoke too much of a debate off topic from the original idea of this thread.

 

Jeff

Probably wouldn't have, but now you can't reveal it, so we'll never know! biggrin.png

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That big fl. green and white bug in the photo is actually a variant of one of my signature patterns with Umpqua Feather Merchants - it's the Tarpon Snake - and anglers world-wide have been catching fish with it from the big tarpon all the way west to giant trevally - depending on the color variations. Any shop can order the basic all black version from Umpqua - and a variant they like for northern pike in orange and yellow or red and white... Heck I even do it in all fl. pink for days when the water is so murky that a fish might have to bump into a fly to find it...

Besz0uH.jpg

 

All of the feather materials on it are just wide, webby, large strung saddles - if you can find decent quality... The hook is either a Tiemco 600sp or an Owner Aki. The ones I tie all have wire weedguards - the ones from Umpqua don't have the weedguard... The eyes are largest bead chain (the size used with vertical blinds pull cords...).

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