The Blakliz Midnight Grey: Bloodline or color?
We write this article in response to some query about the Blakliz Midnight Grey. What is it? Is it a bloodline or a phenotype?
It is both a bloodline and a phenotype for plumage color.
The Blakliz midnight grey is a family of the Blakliz, which is a product of a breeding technique we call intervention. Sometime in the development of the Blakliz, one of the lines was infused with a grey bloodline bred by the late Mayor Juancho Aguirre. The Aguirre grey was actually a Hulsey grey, thus a regular grey.
As the intervention technique calls, we slowly bred out the grey bloodline but retained the grey plumage. The Black genes in the Blakliz allowed for the transformation of the regular grey plumage of the Aguirre grey into some sort of a black grey. Then after the series of back breeding to the Blakliz, we set it as a new family of the Blakliz strain.
The new family of Blakliz midnight grey, came black grey, black or brown red. Lately, however, most came out black grey with only a few males with black or brown red plumage.
Now as a color, the midnight grey is actually different from ordinary black grey we know in game fowl plumage. We need a little color genetics to explain this.
What we call grey in game fowl is actually a result of the masking of the red pigment by what is called in genetics as the silver gene.
Color grey comes in two main classifications. The silver duck wing and the silver crow wing, which is sometimes called birchen. The difference is the triangle in the wing. The silver duckwing has white wing triangle while the the crow wing has black wing triangle.
However, in the case of our midnight grey, the real midnight grey as a color, the entire wing is solid black, in addition to the solid black breast. There is no wing triangle patch. This is what we call midnight grey in color. Maybe in genetics this is the real black grey too. Whereas, in game fowl parlance, the range of the common black grey (hiraw in Tagalog and lambohon in Bisaya) includes the silver crow wing or the silver birchen.
Midnight grey is neither birchen nor crow wing. The midnight grey color is a result of additional dose of melanin enhancers or blackening genes.
We at RB Sugbo designed the Blakliz midnight grey to be blacker, because in our experience we felt that the black color in the Blakliz is somehow correlated with certain fighting traits we want in the bloodline.
We reckon that the Blakliz midnight grey plumage is in color genetics a combination of the silver birchen and some black extender genes such as the Extended Black or the Melanotic. These things may not matter much in game fowl, in which fighting ability not color is most important, except that we believe some black genes in the Blakliz are linked to some fighting traits that we also desire.
It has something to do with our theory that some wild type traits necessary for survival in the wild are linked with one another to ensure the continued existence of the sub species gallus domesticus or chicken. And, these traits also help for the game fowl to survive in the pit.
Many in the Blakliz midnight grey family come in ordinary crow wing plumage. These are Blakliz midnight grey in bloodline but not midnight grey in color.
Now as to the frequently asked question if midnight grey is a bloodline or a color, the answer is that the midnight grey is both a bloodline and a color. There are Blakliz midnight greys in bloodline but not midnight greys in color. And there are midnight greys in color but not Blakliz midnight grey in bloodline.
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