The Double-laced Pattern
In 1930, C. S. Th. Van Gink, Vice-President of the World’s Poultry Science Association, Voorburg, The Netherlands, wrote the following:
When in 1921 the Barnevelders were exhibited at the First World’s Poultry Exhibition at the Hague a number of visitors from abroad saw this breed, which was then just acquiring its definite type of colouring and marking, and suggested verbally and in print its relationship to the Indian Games. Why? Just because the double-laced marking of the female’s feathers supported this opinion! This conclusion was wrong, and there was little or no excuse for the error made, as with the exception of the resemblance in markings there was no other point that could suggest a relationship between these two breeds. How could there be, as there is no blood of the Indian Games in the Barnevelders? For years and years they were within certain limits variable in colouring and marking until here and there a female appeared with markings which were more or less like the double-laced pattern as we know it in the Indian Games. The appearance of these double-laced females remained fairly well unnoticed by the breeders of the Barnevelders, but we happened to see these birds and suggested, - where the breeders were looking for a suitable colour-type of which both standard-marked males and females could be bred from the same breeding pen, - that this type of marking be given a fair chance, as it had proved in another breed to fulfil these requirements. Since then this colour-type has been adopted in Holland and it will in the future safeguard the breed against otherwise perhaps unnoticed crosses, as no cross can possibly be found that will not upset the adopted colour-markings in some respect."
Genetically, the double-laced feather pattern phenotype has been shown to depend upon homozygosity of both the linked eumelanin extension melanotic (Ml/Ml) and the feather pattern arranging gene (Pg/Pg). In the Barnevelder (large fowl), the pattern is expressed on a brown (e^b/e^b) background. Only the females express the double-laced pattern, whereas the males are melanized black-breasted reds.
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Famous quotes containing the word pattern:
“Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong women the man, many years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)