Due to the kindness of Nick Brent of
Australia and of the
St Clair International Stud loft, I can now show you a bit of what I've
written about. All photos linked to, or shown on, this page are by him and he
holds copyrights to them. There are four pictures here which show the blue or wild-type
color series. I'm responsible for the descriptions. Remember, the pattern
- barless, bar or check is inherited independently of the color and all
pigeons are one of these patterns, whether we can see it or not. I apologize if
this takes an extra moment to load, but the photos were so good, I didn't want
to cut them down.
BLUE BAR SPLASH (Splash is a fancier term which simply means the
bird has much white on it also - the pattern, however, is simply blue bar, or
wild-type.)
BLUE BAR SMOKEY. This bird is also a blue bar, but it carries
other genetic factor also, smokey and likely sooty. Notice the false checking on
the wing shield - that's the sooty factor and also note the smeary or wash-out
looking bars, that's smokey. If we could spread the tail, we would also note
that the outer two tail feathers are missing the whitish (albescent) strip they
normally have. Smokey birds are known by racing homer fanciers as slates.
Smokeys often show a lightened beak. Birds which carry sooty sometimes do not
show the false checking on the wing until they molt into their adult plumage.
Smokey birds often have the bars washed out, so much so on occasion that they
can be mistaken for barless birds.
BLUE CHECK. Check
is an extremely common mutation in pigeons and may even be more common than bar.
The check marking is actually the darkened feather of the wing shield. There are
different alleles, or alternatives, in the check series which can be important
in breeding some of the Color Pigeons for show, but this bird well illustrates
the medium to light checker where the checking and lighter ground color are
about even.
T-Pattern checker.
This is one of the check alleles, CT, and is characterised by little
or no ground color showing through. A bird like this is sometimes called a
velvet or blue-tailed black by racing homer fanciers. Note the tail of this bird
is still a wild-type tail. The terminal tail bar is visible, so this bird is not
carrying spread, which is a totally different mutation and is not part of the
pattern series.
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