It took over two years and about 100 chicks - give or take. I'm sure I probably got a few DS OB BB hens mixed in there too - but I was not confident.

The male I started with also had SF FF mixed into him - which made the entire process much more painful than what it needed to be. I finally decided to just sell all the lightest color offspring - assuming they were probably SF FF DS. The original male was very light - so I was just going by his phenotype. It was easy to winnow out the SF FFs because while they had light silver backs, they had dark orange cheeks. It was nearly impossible to tell the difference between DS vs DS SF FF. Again, that is why I opted for culling the lightest ones that were the most similar in phenotype to the father.

About four months ago, I decided that I'd had enough with this project - it was going nowhere. The split fawn F1 generation males were never giving me what I wanted. Originally, I wanted to make a DS OB BB Fawn - but finally gave up on that. I just felt like all I was doing was breeding culls to take to the bird dealer. Good for seed money, not much good for anything else. With the SF FF mixed in there from one side, and CFW-Fawn from the other - sorting through progeny had become a nightmare.

One day, I just packed nearly all of them up and took all but the darkest birds to the bird dealer. And a few cuties I couldn't part with :-)

I then re-paired my best breeding OB/BB male with a hen progeny from his brother (in other words, I mated him to his neice). They kept giving me promising chicks - all OB and then they'd die. After a failed clutch or two, I treated with Ronidazole for protozoa. I lost some gorgeous chicks - broke my heart to lose them like that.

The next clutch revealed four essentially white birds. I GROANED! Not four CFW-Fawn hens again. I cursed my bad luck. That's IT - even these promising hens are going I swore!

I continued to feed the parents egg food, but didn't do another nest check. I didn't care what they had going on in there by this point - even the blue gould was up in the nest brooding the chicks and feeding them. Normally, I'd pull him for interferring - but I just didn't care - so I left him. I was so disappointed that I was sabotaged by Florida Fancy - the one mutation I ABSOLUTELY HATE to begin with!!! I had bred oodles of SF FF and had them assualt my eyeballs for years - for what? NOTHING! It was the very last straw! I decided that I was selling all these blasted DS and FF and CFW-Fawn mucked up interbred messy birds and would forget the entire project. I tried to tell myself that a DS OB BB Fawn wasn't a very pretty bird to begin with - knowing full well that I just LOVED them. I just resigned myself to never breeding my own, a life of salivating over Dutch bred birds.

Then all of a sudden, BAM! I heard a squeaky wheel from that flight cage. Who could that be? I knew I only had one mature male in there with five hens. HA HA - well one 'hen' was obviously a male (Male A) and perhaps just what I was looking for. I was so excited, I couldn't even talk about it for a few days - afraid I'd jinx it. HIs father had pulled his tail, so I let him out of the flight to free fly. Then about a week later, the youngest of the clutch started with his squeaky wheel and darned if he wasn't potentially a DS BB OB too!

Two birds which looked VERY PROMISING in markings in once clutch - after all that.

I'm still not sure what I want to do with this project now. I had already forgotten it in my mind and didn't really have any future plans. I'm open to suggestions....

While all the birds from these lines are not large birds, many of the ones I kept have nice cobby shapes to them. I'm hoping that with time and maturity, these two will shape up and fill out some.