About & Methodology

Who writes and maintains it

The site is written and maintained by Dr. Anne Rainville as part of the Wolfhoeve breeding programme. This website and its tools are constructed to answer the specific questions a breeder may have when planning a pen.

How this started

The project began as a way to understand and apply expert advice on chicken colour — specifically, which crosses were and were not sensible to attempt in the Wolfhoeve breeding programme — and grew into a public reference so that other breeders could work through the same questions.

What the tools do

• Compare Standards puts two colour varieties side by side — their genotypes and standard descriptions — so you can see exactly which genes separate them.
• Breeding Outcomes works a cross out: it builds the Punnett square and the expected F1 and F2 genotype frequencies, handling sex-linked genes correctly. See the FAQ for what F1 and F2 mean.

Both are free, need no account, and are meant for learning and planning.

The photo identification tool

Alongside the two planning tools there is an experimental photo identification tool: upload a picture of a bird and it suggests which colour varieties the bird lines up with. It works the way an experienced breeder's first glance does — it reads the visible plumage cues from the photo (the darkest shade anywhere on the bird, the main body colour, and whether a pattern runs across the feathers) and lines those cues up against a reference set of known colour varieties.

The reading of the photo is done by a vision-capable analytical model — Anthropic's Claude, which weighs subtle feather detail before settling on a description. It reports what is plainly visible in the picture — the bird's colour and pattern as they appear to the eye.

To uphold accuracy, every version is measured against photographs of birds whose variety is already confirmed. Each release is refined until it reads those birds correctly while the ones that already worked keep working — the tool improves one verified bird at a time.

Where the information comes from

The genetics is drawn from established, openly available sources and checked against them, rather than being a body of facts this site claims to own:

• Standard colour descriptions — phenotype descriptions synthesised from chicken-colors.info.
• Genotype data — checked against the calculator standards at kippenjungle.nl.
• Gene identities — the molecular genes behind each trait are taken from the peer-reviewed genetics literature.¹

What this site adds on top of those sources is the work of turning them into something usable: an expert-reviewed genetics reference — correction, structure, tool integration, and breeder judgement. The underlying genetics facts belong to the science; that work is what this site contributes.

The limits of prediction

A breeding prediction is a probability, not a promise. The Breeding Outcomes tool tells you the expected proportions of each genotype — but a real hatch can look quite different from those numbers, for reasons worth understanding:

• Small numbers. Expected ratios only show themselves over many chicks. A single clutch is a handful of coin-flips, and small samples swing widely from the average.
• Modifiers and linked genes. Minor genes, incomplete penetrance and linkage can shift how a genotype actually looks, so two birds of the same genotype are not always identical.
• Selection still matters. A genotype tells you the genes; it does not tell you the quality. Breed type, feather quality and the fine detail that wins in the show pen come from a breeder's selection over generations, not from a calculator.

Contact

Corrections and questions are welcome — the aim is to be accurate first. You can reach the project through the Wolfhoeve site.