# Anyone know the origin of the pencil gene?



## jbangelfish (Mar 22, 2008)

I just saw some penciled rollers the other day for the first time. They are really attractive birds and look exactly like some mutts that I had when I was a kid.

When I was about 10 or 12 years old I had a black nun hen that mated to either a feral or a tumbler and I don't remember which. At any rate, the babies that they produced looked exactly like these penciled birds in both color and markings. They had the mostly black head area, dark tails and the mottling over the shoulders and varying amounts in the shield area. Even the bronze color that was present in these penciled birds was present in my mutts. They looked so much like the mutts that I had back in the 60's that I had to tell the guy about them and how much they looked like what I had way back when.

Just wondering if anyone knows if nuns were used to make up the pencil gene or what it came from.

Bill


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## george simon (Feb 28, 2006)

*HI Bill,All that I could find on the origin of pencil,was in the book by Dr Hollander, Pigeon Genetics Origins
I will quote from the book "The somewhat grizzle-like colorations of the bruster(breast pigeon),Halbschnaler,Czech Bagdad, and a few other breeds now seems to be unrelated to G (grizzle).Mme. Francqueville's tests show that it is a recessive unit. She proposed the name pencilled and gave the gene the symbol pc (APJ MARCH 1981 p.16). Tests by WFH and others suggest interaction in crosses with piebald types.* ..GEORGE


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## jbangelfish (Mar 22, 2008)

*Thanks George*



george simon said:


> *HI Bill,All that I could find on the origin of pencil,was in the book by Dr Hollander, Pigeon Genetics Origins
> I will quote from the book "The somewhat grizzle-like colorations of the bruster(breast pigeon),Halbschnaler,Czech Bagdad, and a few other breeds now seems to be unrelated to G (grizzle).Mme. Francqueville's tests show that it is a recessive unit. She proposed the name pencilled and gave the gene the symbol pc (APJ MARCH 1981 p.16). Tests by WFH and others suggest interaction in crosses with piebald types.* ..GEORGE


I read somewhere about the Saxon Breast as having this gene and I used to raise them as well. Most of them were mismarked as young birds but moulted into the proper marking and lost the color on the wings and back. I had actually forgotten about this trait in them until I began reading about pencil and then remembered how the young Saxon Breasts looked. Mismarked birds did occur that never completely moulted out to white in the back and wing.

With the Nun having a similar pattern to a Saxon Breast, it makes sense that we may be talking about the same gene. The penciled birds, as yet, seem to have no rule as to a pattern and vary greatly. It seems that the normal mismark of the pattern is desired in pencil as it creates more of a pattern or markings. Still a very interesting marking and an attractive bird. They all have a similarity in how the color shows up on a white based bird and the color tends to gather in certain areas. It is rather like pied in reverse.

Bill


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