Color Mutation in Wood Ducks

Listed below are the possibilities for passing silver and white or apricot or blonde in Wood ducks and white or blonde in Mandarins as I understand the transfer of the genes. I have researched this for a number of years with fellow aviculturists, and numerous breeding procedures used here at Squaw Creek Farm. From this information, with the help of other aviculturists, I have come up with the following illustrations of punit squares. 

Premise: Silver is an autosomal recessive trait while white, apricot or blond are sex-linked recessive traits. 

The bottom line is that two split silver Wood ducks theoretically producing four offspring will produce one silver and three normal ducklings. The kicker is that one of the three theoretical normal looking ducks does not carry the silver gene. It is in fact a normal, but there is no way to differentiate the normal looking ducks by eye sight, only test crosses or possibly DNA analysis. 

White, apricot, or blonde are a whole different story, but they apparently transfer in the same way. For the purposes of this presentation white will be the focus. The male has two X chromosomes with a color capability on each. The female has an X and a Y chromosome, but only the X has a color capability. Males can have two genes for normal, one gene for normal and one for white (split), or two genes for white. White, a recessive, only shows when there is no gene for normal present. Since the female has only one X chromosome she can only be normal or white. Thus a split white female is impossible. The female duck believed to be a split is really a normal duck like any other normal duck. Note also that the cross between the split white male and the normal female will produce both normal and split white males with no way to distinguish between the two. The normal female in this cross is the same as the one described above. 

Silver - A recessive gene determining the silver color in Wood Ducks.