>From:    "Amoreena G. Ralya" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: What's the color of these ferrets?
>Obelix: used to be sable, now has pale grey undercoat and black & silver
>guard hairs (his head is almost completely silver, and his mask is
>dissapearing: we sometimes have trouble telling him apart from our shaded
>silver female): What is he now?  Still a sable?  A silver?
 
Well by silver do you mean white?  Or mixed black and white?  Are the feet
white?  All blacks (also called silvers) have white feet.  Lack of much mask
is a mark of pandas, blazes and siamese.  There are other things to look
for.  Do the back kneecaps have a white patch?  The replacing or dark guard
hairs by white is called roaning.  If all that is happening is this than you
have a sable roan.  I suspect what you might have is a heterozygous
sable/black with the roan gene.  The heterozygous ferrets often show signs
of two colors.
 
>Cwynn: Always been a strangeish color when we got him: his guard hairs are
>tan-apricot on the light portions of his body, his legs and tail are black,
>his mask and other dark parts of his face are milk-chocolate brown, and ...
 
There is a chance you have a tri-color.  I've only seen two in my life - I
have one named Rafiki - the other was named Bootlegger because he was a
black roan mitt (medium silver) with a single sable leg.  But i think he is
more likely a sable point that is heterozygous sable/chocolate.
 
>Mithril: Used to be a shaded silver (black and silver guard hairs over grey
>undercoat, dark grey v-mask, pink nose) but now resembles a panda-bear
>because her tail and legs are jet-black while the rest of her body...
 
The description you gave was at first a roan mitt or medium silver.  Shaded
silver is usually meant to describe a non-black mitt.  A Chocolate or
champagne with mitts not a ferret with black guard hairs.  The difference
is that she went from a standard pattern to a exquisite point (or siamese).
Quite a few ferrets go back and forth between standards and points.  We
have a male - Ghengis Khan - who one breeding season was a point and his
litter with our jill Tantra was all points.  The next year he was a standard
and his litter with the same jill was all standards.  Kind of surprised a
lot of folks.
 
bill and diane killian
zen and the art of ferrets
http://userwww.qnet.com/~killian/zen_home.htm
[Posted in FML issue 1560]