>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]