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« on: August 29, 2010, 11:15:57 AM » |
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Came across this Lemon Guapo history from Tilaok.blogspot.com
THE LEMON GUAPO
Another strain of lemon that has been around for more than 30 years is the lemon guapo of Mayor Juancho Aguirre.
According to mayor Juancho in the sixties and the 70s Negros was full of so-called lemon lines. There were the 84, the batchoy, the togo , the massa , and the hinigaran, to name a few. The 84 was Paeng’s creation. Batchoy and massa were name of the breeders who originated these lines, while Hinigaran is the place of Freddie Yulo, who had been the Negrenses’ foremost source of hulsey lemon cocks.
At that time most Negros breeders, including the group of Mayor Juancho, did not have the technical knowledge and support that present day breeders enjoy. For them, it was, almost always a hit and miss affair. Thus, they really had a hard time producing good birds, much less maintain their winning lines.
Indeed, it was the reason, mayor Juancho said, that they sponsored the Duke himself to stay in Negros for a while to teach them the rudiments of breeding and fighting.
Because of this lack of scientific knowledge, coupled with the fact that the breeders also failed to assess accurately the value of these lemons, most of these lines either went to extinction or took the back seat.
The 84s and the batchoys are still around. The massa and togo are no longer heard of. The hinigaran has reincarnated as the Guapo line.
Here is the story:
At about the time, Paeng’s 84s were making waves, disaster hit mayor Aguirre’s stock. Avian pest wiped out his flock. Among, the very few survivors were a lemon brood cock and a baby stag that was suffering from a limber neck as result of barely surviving the epidemic.
Discouraged and decided to take a leave from breeding, the mayor gave the brood cock to his brother-in-law Bob Cuenca who had a lot of the same lemon strain- the hinigaran variety.
Mayor Juancho also gave the surviving limber necked hinigaran lemon baby stag to a kumpadre who peddled chickens.
After a year, the mayor casually asked his kumpadre about the limber necked stag. To his surprise, the limber neck was not only fine but indeed was a very beautiful specimen of a cock.
They started calling it guapo. After a while they fought guapo. It won four fights practically unscathed. On its fifth win guapo was badly wounded.
Mayor Juancho, whose interest in breeding had been slowly revived, decided to breed guapo. He bred the erstwhile limber neck to some cecil hens and some hatch hens.
He kept breeding the best pullets back to guapo, at the same time employ some brother-to-sister matings, until he was able to set the strain he called lemon guapo.
“I continued to play around with many inbreeding variations of the guapo line, always keeping in mind absolute quality control,” Mayor Aguirre told this writer.
Eventually the line with the infusion of the cecil blood was discontinued because according to him the cecils tend to produce oversized offspring. (The cecils referred to were not of Cecil Davies bloodline but a line of Duke Hulsey which Duke called as such. They were reds with white under hackles.)
The malatuba family of the guapo
After almost forty years of playing around with the guapo bloodline, suddenly a bunch of the present day guapos came out malatuba or pumpkin in plumage.
These pumpkins are direct decendants to a guapo lemon that had just recently died but not before reaching the age of nine. According to mayor juancho, this particular cock became a hennie or binabaye after its last moult.
He consulted veterinarians on the phenomenon. All they could say was that it could be a result of altered hormone balance as brood cocks were normally pumped with hormones to induce fertility.
How about the bunch of pumpkin guapos? They could not be result of hormone imbalance. They could only be throwbacks.
The pumpkins came out of a likewise pumpkin cock that is son to the old lemon-turned- binabaye brood cock. This pumpkin lemon broodcock could be a case of “throwback beyond the original.”
The original hulsey cocks brought to the country in the sixties were not malatuba. The throw back must be way way back to their earlier predecessors. Perhaps, somewhere along the line long before the hatch-claret-butcher lines were blended by Duke Hulsey, any one or more of the said bloodlines carried some pumpkin genes. I suspect it must have been the clarets.
According to the History of Game Strains (Johnson and Holcomb) in 1927, a Duryea cock which was thrown in to contribute to the development of the claret bloodline, produced many wonderful pumpkin cocks.
This could be the reason why Juancho’s lemon guapo is now producing pumpkin throwbacks. And, their fighting styles? Well, JGA’s pumpkin lemon guapos are the most powerful lemons I’ve seen. And, they still fight like lemons should—smart and quick.
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