Peacocks

Here are some gorgeous pictures of our peacocks that I decided to share.  Hope you like them, they are of our black shouldered male this spring.

*Also check out some graduation pictures I took for a friend with one of my horses*

Giving a Broody Hen Live Chicks

Q: Can you give a broody hen live chicks from a hatchery or incubator?

A: Yes, under the right circumstances.  We have done that a couple times now, I had 10 chicks hatch out of the incubator that I thought it would be silly to heat up a brooder for them, so I gave them to one of my bantam hens who I know is a great mother (she is in the photo left) and she was the happiest chicken in the world...she got babies and didn't even have to work for them.  They are my sex link and RIR chicks.  We also did this a few years ago with some chicks ordered from the hatchery with a different hen.  You just have to watch them closely, and we put her in a very small area, so she could not move around with her chicks for the first couple days, or else she would get off and pace her small 3' X 2' pen.

Poultry Genetics - Breeding for Egg Color

The single most popular article I have wrote for this blog has to be Which Hybrid Chicken to Choose?, so I think I am going to talk more on this subject.  That is, breeding hybrid chickens for egg color. 

What is egg color?
Lets start this off with what is egg color, or how it gets there.  The brown egg color is actually applied on top of the shell...if you don't believe me, just run your fingernail over a brown egg, I bet you can scrape some of the color off.  This coloring is applied in the abdomen of the chicken before the egg is layed.  A combination of genetics determines how dark or light the coloring will be.  A white egg is absent of this brown coloring added, it is simply the egg shell.  A blue egg, is like the white egg.  It is the color of the shell itself with the absence of any brown on the outside of the shell.  A green egg on the other hand is a blue shell with the brown color applied to the outside.  This happens when a blue egg laying chicken (ie Araucana) is crossed with a brown egg laying chicken, commonly seen in the hatchery mutts called Ameraucanas or Easter Eggers.


Why breed for color?
Well, it really does not matter what color the eggs are, as far as quality of nutrients in the egg, or shell quality.  It really comes down to personal preference.  Many of the people that buy eggs from us prefer to see the brown and blue/green eggs because it creates a color difference from the mass produced white eggs found in the grocery stores.  Some people really like blue/green eggs, because they are pretty and there are some myths about them being lower in cholesteral.  Like I said it is all personal preference.

Why cross the breeds in the first place?  How does this concept of hybrid breeds work?
Many chickens are inbred. If you are familiar with inbred animals, you will notice that they are weak and less productive. This same concept is true for chickens, when you cross the breeds, it introduces new genetics and if they line up just right (called nicking in the horse world), you will end up with an exceptional animal.  You however should not use the offspring of the hybrid chickens for breeding, the reason being you will end up with bad traits showing up, the first generation is always the healthiest. It is entirely different story when you are developing a new breed though.  All in all, if your breeding is successful, you can make more efficient egg layers.


How to get the color you want?
You always need at least the male or the female to lay the desired egg color when breeding for blue, green or brown eggs, where when breeding for white eggs, you need have both the male and the female to lay white eggs.

Green or Blue Eggs

The blue color is dominant, so breeding a blue egg layer to a breed that lays another egg color will get you another blue or green egg layer (unless blue egg laying bird was heterozygous for that trait then there is a chance of getting a bird who lays a different color egg such as brown or white).  So in other words, your odds a pretty good of getting a blue egg laying chicken.  If the chicken layed actual blue eggs and you breed her to one that lays brown eggs then you will get a green egg layer, however when the blue egg layer is bred to a white egg layer, you will retain the blue color without adding any brown on top which creates the green color.  Sorry if that gets a little muddy in there...sometimes putting forth all those hypothetical scenarios gets confusing.  If you are confused, just ask a question in the comments and I will try to clarify.
It is also thought that the green/blue egg color is linked to the peacomb of the Ameraucana and Araucana breeds, however it is possible for these two genes to separate as I have had a blue egg layer with a single comb. 

Brown Eggs

This is a dominant trait, so as long as one gets passed on to the offspring, they too will lay brown eggs.  This allows you to breed a brown egg layer to a white egg layer and get a brown egg layer.  Some of the "red sex links" are bred this way, with the white chicken being a white leghorn.  This is really pretty simple, what gets more confusing is what shade of brown they will lay.  It is passed down from the parents, but it is much more complex.  Breeds that have been laying dark brown eggs like Marans and Welsumers will keep doing so, but when bred to a light brown egg layer, they could lay something in between, dark eggs or light eggs. 

White Eggs
It may not seem this way, but white eggs are actually a recessive trait, so they must have acquired it from both parents.  This is why when people are breeding show Leghorns and such, they will throw out any bird that lays tinted eggs, because it will cause their pure white egg layers to lay tinted eggs as well. 

So there is my quick little post on breeding for egg color.

I Ordered Some Chicks

I am trying something new this year, I ordered my chicks from Ideal Poultry.  My order consisted of 25 Buff Cochin Bantams, 15 Buff Orpingtons (5 males and 10 females) and 10 Ameraucana Pullets.  I have never bought from Ideal poultry before.  I am hoping they will be of good quality and not like that time I bought some from Meyers Hatchery...I had two Cochins with extra toes and another bird that was a complete mutt!

My order will be shipped on the 10th, so I am getting chicks early this year, I guess they will be living in the shop for quite a while!

I have the picture up now, it is a standard light Brahma chick we bought a few years ago.  I love photography, so I made a backdrop and added some artificial lighting and took pictures of the chicks that year.  This was one of them, I absolutely loved the white with black background.  I have another picture like this with all 4 breeds we bought that year on the contact page at Highland Grove Farm.

Poor guy...

The other night in the barn our peacock was apparently roosting a little too close to one of the calf pens.  One of the heifers in there would much rather annoy someone than eat the best grain in the world...anyways she started sucking on Captain's tail (he has already grown about 10-12" of it) and the poor guy could barely get away.  He was flapping his wings as hard as he could.

I wonder if I will ever see him roosted there again...?

I just thought that was cute, it would have been a candid photo if I would have had the camera ready too!

New Look and everything else

I am sure you guys noticed I have changed my blogs look...again.  I wasn't really happy with the template I found, so this time I did the editing. 

I made the background, it is flowers.  I am not sure if that is the best, but I thought it was cute and had a little bit of a rustic look.

For more information on what I did go to my design page and scroll down to the "blog" part.  This will actually bring you to All Around Horses, but you can use the back button on your browser or there are links to bring you back here.


I am in the blog editing mood lately :). I also did Olson Quarter Horses blog for them and All Around Horses.

I kind of feel like I failed this blog :).  I had intentsions of making it something great when I first started, then reality kicked in.  There are tons of websites out there that have been around longer than this with all the information I could ever write up.  I still post occassionally, lately it has been a couple a month or like December only 1.  I almost deleted this blog a couple times, but people keep visiting it.  Mainly because they find it on google while looking for information on sex link chickens.  They usually end up reading my post "Which Hybrid Chicken To Choose".  So I cannot come to delete it.  That leaves me here, putting one or two posts a month up.  I hope you guys do not mind too much.  That just means there is not an overload of stuff to read right :). 

I noticed today that my blog has 5 followers.  Wow, for the longest time I only had 2.  Maybe it isn't too bad. 

I just have a stronger passion for horses than chickens I guess :).  Because at All Around Horses I ususally put up 6-15 posts a month.

Maybe the winter months will get me to the computer more often than the outdoors and I will get some more posting done.  I really should take some more pictures of our peachick.  He is not much of a baby anymore.  We still do not really have a name for him...that is really suprising.  I just call him "mini Captain" because his dad's name is captain. 

That is all for now, I hope you like the new look and wider post size!  I will probably do a few more changes, but not as many as I did on All Around Horses.  I still have Captain as my header image, that will probably not change for a long time.

Bunnies

Here are some photos of our bunnies!

This one is missing the needed dark on each side of his nose for his breed's coloring.

This one has the dark on each side of his nose.

Finally here is our all white bunny with pink eyes.

Sorry guys, I cannot remember what they named the bunnies.  Those boys come up with names for everything, including all of our butcher steers...it just ends up being a lot of names to remember :).