There is lively cheeping going on again. Something is happening in the other room.
New chicks are hatching.
* Dark brown egg chicks, which over three years I have bred from a Brahma hen crossed repeatedly with a Marans rooster, making the egg colour darker and darker. They cannot compete with the Marans's chocolate coloured eggs, but they are still beautiful and a rather tempting sweet colour. All the birds so far have copper black plumage, the feathered legs typical of a Brahma and a hefty body, and some of them the brooding instinct typical of a Brahma as well. Fertility 100%.
* Green egg birds, a result achieved over several years by alternating crosses of Lavender Araucana and Copper Black Marans. To the dark olive colour you now have to add, in your mind, a touch of pale blue; that is what this time's egg colour should be. Last year there was also an anomaly where one of these birds started laying entirely pale blue eggs. Even though crosses supposedly do not do that. So a few surprises can be expected in the egg colours to come, but hopefully the result will be an even greener egg than before. Fertility 100%.
* Pale blue egg birds. Obtained by crossing Lohmann White hens with the Lavender Araucana rooster. The chicks themselves are yellow with a few grey or black speckles on the back and head 🙂
You might expect them to turn into speckled birds with white plumage. On their foreheads they have the little tuft typical of an Araucana, and I can imagine what splendid white tufted heads they will grow into.
For the hens I chose Lohmann White, in the hope of getting a pure pale blue egg tone and birds that lay very well. 🙂
Fertility 100%
The picture shows the previous chicks. There are no pictures of today's chicks yet.
Why crosses, of all things?
For years I have tried to get purebred offspring from CB Marans and Lavender Araucanas. For the beautiful egg colour and their wonderfully beautiful plumage. But in all those years something has always gone wrong. I no longer remember exactly, but let me try to recall the incidents that ruined a whole year of raising a hen from a chick and then getting purebred hatching eggs...
* One year the Lavender Araucana rooster simply decided to die. One night he lay down and that was that... There was no illness in the flock and nothing suspicious... Since it happened quite soon after the rooster was brought home and he turned out to be very nervous (the hens gave him a bit of a beating), perhaps it was stress.
* The hatch rate of purebred birds has consistently been only 5 to 20%, while at the same time the crosses with the same rooster ran at 98 to 100%. The chicks that hatched a few at a time along with the crosses I sold, and put my hopes on the next hatch, hoping to get at least ten chicks at once. But it did not work. In the end I had to buy purebred chicks after all.
* In the third year I bought a new incubator and it turned out to be faulty. And the few purebred chicks I did manage to get were carried off by a fox along with the mother hen. It tore the roof off the chick shed, and a couple of feathers and a single chick's leg with a ring on it were all that was left of the brood.
* Last year I bought 5 Marans chicks again. Three of them were cockerels. And the hens never became layers (see below).
* This year there are again new, proper, perfectly fine purebred roosters, but the Araucanas have decided not to lay at all since Christmas. And they do not. They eat their share of expensive feed nicely and simply live their pleasant hen lives. Not a single egg since Christmas.
* The Marans, though, have some strange magnet for bringing on cannibalism. Eight months of feeding and raising and waiting for them to start laying. And when that finally happens, what also happens is that somebody pecks them to death from behind. And so it has gone for several years. Nobody else gets pecked, but the couple of Marans in the flock, this has happened to them 3 or 4 years running and I cannot get past it or around it.
So once again I BOUGHT myself a few Marans chicks and a few Araucana chicks, and put only crosses into the incubator myself. That is also why I tell you never to complain about the price of purebred chicks. You simply cannot imagine how much trouble it takes to get those hatching eggs or chicks. 🙂
Food for the chicks in the first days is boiled egg only. After that GMO free chick feed. Alongside that I give curd, green salad or cabbage, apple, sometimes porridge with egg and sesame seeds, and I mix in sea buckthorn oil and the like.
