about the chickens

I said I would write about the chickens, so here it is. I sorted through ALL the remaining youngsters yesterday and made some interesting discoveries.

I have fewer good birds than I thought I did. I was thinking "gosh I have a LOT of Blacks" but actually a large percentage of those were black birds from the Cuckoo cross... and I won't be keeping those. Well, maybe one, just for kicks, we'll see.

I thought I had a pretty good number of nice colored BBRed pullets. I do, but I discovered that 4 of them are 1/4 Dominique, from the Crele breeding pens. Hmm. Nicely colored birds! I'll see how they turn out, they may end up too big or with small ear lobes. If they are typey though I would put them with a BBRed male and see what happens, but I certainly would not sell them as a BBRed Rosecomb.

The best colored Cuckoo male IS in fact the single comb bird, but he's probably not going to have good type. The best type male is fairly washed out, with a lot of solid black in his tail coverts. The best colored rose comb male has red ear lobes. It's not fair! The females are all dark, but I'll see how they feather out as adults.

The Creles are going bye bye. Didn't end up with any males worth keeping. There is one half way decent female but she's enormous. It's not worth the time and effort, it wasn't the right way to start that color. This is not failure, this is knowing when to stop! :-)

I will have VERY few show birds for sale.