whiting true blue Archives

Hatching eggs is a beautiful experience.

I previously wrote about our little breeding program to expand our chicken egg color palette, well on Friday another important step was taken, we successfully hatched 3 bright blue egg layers. The hatching rate wasn’t great. Only 3 out of 9 eggs hatched. Usually 60% can be expected. Ugh. It appears that a few of the eggs we received from the breeder in FL weren’t fertilized, which is really annoying considering the cost, but at least we got 3. And they’re sooo cute!

Blue Egg Layers

2 of these chicks are Cream Crested Legbars and the other is a Whiting True Blue. The Cream Crested Legbars are a purebred, rare breed of blue egg layer. While the Whiting True Blue was bred by Dr. Tom Whiting, a poultry geneticist, they’re a relatively new breed, but they consistently lay a blue egg and that’s all that matters. Don’t ask me which chick is which though. It’ll be a few weeks until I can answer with confidence. But I can tell you that the Cream Crested Legbars have awesome hair!

Clearly, it’s easy to identify a Cream Crested Legbar.

But back to the hatching…about 7 hours after the first chick hatched we realized that one of the babies was struggling to escape to freedom. We learned from previous hatchings that not helping can lead to curled toes, vitamin deficiencies and death. (Remember the story about our rooster, Jerry) However, we’ve read that helping can cause development issues and even death, this is all based on the idea that people might force a chick out of the egg to early.

Our cat was obsessed with the hatching chicks.

This was not the case, so we decided to go ahead and open the egg. Carefully, with tweezers, patience and a warm, wet cloth to try to moisten shell and internal membrane. (The internal membrane that lines the inside of the egg, which you may have noticed when peeling a hard-boiled egg, dries out from the exposure to the air after the chick breaks the shell), so this little guy didn’t stand much of a chance without our help.

Check out the chick rescue video on Instagram @ArchiesAcres

It was a wonderful moment when we realized that we saved this sweet little baby. S/he was very weak from the rough start but has since made a full recovery. Here’s a pic from right after the “delivery.” The video of the rescue is on our Instagram feed as well.

Newborn baby chicken. We had to help this little one along.

We’re happy to report that all 3 chicks are doing well!

In the next day or so we have another incubator filled with 6 eggs that will (hopefully) be hatching. Stay Tuned for that!

We have really been getting into chicken “husbandry” this year. What exactly does that mean? Well, we have seen the egg shell color possibilities on Instagram and our working to expand ours. The chicken ladies on Instagram get real nerdy scientific with it and we’re both kind of obsessed with the possibilities.

egg, rainbow, chicken — Our current egg color selection. It’s a mini-rainbow!

Don’t get me wrong, we’re not taking our current ladies for granted! They do great work. We love the different shades of tan, white, pink and brown they give us. We just want to add a little more pizzazz to what we can offer our farmers market patrons. Because it’s fun. And we love pretty things.

Eggshell color is all about genetics.

So because of that we have researched chicken breeds and how to cross them to make different egg shell colors. We recently purchased Black Copper Marans, Cuckoo Marans and Welsummer chicks from Hoover’s Hatchery in Iowa to provide us with a dark chocolate egg…

maran, egg, chocolate, color — Marans have a beautiful chocolate brown egg.

Aren’t they gorgeous?

For the blue eggs needed for our rainbow, we ordered 4 Easter Egger chicks. 3 females and 1 male. And we also purchased 8 Whiting True Blue eggs from a farm in Florida and 6 Cream Crested Legbar eggs from a farmer in Pennsylvania. We are currently incubating all 14 and they should be hatching within the next week

How many chickens is too many?

I know what you’re thinking, “that’s a lot of chickens!” But really it’s not going to be. Our coop is set up to more than accommodate the chicks we bought from the hatchery. Plus the hatching rate for successfully incubating eggs is only about 40%. So we’ll be lucking to 5 out of the 14 we incubated. We’re good on space, but I admit that I’m a certified chicken lady. That being said we have well over 30 chickens right now.

Egg husbandry chart for colors:

This shows how to cross chicken breeds to create fun egg colors.

As you can see; the process is fluid and there’s no guaranteed result, but that’s the fun of it! We will have special chicken runs built to facilitate this process. And we specifically bought a Black Copper Maran male, Cuckoo Maran male and an Easter Egger male. The breed that comes from crossing a dark brown layer with a blue layer is generally referred to as an Olive Egger, and the olive/green tint varies vastly.

So there’s your crash course in the wild world of chicken breeding for egg colors. We will have dark brown and blue eggs added to our current colorful arrangement by late summer. And olive, green and mint colored eggs by next Spring. We will also be selling fertilized eggs for people who would like to incubate and raise their own special Oliver Eggers. Keep a lookout for us!

Tag: whiting true blue

A busy weekend of baby chickens!