The Aloha Chicken Project

hallerlake said:

I would love to get some chickens with coloring like the Ginger girls. Are there any in the Seattle/Portland area? Pretty please!

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Umm, well, we've got Tam'ra up in Oregon, and a new member (Runswithscissors) joining up in Oregon, and I thought MaBo was in Washington? But I don't know what part.

Tam'ra and MaBo will be hatching out chicks soon - mostly half-breds to improve size and type, so you probably wouldn't get any that look like the Ginger Girls from those crosses. Tam'ra and Ma'bo are crossing their small colorful ones (like these) with Buff Rock and Sussex, to improve size and quality.

The half Sussex'es-half Alohas will look like really awful purebred Sussex. The Buff Rock mixes will look like Cheeto, who is shown in other photos. Big and solid yellow or orange. However, if you bred the halfsies together, the colors should come back the next generation! Though right now, both MaBo and Tam'ra have the Alohas running amuck with the small Aloha hens, and they haven't set up their breeder pens yet. Some of their chicks will be pure Alohas, until they get the pens sorted out in the spring, and most certainly could look just like these. You could ask them to let you know if any turn out like that.

Runswithscissors is going to get a LIVE shipment of baby chicks soon, including babies from these exact chickens, but you'd have to figure out how to talk her into giving 'em up, if she's lucky enough to get some Ginger Girls of her own, ha ha ha!

Overall the best of everything is being kept for the breeding program . . . . unless you were interested in breeding them yourself? Progress will go a LOT faster the more people are involved, because you would all be able to set up your own breeder pens, and trade eggs, extra roosters, etc.

i spent a lot of time out there trying to figure her out. i did take some pictures that could show you how she is using her leg, i also got some video but have no idea how to post that. she is eating fine, she gets right up in the middle of it when i give treats. i mixed some save a chick and gave her some in a dropper and put the rest in the coop water for the rest, hopefully she can access that. she seemed to be doing a little better after the water, and some babying by my daughter and i. we cleaned out the coop and took out all the uneaten weeds and melon rinds.
i guess if more show the same symptoms over the weekend i have to assume the worst. by monday if she's the only one i'll figure out what to do from there. they are starting to pick on her so she cant stay with them. and i'm not set up for special needs chickens at this time.
in other (hilarious) news. i have determined that i have at least 5 roosters in my flock and they are starting to challenge each other. sommer, i am interested which one you think i should keep, so i will get you pics SOON.

going to attempt to post some pictures.

rooster on the swing


our above mentioned banty who keeps falling down, little mrs


hens at the watering hole. my favorite is on the very left, LOVE her color.


k, this is a blurry picture but i wanted to show some coloring, there are 3 spotted ones near the top. marshmallow is far left, most white, ROO. then snow in the middle, ROO. and pecker on the right, the one with the least white. she was the aggressive one from previous posts and i thought was a roo, but pretty sure she's a hen now. less aggressive, but still pretty dominant.

Morning, Folks! Here are some of my New Year's Hatch Aloha chicks. We've got the reds (not yet presenting mottling), the buff mottled, and the Speckled Sussex crosses.



All in all, I think there are ~40 of them. They've got another 2 months before I start culling, but I may cull the little roos earlier. I have my heart set on the little SS cross roo, and a buff-mottled roo for my next gen.

I hatched a large number of buff-headed chicks with the wild-type body. Past experience shows these chicks DO tend to carry the mottling, even if they never present. Plus they tend to be big-ol fat hens and gooood broodies.

love your pictures! i keep going back to the second one and saying hello roo, he has a very pretty head. is it safe to assume he's a roo? or does the comb size not matter in chicks this young? thats kind of how i tell mine apart at the moment. i too am thinking about thinning out my males in a few weeks.
where did that black chick come from?? i'm assuming not aloha, lol

update on little mrs. this morning i found her squeezing out of the fence again. she's getting too big for that but they were picking her feathers so she escaped. her right food is curled, i'm assuming this is what alohachickens earlier mentioned as 'knuckled over' she is still eating fine and i gave her a bowl of save a chic to have all to herself. i told DH we might end up culling her after all. no other chicks are showing signs.

Oh, he is definitely a roo, He's so rooey, he could be a kangaroo.

I can usually tell the roos from pullets at this point, but slow-maturing roos will still sneak through my process. Some hens will get the comb and wattles right away, and then the comb/wattles never grow again. Still, I find I am 80-90% accurate on my guesses. I can tell at hatch, ~3 weeks, ~2 months, then I lose them for a while, then again before they start to crow. Still, there are always the sneaky ones.

The black chick was hatched from my chocolate/mixed silkies. I hatched a bunch of silkies with the last batch of Alohas. You can see my roo Backfire below. He is the GREATEST dad.



Here is Backfire a few moments after I put the chicks in the grow-out pen with him and his ladies. I missed the shot of the chick taking food from his mouth.


And most of the chicks with their momma when I first put them in the grow-out pen.

notinoz2007 said:

update on little mrs. this morning i found her squeezing out of the fence again. she's getting too big for that but they were picking her feathers so she escaped. her right food is curled, i'm assuming this is what alohachickens earlier mentioned as 'knuckled over' she is still eating fine and i gave her a bowl of save a chic to have all to herself. i told DH we might end up culling her after all. no other chicks are showing signs.

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Just an FYI - it's been two months since that one pretty hen chick of mine showed the "knuckling over" and so far none of the other (20) chicks showed any signs. So I'm assuming it's not viral, but some kind of developmental issue. She didn't look like the one chick of yours, neither leg was stretched out front like that. It was more like her feet were in "roosting position" at all times, and she walked on the knuckles instead of stretching out her toes properly. It was weird. Never saw anything like that before.

Maybe could have saved her, but honestly I have no room for "special needs" chickens either, and it's critical to me that Alohas stay tough as nails, I don't want to encourage any weakness to linger in the gene pool. So she was humanely and painlessly put down in an instant. (Still was a bummer, though.)

Another note - recently a BYC friend had two pf her chicks show up like that, she took them to the vet and they said Marek's but the tests for Marek's came back negative! (Different breed, not Alohas.) So, eh, kind of bizarre but she can't figure out what happened to her two, either. It was a total mystery!

LareePQG said:

And most of the chicks with their momma when I first put them in the grow-out pen.

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Wow, Laree - you really did get a bumper crop of the "wild type" patterned ones again! Crazy how much that "tree bark" color/pattern lingers on the Alohas generation after generation.

(FYI for the other members, this color around from the start and really hard to clear up. This is one of the original four "foundation" Aloha hens, "Kona", and she shows it.)



Not that this color is hideous, it's kinda cool, but I prefer the flash of Kona's sister, "Ginger"



Both of these hens are now deceased. They were Oddball the Banty's daughters and the foundation of all the weird colors I'm getting now . . . .

Kona's "wild" dark brown color has been very hard to breed out!

LareePQG said:

Morning, Folks! Here are some of my New Year's Hatch Aloha chicks. We've got the reds (not yet presenting mottling), the buff mottled, and the Speckled Sussex crosses.

All in all, I think there are ~40 of them. They've got another 2 months before I start culling, but I may cull the little roos earlier. I have my heart set on the little SS cross roo, and a buff-mottled roo for my next gen.
I hatched a large number of buff-headed chicks with the wild-type body. Past experience shows these chicks DO tend to carry the mottling, even if they never present. Plus they tend to be big-ol fat hens and gooood broodies.

Click to expand...

I love these buffy-mottled ones!!! SO NICE!

I couldn't stand it, I went and took photos of Cheeto's babies even though it's still early . . . four show WHITE feathers. Others show spotting, but the spots are more light buff against darker buff. Not "true" white feathering. I don't know if they are going to mottle out or not, but clearly they carry it. Those ones look like really washed out lighter than normal Sussex chicks in patterning.

But a few clearly have WHITE on the shoulder or chest!!! And Cheeto is "for sure" the daddy, I was very good about never turning the hens out with the other roos!







The true white-white feathers are up on the shoulder on these two, and one has white coming in on his/her chest: