Brown Egg layers laying green/olive eggs?

[MMelton67]

I have a mix of Lavender Orps (7) and Barred Rocks (6). They are now 25 weeks old and the 1st egg showed up the day before they were 18 weeks old. This past week we started seeing a green/olive egg almost every day now. I've googled but can't find any reason for either breed to lay this color. It's not biggie, they taste just as good. I'm just curious if there is a reason...and hopefully not one related to illness or malnutrition (which shouldn't be the case: layer feed since the day after I saw the first egg, oyster shell available all the time and 2 cups of scratch 1/day for the 13 of them.

*edit* meant to attach a pic

TIA

 

[MommyGirl]

Yes I believe the one with the tuft on her head is your Olive Egger!

 

[BigBlueHen53]

Crested Cream Legbars lay a blue egg and, of course have a crest. Your hen with the crest sounds like she may have some of this breed in her. She's laying a blue egg (crack it and look at the inside of the shell) with a brown coating, resulting in a greenish or olive colored egg. She has the genes for a white egg with a brown coating, and for a blue egg, resulting in a greenish egg. Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, I'm sure, but that's my understanding.

 

[NatJ]

ok. so, just to be clear, I'm not trying to be aggro on anyone. And, I realize, other than a DNA test, no one can be sure. However, how does a crest mean she's an OE?

The crest proves that she is not a pure Barred Rock.

Olive eggs prove that somebody is an Olive Egger.

Since some Olive Eggers do look like your barred pullets (the crested one and the not-crested ones), the simplest explanation is that Hoovers sent you some Olive Eggers, either instead of Barred Rocks or else mixed with some Barred Rocks.

I don't have a camera on the nesting box or inside the coop but she's the last chicken I'd expect to be laying; period.

In the photos, it looks like her comb and wattles and face are very red (more than some of the others.) The pullets with the reddest faces are usually the ones that start laying first. So that is why I think that she easily could be one of the pullets who is laying eggs at the present time.

If they were all laying and you only got one olive egg each day, I would bet it came from her. One odd chicken, one odd egg, mystery solved.

But you actually have 2 olive eggers (and may have more, when the rest start laying), so it is NOT as simple as just finding one bird who doesn't match. I think the olive eggs are more likely to come from the barred birds, and less likely to come from the lavender birds, due to which coloring is more common in Olive Eggers.

And, the assertion that the hatchery messed up seems to be a fallback position to take if there is no other likely reason. I understand mistakes can happen as we ended up with one rooster out of the 8 BPR pullets we ordered (may his prolapsed vent and he RIP.) I'm truly curious about the assertion that mistakes are common at the hatcheries as I'm not in this to keep chickens as pets and just ordered a batch of 16 Australorps from Hoover's for early March delivery. Can I really expect not to get 16 female Australorps from them? fwiw, I've gone back to Hoover because Murray need's a 25 chick minimum before April 1 and none of the local farm store's (Bomgaars, TSC, RK) seem to be able to tell me that their chicks are immunized against anything (it's retail, i get it).

When ordering from a hatchery, you can expect most orders to be fairly close to correct. If a particular hatchery made too many errors, word would spread and no-one would order, and they would go out of business.

But with all the thousands (probably millions) of chicks that get hatched and shipped, some mistaked definitely do happen. As you've experienced, there can be wrong-sex and wrong-breed mixups.

There can also be chickens that are the correct breed & sex but have something "wrong" because the hatchery flock was not being carefully selected for the right traits (single comb chicks in breeds that should have rose comb, clean faced chicks in breeds that should have muff/beard, tiny breeds that are not small enough, big breeds that are not large enough, patterned breeds that are a bit mis-marked, etc.)

If you want chickens that have ALL the correct traits for their breed (any breed, from any source), you need to either buy adult chickens after inspecting them to see if they have the right traits, or buy more chicks than you need and plan to keep only the best while eating/selling/rehoming the less good ones.

But if you want a flock of mostly-correct chickens that are healthy and good layers, it is usually possible to get that by ordering chicks from a hatchery.

 

[NatJ]

I realize, other than a DNA test, no one can be sure.

Actually, for olive eggers, you can be sure without a DNA test. Put any hen in a cage by herself until she lays an egg, then look at the color of the egg.

If she lays an olive-colored egg, then she is an Olive Egger.

 

[NatJ]

I just wanted to understand how the industry apparently works. I guess they don't operate in 'laboratory' like conditions which is honestly surprising to me since they all seem to be claiming to sell very specific breeds and if you're saying you're selling X, Y, or Z you'd want to be sure you were breeding true.

My understanding is that some hatcheries operate their own breeding farms, and others have contracts to buy eggs from farmers.

They keep separate pens of each breed, that are supposed to be chicken-proof so no accidental mixing takes place. When selecting the breeding birds for each pen, they should remove any with obvious flaws (like wrong foot color, or wrong comb type, or badly wrong size, etc.) But they will probably not bother test-breeding to see which birds carry recessive genes that should be culled, and they are not going to pick through large numbers of birds to select the best few for breeding. At a guess, if they need 100 hens for breeding, they probably try to hatch enough chicks to get 110 to 200 pullets, then remove the worst ones until they are at the right number.

They should be careful about which eggs come from which pen, keeping them sorted or marked as they go into the incubators, then having them hatch in different trays or different hatchers or some such system. Then the chicks should be taken out of the hatchers, sexed if needed, and boxed for shipmeny-- without being able to mix with other chicks.

Of course there will be a few mistakes (either from chicks jumping where they shouldn't, or from human errors), but the hatchery should make all reasonable efforts to keep such errors to a minimum.

Poking around hatchery websites can turn up quite a bit of information about how they do things. For example:

Cackle Hatchery has videos of their breeder flock for many of the breeds, which give some idea of how the birds are housed for one hatchery. (Look for a box that lists breed facts, description, videos, etc: videos are there if they exist.)
https://www.cacklehatchery.com/product/cinnamon-queens/
They have a large flock of parent stock for these. This exact "breed" is a cross of red roosters with white hens, which makes it easy to see how many males vs. females are in the building.
https://www.cacklehatchery.com/product/lakenvelder/
This is a smaller group, and at one point in the video I can see a wire-mesh divider with a different breed on the other side (they look like White Polish, about the 0:33 mark in the video.) I notice that they look quite different (so if a chicken accidentally does get into the wrong pen it will be quite obvious.) Also, if you look at the Lakenvelders, you will see that the color/markings differ a bit. The ideal is black neck and tail, with clean white everywhere else. The actual breeding hens & roosters have some with black necks & tails and some with bits of white showing there. Some have clean white on their bodies, and others have quite a bit of gray or black in places where it should not be. That is a good example of how "hatchery quality" can be different than show-winning quality for coloring and pattern.

https://www.cacklehatchery.com/tour-cackle/
This page has a link to a .pdf "Take a virtual tour of Cackle Hatchery 1999-2009"
It has photos and text.

https://meyerhatchery.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/12987067569165-Virtual-Tour-Meyer-Hatchery
This page has link to youtube videos with tours of various parts of their Myere Hatchery operation (hatchery, breeder barns, etc.)

https://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com/history.html
McMurray Hatchery has a page about their history, with a link at the bottom to a video tour on youtube.

(Of course this is not a complete list of what hatcheries have on their websites, just some that I remember seeing before or could easily find today.)

 

[NatJ]

Can you get more $$ for the olive eggs at farmer's markets? lol.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

You could sell dozens of just the olive eggs, or you could sell mixed-color dozens (some people like those.)

If you want to make your eggs visually distinctive in some way, so they do not look quite the same as the ones other people are selling, you could do some kind of predictable pattern (like putting 1 olive egg in each carton with 11 brown ones.) Of course, you would need to be sure the customers know that olive eggs are special, not turning green from being old or spoiled

 

[MMelton67]

One olive egg, 5 brown.

1st day of 6 eggs, too. All laid in a 3 hour span mid-morning.

 

[MMelton67]

So, Hoover's response was that their line of BPR's is 'heritage' and there shouldn't be any mixed breeding...but then when I sent pics she acknowledged something had gotten in the mix because of the crest. But, otherwise didn't offer any explanation except 'due to high volume...blah, blah, blah' Anyway, she refunded me the price of one chicken...which wasn't what I was after, lol. I just wanted to understand how the industry apparently works. I guess they don't operate in 'laboratory' like conditions which is honestly surprising to me since they all seem to be claiming to sell very specific breeds and if you're saying you're selling X, Y, or Z you'd want to be sure you were breeding true.

 

[NatJ]

Sorry, I wasn’t trying to imply you were complaining. I just see a lot of complications with hatchery orders on this website.

People tend to post when they have a question or a problem. It is less common for people to post a thread that says "I ordered chicks from a hatchery and nothing went wrong!" (Although there are some threads that pretty much say, "look at my cute chicks!")

If you look at threads about brooder setup, and sexing chicks, there are usually quite a few people who ordered from hatcheries and did get the correct chicks.

Cackle is new to me. I've had Hoover, Murray, and Metzer bookmarked so far. I went with Hoover because they had lower minimum orders than the others at 15.

You might look at Ideal Poultry as well. Their minimum order is in dollars rather than a set number of chicks. If you sign up for their sales emails, they sometimes run nice specials on some of the good layer breeds (typically very early spring and also late summer on into the fall: the times when not as many people are ordering chicks.)

There is a good practical reason for the minimum order sizes and small-order surcharges. Putting 15 or 25 chicks in a correctly-sized box will let the chicks' own body heat keep them warm in shipping. For orders smaller than that, the hatchery needs to pack them differently, and often needs to include heat packs as well. That takes quite a bit more time and supplies, which is why they have the surcharge.