Crested cream legbars

[maryellen21]

I picked up 6 crested cream legbar pullets. They don't have blue ears. Does this mean they will lay brown eggs?I specifically got them for the blue egg not brown, as I have brown egg layers already. So do I just wait till they start to lay to see what color egg they lay?

 

[Wishing4Wings]

I am not completely sure, but if they don't lay blue eggs, you would probably get green rather than brown. If red earlobes indicate the presence of genes for brown eggs (which is not always the case), your pullets should still have the gene for blue shells if they were hatched from blue eggs. When you have genes for both blue shells and brown coloring, the eggs come out looking teal, green, khaki, or olive depending on the clarity of the blue and the intensity of the brown. When the egg is made, you start with a blue shell and toward the end of the process, some brown coating is added to the outside of the shell making it look green. Brown egg layers don't have the blue gene, so they start with a white shell. (The inside of a brown shell is white.)

Of course, after I said all that, I just realized you are talking about young chicks and not older pullets, right?

The earlobes can change color as they mature. I have a green laying EE with white ears, but as a chick they were red.

 

[enola]

Do your hens have white ear lobes?

The color of the ear lobes does not determine the color of a hen's egg shells.

 

[maryellen21]

They are pullets, some have brown lobes some have brownish/whitish. They don't have full crests /combs yet. They were hatched in may

 

[scratch'n'peck]

I think you need to wait until they lay. I have read that the ear lobe color determining the egg color is a sort of an old wives tale. I saw some photos of cream legbars recently and the owner said most of them laid blue eggs, but they did not have blue ear lobes.

Also, I have had a hen with bluish ear lobes who laid cream colored eggs ; )

 

[scratch'n'peck]

I was curious so I googled and found this:
The Cream Legbar was originally developed from the white egg laying Leghorn, and so generally lays a blue shelled egg; however the Barred Rock, which lays a tinted egg, also played a part in the creation of the breed so it is not unusual for some Cream Legbars to lay light blue/greenish eggs. The Breed Standard does include a range of egg colour (blue, green and olive) and some strains of Cream Legbar may lay a mixture of egg colour, however this does indicates that either rigorous selection for blue egg colour has not been carried out, or alternatively that they are not a pure strain - the purest strains will lay predominantly blue eggs.

It sounds like they will most likely lay blue or perhaps pale greenish blue eggs if they are well bred.

That copy and paste was from a British site, but it probably holds true for the US http://www.harislau.info/legbar

 

[maryellen21]

I am pretty sure they will lay a colored egg. Just gonna wait and see