MaeIstrom
Songster
So a couple of years back I set out to create a new breed of chicken that retained the intelligence and personality of an Isa Brown but pared back the laying output to about 90% so as to eliminate the host of reproductive disorders and cancers that doom so many of these birds to a short life and painful death. When I read about the Araucana, a bizarre breed of chicken from South America which laid blue eggs, lived for up to 20 years with survival instincts second only to the OEG but plagued by it's own built in death sentence in the form of a lethal ear tuft gene causing high levels of chick mortality it seemed like I had a match made in heaven. Two breeds with such dire problems at one end of their life cycle but excelling in the other so the first cross was attempted. Unfortuneately a botched incubation meant I was left with just one hatchling from this initial cross but she did go on to exceed all my original expectations, laying a week earlier than my new set of hyline brown hens and pretty much matching them egg for egg with maybe a month off for moulting and maybe the occaional day off, it was hard to tell as she also the most adept hen for finding impossible places to lay her eggs but at any rate you can read more about the begginings of this project at https://www.backyardchickens.com/threads/crossing-isa-browns-to-heritage-breeds.1321617/
For the next generation (F2) I went with a Cream Crested Legbar X Leghorn Rooster over my F1 hen plus 3 hyline browns hens with the idea being that I would take a male from the F1 hen and cross him over females from the hyline browns thus achieving a double 3-way breeding cross between two strains of araucana, 2 strains of red sex-link and 2 strains of leghorn (taking the ancestry of the CCL into account) and from there it would be a matter of culling for blue eggs for the next 4 generations at which point I should hypothetically have a new breed of chicken called the Austracauna (or Austraucana) which lays larger blue eggs and more of them than any other chicken breed. Well long story short the CCLX rooster ended up throwing every feather color and pattern you would expect from a bird with CCL ancestry except blue eggs although a few newly added araucana hens and eventually a rooster have pumped some blue back into the flock.
However this might well be where the story ends for the Austraucana, I've been asked to move out of the farm where I've been boarding in the next month and speaking as someone who's had search alerts set for any rural or farm rentals for months now I'm not optimistic of finding a room on a suitable farm in the next 3 weeks plus after 2 years of putting every other aspect of my life on hold for this project I'm pretty much at the end of my rope both financially and emotionally. I really don't have the energy to keep moving from house to house building new chook pens only to move on when someone gets sick of rooster crowing and the continual property damage of chickens and the process of breeding cages and culling has slowly sucked all the joy out of what used to be a fulfilling hobby to the point where some days I can hardly bring myself to go out and look after my birds and so I think I need to sell up and move back to the rat race and find a more economically sustainable way of being miserable but it would be kind of heart-breaking to see this breed dissipate into a bunch of mongrels and easter-eggers to be auctioned off so I'm desperately hoping to a find a couple of breeders with the pen space and energy to take a breeding trio and continue this breed/strain. I currently have the following birds available
1 barred rooster (araucana comb) normal size
1 barred rooster (araucana comb) bantam size (could even use this to put barring and egg production into araucana flock)
3 barred chickens, two female one to young to tell
This is the most exciting group as barring is an auto sexing feature that lets you tell the males on hatching day due to a larger white dot on the male from his double set of barring genes to the females one. As these roosters only have 1 barring gene the first generation should look 25% male and 75% female due to only half the males receiving a double dose of the barring gene so the trick will be to cull the males that weren't obvious on day 1 and make breeding trios from the ones that were for an auto-sexing green egg layer which lays as least as many eggs as a leghorn due to the modern isa/hyline brown ancestry.
A bunch of black and white chicks (and a couple of barred) aged from 1-3 weeks that are too young to sex but as descendants of the F3 rooster are technically F4s.
A breeding trio of very pretty laced birds that aren't technically any color I recognise but very attractive. This one seems to be 2 heans with the araucana comb and 1 rooster with a single comb so you should breed from the offspring which maintain the araucana comb (and blue egg gene).
3-4 pullets of assorted colors that have the physical aspect of a CCL hen but the laying aspect of a hyline brown, can be combined with one of the barred roosters for more color variety and any barred daughters they produce can be used with the autosexing strain.
I'm currently located in Serpentine which is about an hours drive south of Perth (or 30 minutes east of Rockingham) and I'm hoping to get some interested breeders before I auction the rest of so please send me a PM if you'd like to get involved in creating and establishing a new breed. I'm asking $10 for the roosters and $20 for the hens and $5 for the day old chicks and also to retain your contact information in the aims of eventually establishing a web page and a breeders registry in a years or so if there's demand.
For the next generation (F2) I went with a Cream Crested Legbar X Leghorn Rooster over my F1 hen plus 3 hyline browns hens with the idea being that I would take a male from the F1 hen and cross him over females from the hyline browns thus achieving a double 3-way breeding cross between two strains of araucana, 2 strains of red sex-link and 2 strains of leghorn (taking the ancestry of the CCL into account) and from there it would be a matter of culling for blue eggs for the next 4 generations at which point I should hypothetically have a new breed of chicken called the Austracauna (or Austraucana) which lays larger blue eggs and more of them than any other chicken breed. Well long story short the CCLX rooster ended up throwing every feather color and pattern you would expect from a bird with CCL ancestry except blue eggs although a few newly added araucana hens and eventually a rooster have pumped some blue back into the flock.
However this might well be where the story ends for the Austraucana, I've been asked to move out of the farm where I've been boarding in the next month and speaking as someone who's had search alerts set for any rural or farm rentals for months now I'm not optimistic of finding a room on a suitable farm in the next 3 weeks plus after 2 years of putting every other aspect of my life on hold for this project I'm pretty much at the end of my rope both financially and emotionally. I really don't have the energy to keep moving from house to house building new chook pens only to move on when someone gets sick of rooster crowing and the continual property damage of chickens and the process of breeding cages and culling has slowly sucked all the joy out of what used to be a fulfilling hobby to the point where some days I can hardly bring myself to go out and look after my birds and so I think I need to sell up and move back to the rat race and find a more economically sustainable way of being miserable but it would be kind of heart-breaking to see this breed dissipate into a bunch of mongrels and easter-eggers to be auctioned off so I'm desperately hoping to a find a couple of breeders with the pen space and energy to take a breeding trio and continue this breed/strain. I currently have the following birds available
1 barred rooster (araucana comb) normal size
1 barred rooster (araucana comb) bantam size (could even use this to put barring and egg production into araucana flock)
3 barred chickens, two female one to young to tell
This is the most exciting group as barring is an auto sexing feature that lets you tell the males on hatching day due to a larger white dot on the male from his double set of barring genes to the females one. As these roosters only have 1 barring gene the first generation should look 25% male and 75% female due to only half the males receiving a double dose of the barring gene so the trick will be to cull the males that weren't obvious on day 1 and make breeding trios from the ones that were for an auto-sexing green egg layer which lays as least as many eggs as a leghorn due to the modern isa/hyline brown ancestry.
A bunch of black and white chicks (and a couple of barred) aged from 1-3 weeks that are too young to sex but as descendants of the F3 rooster are technically F4s.
A breeding trio of very pretty laced birds that aren't technically any color I recognise but very attractive. This one seems to be 2 heans with the araucana comb and 1 rooster with a single comb so you should breed from the offspring which maintain the araucana comb (and blue egg gene).
3-4 pullets of assorted colors that have the physical aspect of a CCL hen but the laying aspect of a hyline brown, can be combined with one of the barred roosters for more color variety and any barred daughters they produce can be used with the autosexing strain.
I'm currently located in Serpentine which is about an hours drive south of Perth (or 30 minutes east of Rockingham) and I'm hoping to get some interested breeders before I auction the rest of so please send me a PM if you'd like to get involved in creating and establishing a new breed. I'm asking $10 for the roosters and $20 for the hens and $5 for the day old chicks and also to retain your contact information in the aims of eventually establishing a web page and a breeders registry in a years or so if there's demand.
