I haven't been on this thread in a while, but I wanted to make a few comments on my birds. I have heard a lot of people saying that they don't really lay big eggs or very many, and that they don't lay early. I have four pullets that were hatched in the beginning of January. Well they started laying medium eggs on July 2nd, and only layer a few eggs for the first week. Gradually the eggs have gotten bigger and more of them. This entire week I have gotten four eggs every day except one day I only got three. One egg is jumbo most of the days and two are at least large, and one is the light side of a large. How is it so much discrepancy between different peoples birds when they all came from the same place? I am very happy with the breed and will continue to raise them as long as I have chickens. Sorry for the long comment and happy farming.
I certainly am no geneticist but my thinking is that engineered birds with several breed ancestries will inherit different genes from their ancestral backgrounds. Some breeds are used to cross-breed for auto-sexing, some breeds used to increase egg production, some breeds used to increase bird size, etc etc. With all the different ancestral breeds laying different-sized eggs who knows what the final offspring will inherit either temperament-wise, size-wise, or egg-size? I mean, White Leghorns have been engineered to be non-broody laying machines yet once in a Blue Moon someone gets a broody Leghorn that hatches and broods her own young. Gotta be something in their background genes that eventually emerges to produce an oddball that doesn't fit the breed standard. It's like puppies or kittens when a runt or a massive offspring is produced in a litter of normal births - why? Who knows? Selective breeding seems to be the best way to raise good traits and eliminate bad traits but the hereditary genes will always be lurking in the background.
Hopefully people will only breed birds that meet specs as opossed to just breeding them because they spent $20 per pullet. I could see the breed getting off track quick if we all aren't careful, and it would be a shame to damage such a nice breed.
