Araucana thread anyone?

[smoothmule]

I tried to get pics of Little man's tiny tufts, but didn't get any really good shots


This was as close as I got to seeing them




And Ari

He just keeps getting nicer and nicer! (Ari)

 

[smoothmule]

It's a great day for sharing pictures! I did lose on tufted barred pullet to the oposum. Life goes on.
This is Barry. The one that made it through all this years culling.

Some of the girls with their tushies in the air...

Barry with his great grandfather Scott

More of Barry

Excellent!

 

[Ray_n_Debi]

I get tons of roos like this.

 

[KirstenJL]

Either every hen I have and/or the roo has the e+ gene in them. That is why I get the wild type pattern. As chicks the parents looked lavender. 
I have a clean face Ameraucana roo that I am going to try on the hens and see what I get but that is not going to be a project until spring. 
I feel a lot of the lavenders out there have been crossed to buff or black that has the e+ gene. 

Yeah, it seems like all the Araucanas out there are a potpourri of colors!

 

[KirstenJL]

I Love your cockerel there, the silver/black.  Is that spangling on his chest?  If you have any pullets from him, breed them back to him and see if you can get more spangles.  I have a cockerel with a lot of spangling, clean faced with a tail but I want to try him with a better hen and see if I can work on that pattern

I caught him tonight and checked him out, and yes, they're pretty rough, but they're spangles. From a distance they looked like different colored individual feathers. I guess that means he is ER based too. I'm not sure about the silver though. He's been straw-colored on top since those feathers came in, so I think at best he's S/s+. He's in with my potentially ER girl (among others) so maybe they'll make some spangled babies!

 

[smoothmule]

Kirsten,
If they do, I'd love to buy a couple of chicks or some hatching eggs or do some swapping with you to work on spangled

 

[KirstenJL]

Kirsten,
If they do, I'd love to buy a couple of chicks or some hatching eggs or do some swapping with you to work on spangled

Sounds like a plan! They're all only 18 weeks old, so I don't know anything about their fertility and I'm a complete newbie with this breed, so we'll see how it goes.

 

[syble]

well it seams as though the young boys are doing their jobs, of the 8 eggs i brought to my friends house to incubate, all 8 are growing... which quite frankly astounds me because I've watched both mavericks doing their thing and it certainly didn't look too promising to me haha.

 

[Bentley]

Sounds like a plan! They're all only 18 weeks old, so I don't know anything about their fertility and I'm a complete newbie with this breed, so we'll see how it goes.

in nearly all chicken breeds fertility lags behind the onset of egg production by a few weeks. With my Araucanas I never do get fertility that is comparable to my other breeds. Something about the mechanics of mating and males doing so without a tail makes it more difficult. You also cant forget the embryonic lethality associated with the tufted gene so sometimes your embryo mortality associated with the tuft gene can be misconstrued as poor fertility just because the eggs don't hatch.

 

[syble]

Just curious if anyone has been culling for color based off of chick down color? I've been talking with a couple of breeders who have mentioned that they cull any chick with rusty cast and it has decreased and/or eliminated adult birds with bleed. just wondering how many do this? I hope to have the opperatunity to try this later on this season.