Black Australorp x Buff Orpington

[Elifg]

Hi all,

This came out of my buff orpington egg today which was a bit unexpected as I did not realise my black australorp rooster had been in with the orpington girls.
To me it looks exactly like a black australorp chick. I also hatched a whole bunch of australorp eggs and I’m worried that maybe they are mixed with the buff orpington rooster??
I thought if there were any cross breeding there would be obvious differences but not so sure anymore.
Any tips that can help us figure out if they are mixed or not?

 

[Amer]

That chick has a beard. Are you sure it's not something else that has gotten in with your Orpingtons? An Easter Egger, perhaps?

 

[NatJ]

This came out of my buff orpington egg today which was a bit unexpected as I did not realise my black australorp rooster had been in with the orpington girls.
To me it looks exactly like a black australorp chick. I also hatched a whole bunch of australorp eggs and I’m worried that maybe they are mixed with the buff orpington rooster??
I thought if there were any cross breeding there would be obvious differences but not so sure anymore.
Any tips that can help us figure out if they are mixed or not?

When they are young chicks, I would expect mixes to have the same coloring as Black Australorps.

Pure Buff Orpingtons will be buff.

When they grow up, the purebred Black Australorps should be all black, but mixes of Black Australorp and Buff Orpington will probably have some leakage of silver or gold. Crosses with a Buff will usually have large amounts of leakage, so I think you should be able to pick them out pretty accurately.

The other way to tell is to grow them all the way up, then breed each maybe-mix to a Buff. If you hatch at least half a dozen chicks and they are all black, the maybe-mix is probably a purebred Black Australorp. If you get chicks of other colors, the maybe-mix really was a mix. That is obviously a lot of bother if you need to test very many chickens, but could be worth doing if there is an especially nice rooster that you really want to be sure about.

Given the shared ancestry of Orpingtons and Australorps, I would expect feather color to be the biggest problem from a mix like that. The other traits will be pretty similar (skin color, body size & shape, and so forth.) And the feather color is only a problem if you want purebreds or a certain appearance.

That chick has a beard. Are you sure it's not something else that has gotten in with your Orpingtons? An Easter Egger, perhaps?

That is a very good point. If other breeds are involved, sorting the chicks can get much more complicated, very quickly.