I know many of you have seen where I have posted that I have had more than 50 years of experience with chickens and that is absolutely true. However, most of those years I dealt with essentially two breeds; Black Australorps and NN/Turkins. This experience didn't give me the experience I now gaining with two new breeds to our menagerie, the White Chanticlers whose gender is enormously obvious and I use the word enormous again to describe these less-than 45 month old birds, two of which stand nearly 25 inches from ground to top of head...lets minus 2 inches for bedding....still, by virtue of a wooden measuring stick, these two big boys really baffle me, essentially because of their youth. I started to kill the two larges cockerels (out of stupidity) but I maintained enough common sense to speak to an 'expert' on the breed who told me to let the birds grow out 'til they are 8 to 9 months before even thinking of culling/eating these birds. I will get better pics this coming week...my batteries are through and won't recharge for some reason.
Another little surprise...I thought I had 11 pretty nice Dark Cornish pullets but I have only (perhaps) 10 because at least one is a very nice cockerel...evidenced by his growing cycle tail feathers and of course watching him try to crow this morning sorta' flipped me a solid clue.
Early on I thought I had two black cockerels and this bird is one of them. He did seem to look very dark but has since developed very beautiful natural coloring. There still may yet be another but I have not been able to put my finger on [COLOR=0000CD]him? [/COLOR]
As a point of interest, I buy and use only Duracell batteries in my cam and just about every other device I use. Just can't figure how these miserable Energizer things got into my camera but I have two choices to consider. Ol' dad won't miss 'em because he almost never takes pics. (Which is true)....but I really want to show what I taking about here so will invest in new rechargeable batteries tomorrow and will take the pics when the weather co-operates... some rain in the forecast.
