Bresse Crossed wit Cuckoo Lemon Orpington...........

[CNJ]

I candled the cuckoo lemon orpington/bresse eggs tonight and I see 5 filling in, out of 14 eggs. I took out 9, at least I got chance to hatch a few. I also candled 2 eggs from a batch of 9 australorp/bresse. One was fertile and one wasn't. I started them a few days after the lemon orpington batch, so I'll check them and remove the unfertile eggs in a couple days.

I am surprised to see fertile eggs, the males just started jumping on the hens, so they can start early. This answers one of my questions about how old they need to be.

 

[CNJ]

I am thinking that I will see a sex link mark on the males of the Cuckoo Lemon Orpington/Bresse cross. I was reading that the males will be barred.

 

[CNJ]

6 out of 9 Australorp/Bresse eggs were fertile........................

 

[CNJ]

Cuckoo Lemon Orpington/Bresse chicks started hatching..................I wonder what color they will be? The females just started laying, so the eggs were small, I am not sure if this will affect their vigor. At least they have straight toes, their father's toes weren't perfect.
Any lemon barred ones should be male from what I researched.

I have another batch of Australorp/Bresse hatching eggs in my other incubator that will be hatching in a few days.

This hatching experiment will help me understand a little more about Hybrid Vigor.
I plan to breed the offspring of the two different pairs together (ABCD).

 

[CNJ]

For future reference: The Bresse/Lemon Orpington chicks were yellow with a little tan or buff coloring around the neck area. Their wing feathers are white and their yellow feet's are turning blue.
Only two Bresse/Australorp chicks hatched, one was white and one was black, it was pure black with black legs. The black one did not have the yellow under tone we see on pure bred Australorps. The Bresse rooster in this cross had black bleeding through, I was hoping to get some pencil color ones.

The mature Australorp eggs were bigger than the younger Lemon Orpington eggs, so the Bresse/Australorp chicks were bigger when they were born, but they now they are the same size as the Bresse/Lemon Orpington chicks.

 

[CNJ]

This was a very enlightening experience, I suspect the pure black one to be a Barbeziuex/Australorp cross, because it has white ear lobes. I remember seeing a 3 month old Barbeziuex cockerel mount a mature Australorp hen when they were free ranging. The other white Bresse/Australorp is from my Bresse rooster, Crooked Toe. Crooked Toe's, toes were curled in, but his offspring toes look normal. These two are a little bigger than the three White Bresse/Cuckoo Lemon Orpington, because the younger Lemon Orpington's eggs were smaller.

One chick of the three Bresse/Lemon Orpington cross feathered out differently. All the wing feathers from both groups grew noticeably longer. I think the short feather one is a male and all the long feather ones are females. I will post a picture for future reference.

The feathers on the short feathered one just started to fill in............If it turns out to be a rooster, this would be a feathered sex link. His red comb is more distinct than the others.

This experiment shows that the white on my Bresse roosters are dominant. I had a total of 14 white chicks and one black with white Barbezuiex ear lobes. I kept only five and gave the rest away.

Also, all the white chicks had blue steel colored legs with in one week of hatching. The odd black one had dark black legs.

 

[CNJ]

Everything on tract, I will use a Male Bresse/Lemon Orpington for my A and B line and a Female Bresse/Australorp for my C and D line. The Bresse roosters from the a/b and c/d crosses were from different farms and had different characters. Furthermore, the hens from the c/d cross (5 lbs) are much heavier than the a/b hens (3 lbs). This is the rooster and hen I will be using for my abcd hybrid experiment. I started collecting eggs today...

 

[CNJ]

I took the rooster out, he already did his thing, he did it an obscene amount of times. I felt sorry for the hen. Anyway, I think the first week of eggs will be from my other pure bred Bresse rooster, he was with her before I put the a/b rooster with her, so I will be doing two separate incubations. I will put the a/b rooster back in with her after week two. I think this hen lays an egg every other day, so it will be around 4 eggs per hatch.

 

[TheOddOneOut]

I took the rooster out, he already did his thing, he did it an obscene amount of times. I felt sorry for the hen.

Had he been alone for a while? He probably felt pretty pent-up, lol.

 

[CNJ]

Had he been alone for a while? He probably felt pretty pent-up, lol.

He was locked up in there by himself about a month. I kept him in there to protect him from my dominant Breese rooster. I hung extra food out on the outside of the cage, so he gets to interact with the free ranging hens daily. But he also gets terrorized by the dominant Bresse rooster, every so often.