Cream Legbars

[grannychicken54]

i got my first egg today laid in the middle of a really bad strom they are 21 weeks and 5 days old

 

[FridayYet]

i got my first egg today laid in the middle of a really bad strom they are 21 weeks and 5 days old

Congratulations!!! How egg-citing. I'm hoping for my first eggs in a month

 

[Roxannemc]

Hey CL ppl
Can anyone show an egg pic please ?Arent these supposed to lay blue eggs? Are they a deep blue or vey light? Here is my Lav Amercauna egg...like this or darker? Or bluer? Thanks

 

[racinchickins]

Hey CL ppl
Can anyone show an egg pic please ?Arent these supposed to lay blue eggs? Are they a deep blue or vey light? Here is my Lav Amercauna egg...like this or darker? Or bluer? Thanks

All the eggs I've gotten for hatching have definitely been blue. Closer to Light Blue than Deep Blue. Definitely not anywhere as dark as a Robin egg. The lightness/darkness seem to be similar to what I've seen from Ameracaunas, but blue and not blue/green. My girls are too young for eggs yet, so I don't have any pics to show you.

 

[normanack]

I hope we can get an article in the Cream Legbar Club newsletter sometime soon on egg color. From what I've read, how we perceive color has a lot to do with our culture. Blue and green are generally the murkiest in when one color becomes another. That said, all the hatching eggs I bought were (to my eye) somewhere between pale blue and pale mint green. The Online Auction Color Chart and the Ameraucana Color Chart -- are both very useful in giving a description that other people can match pretty much exactly. Both are inexpensive.

 

[dretd]

Hey CL ppl
Can anyone show an egg pic please ?Arent these supposed to lay blue eggs? Are they a deep blue or vey light? Here is my Lav Amercauna egg...like this or darker? Or bluer? Thanks

My CLs are too young to lay. I have gotten hatching eggs from 2 sources. I asked one source whether they would describe the eggs as blue or green-tinted and they thought blue. To my eye, there is green. I think that blue v green is very much in the eye of the beholder and the lighting.
Here is a random selection of eggs from the two shipments, one with the more blue-green page from the OAC and one from the more straight blue. Same eggs same lighting. It is really hard to get the color to show on those eggs in photos. Bottom line, most eggs were OAC 123 (more green-blue) or 179 or 151


All I would consider more pastel. I know some breeders have shown a more saturated color and it will vary depending on the time in the laying cycle.

I also seen photos with the eggs displayed on different background colors, and that will really change the perceived color of the eggs.

 

[CountryFriedChicken]

Thanks everyone! They are doing great!

 

[CountryFriedChicken]

I am curious - my friend got some CL females but some of those have silver hackles, they have dark chestnut color. They are from the A line. She is still learning also, but got those from a breeder that is not as conscious about the color. I suppose I do need to take pictures of her birds but drawing at straws, what does everybody suppose this to be?

Thanks.

 

[dretd]

I am curious - my friend got some CL females but some of those have silver hackles, they have dark chestnut color. They are from the A line. She is still learning also, but got those from a breeder that is not as conscious about the color. I suppose I do need to take pictures of her birds but drawing at straws, what does everybody suppose this to be?

Thanks.

Hi CountryFriedChicken.

The breed is really a work in progress, which makes it much more interesting than most other breeds to work with. Many other breeds have been APA recognized and refined for a hundred years or more and there is tweeking required when you build a flock. Here in the US Cream Legbars were imported in a very limited way only a couple of years ago. The gene pool was limited to start and I don't know the specifics of where those original birds came from (I think that my be proprietary/trade secret info right now, so to speak) but they were in all likelihood not top show birds. This creates a challenge for breeders because they have to decide what flaws are the most important to work on first since there are many. Color is a low priority for some (I tend to mostly agree with this) and thus you may get a bird that does not express the cream visually (it should still have the basics of the color including barring etc).

There are two points to consider about the cream gene. It is recessive meaning that a bird must have two copies of the gene for us to actually see the cream color in the bird. It is a gene that prevents the expression of another gene for gold, so it is even trickier than a simple straight up color being present or not.

In an ideal world, the imported Cream Legbars should have all had 2 copies of the cream gene (called ig for inhibitor of gold). Clearly from all of the gold-hackled birds this was not the case. The thing is, because we have such a limited gene pool to start with and the over-all body-type of the bird is very important, if you do not breed any birds that do not look cream (but may be carrying one copy of the ig gene) then you will really be handicapping efforts to develop the Cream Legbar over here. Hence, many breeders have prioritized the type over the color when keeping breeding birds.

Some have likened the analogy as to building a barn--you have to decide what shape and size is important and then paint it. Once you have the blueprints established (call it the first half of the Standard of Perfection or SOP) then you can build the barns from that same blueprint and the barns will generally look the same. If you take a black and white photo or silhouette of a bird, you should be able to roughly tell what breed or one of several breeds the photo is from. The Cream Legbar breed is based on a Leghorn but is a little beefier because of the Barred Rock and other influences, so it will look like a Leghorn more than a Wyandotte for instance.

The 'paint' is really of less importance than the structure, in my opinion, and if you cull birds only based on color you will really limit the building materials available to bring the breed up to the SOP. We are in the first year of a 5 year plan to get the Cream Legbars up to standard (where 50% of the birds need to breed true to the standard). Much work still needs to be done, but quite frankly I am amazed at how far the breed has come in just a couple of years thanks to some really dedicated breeders (not me and thank you to them!).

So what is comes down to is that you should definitely get a photo or two of your friend's bird and post it. If you had said gold I wouldn't think twice--but you said dark chestnut which to me is a really dark reddish brown color and not gold. Because of this description, it makes more wonder if they are not purebred (non)Cream Legbars but perhaps a Legbar cross.

 

[CountryFriedChicken]

Thanks Dretd, I know the breed is in progress which is one of the reasons why I was attracted to this breed and she got hooked AFTER me talking about them. But she basically moved quickly and got the first CLBs. Her cockerels are all over the place, but from what I remember from her pullets are that they pretty much have same type ( with some degree of variance of course)... but the color is different?

Thanks again!