May Hatch-a-Long!

[gander007]

Well as the day is coming to an end I will put up the rest of the day's hatches .....

We finished with 15 hatches from 20 week old EE pullets ...

 

[Demidog]

Cute little fluffy balls

BTW, what is EE? I'm assuming it's the name of the breed - i'm still learning!

 

[gander007]

Cute little fluffy balls

BTW, what is EE? I'm assuming it's the name of the breed - i'm still learning!

EE is short for Easter Egger a chicken that produces light blue, green, brown, and a light pink egg's but what ever color the chicken only lay's one color so you really need to have several chickens to have a egg basket of many colors

The EE chicken is really a mutt chicken but they have slate color shanks and beard and side burns and a small comb .....



These two are typical looking lady's ....

 

[missnu01]

But they can come in about any color. Yet another thing that makes them awesome

 

[Demidog]

Nice

I have no idea what mine are - probably mutts, the guy said he couldn't say what the chicks would be.

Can you tell by the chicks what colored feathers they'll have when they grow up? Or will their markings change when their feathers come in?

 

[missnu01]

Sometimes. Usually yellow comes in white, but sometimes a yellow chick will feather in black. Lol. I find my prettiest adult EE started out as really light colored chicks. I had one that started as a cream colored with really light reddish brown markings that became blonde and lavender. I don't like the "regular" looking ones drab dark brown and orange so I usually pick the lightest and darkest or if a bunch of chick's and hope for the best. All the ones I hatch are brown and orange because my rooster is a BO and my chick's are mixed. I have one coming in the lavender color right now, but it was from a bantam egg fathered by my EE roo. All the chucks from my EE hen are coming in drab brown and orange checkered. But she is sort of a darkish slate color with very few markings, and no beard and she is huge... has a body like a BO hen but a pea comb green skin and lays huge cream colored eggs. I need to pen her with my EE roo so I can get some more likely to be EE chicks. I know that hen is too far from being an actual EE to even count. I bought 6 more EE chicks this year, and 4 are cockerels, and only one of the birds has a beard--so, I'm going to keep the one with the beard -who is of course one of the boys. And eat the other males and hope the hens turn into something more EE like than my original hen is

 

[Demidog]

My yellow chicks have black wing feathers - will they probably be black? I was trying to wing sex them and i think only 2 out of the 6 are female And the last one i was assisting to hatch has just broke out of her egg and is now resting on the other side of the incubator!! I'm so happy about that, hopefully it's going to be OK! And i hope it's a female!! It's yellow too, with some black specs - all of them are a combination of yellow, black and brown. The ones with the black spots i think are male which i am disappointed about because they have the most interesting coloring. I want to get a mixture of different colored chickens so they look nice as well as providing eggs. Can you eat the males? Do they get meat on them? These are all chickens for egg production.

 

[missnu01]

You can eat any chicken and the last batch of mixed chickens I hatched out from my own flock proved once again that down has almost no relation to feather color. I had 6 totally yellow chicks. One feathered in black, 2 feathered in mostly white with brown speckles on wing tips and 2 are feathering in orange, and one is feathering in tan colored. But they all started yellow...and wing feather seeing only works on some breeds. Sometimes I notice that males seem to feather slower, as in my females will all have tails and the males will still just have tail fluff. But even that doesn't always work out. So I wait to see who ends up with a red comb I certainly the birds are totally feathered. That trick has never let me down. Peach comb, girl, orange comb, girl, washed out pink comb, girl...Red comb--boy. But sometimes even the boys are e's low to redden in. But if you notice when they feather some of the chick's are super pretty with awesome colors and patterns those are usually your boys. Hens are almost always more drab than their male counterparts. I had an EE this season that tried to fool me. His size was all boy, his beauty screamed boy, but 3 other boys had already outted themselves by way of comb, but this guy was still all orange and lady like. A full week after the others showed male he finally did. I kept saying I knew he was too pretty to be a girl and I was right.

 

[Welshchick]

 

[chicklets81]

I just put 22 eggs in the bator! I have 10 Easter Egger, 13 Crested Cream Legbar, and 3 copper maran that a local breeder gave me. Hatch day is May 6th!