Pennsylvania!! Unite!!

[OneMountainAcres]

How often does everyone collect their eggs? I have around nine laying. There isn't usually any until mid day. I read that you should place there eggs in the nest box to encourage the hens to lay in the nest boxes. A couple of ours just lay randomly in the coop. The thing about leaving the eggs is that when we go back out that evening to lock then in the eggs are gone. So we have a egg eater. I have found several smashed on the ground too. They get plenty of food believe me, someone is always feeding them.

That stinks thar you have an egg eater. I know Thera a way to build a roll away nest so that they can't get to the eggs but I'm not sure how. Tractor supply has ceramic eggs that you can get to leave in your nest boxes to encourage the girls to lay there. They can't eat them either so maybe it would discourage them some.

I usualy collect my eggs once around 3:00 and then look for more in the evenings when I'm closing the coops for the night. During the winter, I check every time I take the dogs out.

 

[BullChick]

That stinks thar you have an egg eater. I know Thera a way to build a roll away nest so that they can't get to the eggs but I'm not sure how. Tractor supply has ceramic eggs that you can get to leave in your nest boxes to encourage the girls to lay there. They can't eat them either so maybe it would discourage them some.

I usualy collect my eggs once around 3:00 and then look for more in the evenings when I'm closing the coops for the night. During the winter, I check every time I take the dogs out.

Funny. That was my schedule too. I switched to later most days while Duckling is working out her new sleep pattern.

 

[gonehencrazy]

How often does everyone collect their eggs? I have around nine laying. There isn't usually any until mid day. I read that you should place there eggs in the nest box to encourage the hens to lay in the nest boxes. A couple of ours just lay randomly in the coop. The thing about leaving the eggs is that when we go back out that evening to lock then in the eggs are gone. So we have a egg eater. I have found several smashed on the ground too. They get plenty of food believe me, someone is always feeding them.

I always check when I let them out in the morning. Also I check right before I leave for work so like 8 Am. My Gold Stars lay early as does one leghorn so there are usually a few. My dad is at home all day so we check a few times a day. I like to see who is laying. Trying to catch my free loading Welsummer crosses laying.

 

[hyzenthlay]

Ok, I am reluctantly posting both of my confirmed cockerels for sale (free to good home, really, but trying to deter soup hunters on craigslist since these guys have been pets and I have promised my kids that we will find them a nice home). If anyone here is interested in either a 17 week old Light Brahma or a 14 week old Olive Egger (Welsummer x Cream Crested Legbar) in the Pittsburgh area, let me know. The Brahma is really sweet and friendly, and the OE is really striking but more skittish, definitely keeps his distance from people, but gets along well with the flock. I wish I could keep them (my daughter and I were both excited about getting chicks from the OE), but the OE has just started crowing. It's not that loud yet, but I have to assume it will get louder, and we have way too many neighbors, complaints are almost guaranteed. No crowing from the Brahma yet, but it's a matter of time.

Here are their latest pics:

 

[AnneInTheBurbs]

GM all:

Anne:

Congrats on the shed....imho, you may want to put some support in the middle area as you will be walking around in there yourself.....

also, I am a promoter of linoleum, I got mine at HD and bought the 1'x1' peel and stick the ones I used were about $.50 each...easy to install and if one comes loose you just put another on down....only tool necessary is a razor knife to trim odd pieces....

Your OEs are BCM over CCL.....(BCM playing the role of the milkman).....I think using that match, boys will be barred and girls black...(psudo auto sexing)...in my old match CCL over BCM all chicks were barred.....

Some thoughts on setting up breeds and breeding....well, estimate the size of your flock (humm)....next figure out if you will need separate coops/pens for breeding (think milkman)....then decide where you are at on the rainbow basket...and start to backfill the birds you want....
Lastly, I have been caught short in having after having a predator take my only roo...makes plans for a backup....it can set you back an entire year.....my two cents....

You are correct Stake, Rusty is barred (and beautiful!) and the hens are black, with a little copped around the neck and shoulders. They look exactly like the pic you posted below. How old is the one in the picture?

Quote:

All:
Here's a pic of my OE girl...similar to Anne's girls...I think....

They are lovely little mixes. I have two black ones and Rusty. The other got taken from the predator a couple weeks ago.

Quote: I am always scoping out curbside pumpkins. Now I will be able to keep them in my basement for frost free storage! I'm sure they will go faster now though. This bigger crew does go through the food quickly. They love apples, more than my last flock. The turkeys in particular love the apples, when I have a couple that are starting to turn.

Looking through old photos and found that I come by my poultry obsession naturally. This is my mother with her duck, 'Fluff'.

What a treasure! To find a great picture of your mother, and that she had her favorite animal as well!

 

[AnneInTheBurbs]

So yesterday, I decided to start on the roof for my shed. We have beautiful weather, and over a week with no rain in the forecast. So my flock will be fine in their temporary enclosure, and I can get the roof done hopefully in a week or so. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the bonehead who made the coop only had the shingles secured with thick staples, so they were easy to remove. There was no underlayment/felt paper underneath, so the one side of the roof is pretty rotted and will need to be replaced. Again, this was not secured very securely, so it will be an easy fix, I think.

If all goes well, tomorrow I should be able to secure the new osb/plywood and start shingling. Yesterday I was able to remove all the shingles. Only took a few hours. This coop is going to be gorgeous when it's all done. And they're just gonna poop in it! Haha!

Hope you all don't mind me updating you guys when I work on the project.

 

[kie4]

I would not put a whole lot of faith in that pretty chart. I've seen it before, I'm not sure who made it up, but not someone with a deep understanding of egg color genetics. When you take a disparate cross like this and breed for varied outcome as a goal, the end result would be considered a "barnyard mix" by most people. Easter Eggers from hatcheries fall into this category. I like being able to say with certainty what color egg a chick will lay (and also that it will lay eggs and not end up crowing). Knowing at least those 2 traits makes a chick very desirable. It's nice to be able to say if it will have dark legs, or muffs, or a crest, but the egg color and gender are key.

I have seen claims of autosexing olive eggers that breed true for olive eggs. That is not an unattainable goal, but developing a line if chickens that consistently lays olive eggs is a lot harder than it sounds because both the blue egg and brown egg genes are dominant, meaning they hide the non-blue (white) very effectively. Dominant egg colors are extra hard to fix because you can't tell how many copies a male has (they could have none, how would you know since they will never lay an egg). The only way to be sure you have homozygous blue male (needed to get all olive egg laying daughters) is to do test matings to a non-blue egg laying hen and raise all the pullets to point of lay. If any lay brown (or white) eggs instead of olive, the rooster is heterozygous and not what you want. It could take years, and hundreds of chicks being raised and evaluated, before you could prove you had the real deal, and getting a proven homozygous hen is nearly as much work, you also have to do test matings with her to a white egg laying breed roo and see if any chicks lay white eggs. So call me skeptical about the people claiming to have lines of true breeding autosexing olive eggers.

OTOH, I can guarantee that the F1 of a Legbar x Welbar will lay olive eggs and will be 100% autosexing. Future generations will produce some olive eggs and some brown eggs, but you will never be able to tell by looking at the chick what color egg you will get. They would be autosexing Easter Eggers, not a bad thing perhaps, but not what I'm looking to produce when for the same effort I can produce 100% olive egger pullets.

I'm not trying to put down anyone's efforts to make hybrids and enjoy the results, I'm just trying to explain why I don't breed toward those goals. I look forward to a not -to-distant future when I can send a blood sample from a bird to get a DNA profile that can tell me exactly what the genotype is. That would make the huge problem I described above be reduced to a very simple genetic screening to find the right 2 birds to pair up.

What I did to create Welbars was far easier because I was only concerned about genes that were recessive or partially dominant, so it was easy to tell the genotype of the birds in each step.

Sorry if all that is confusing. I know not everyone is as "into" the genetics of chickens as I am.

The days of genetic screening are not far off @dheltzel . Definitely within our lifetimes. There's a Vice episode that documents the clinic of Dr. Steinberg founder of The Fertility Institutes in New York. In the piece he was helping parents select for gender, eye colour and screening for 400 types of hereditory disease. It costs $3,000 to screen the 5 day old blastocyst. I'm sure costs like these will come down and be much cheaper for poultry. I wonder if there are vetinary labs already working on this. They'll certainly already be doing it in the commercial sector for production and growth rate.

 

[fisherlady]

So yesterday, I decided to start on the roof for my shed. We have beautiful weather, and over a week with no rain in the forecast. So my flock will be fine in their temporary enclosure, and I can get the roof done hopefully in a week or so. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the bonehead who made the coop only had the shingles secured with thick staples, so they were easy to remove. There was no underlayment/felt paper underneath, so the one side of the roof is pretty rotted and will need to be replaced. Again, this was not secured very securely, so it will be an easy fix, I think.

If all goes well, tomorrow I should be able to secure the new osb/plywood and start shingling. Yesterday I was able to remove all the shingles. Only took a few hours. This coop is going to be gorgeous when it's all done. And they're just gonna poop in it! Haha!

Hope you all don't mind me updating you guys when I work on the project.

Update anytime! Looks like you are making progress already!

 

[AnneInTheBurbs]

This is not mine, but it's too funny not to share.

 

[chickachickayea]

You can do the deep liter method

Deep litter only works in well covered areas, I can tolerate a little water, but a good rainstorm with convert a foot of friable litter into a foot deep sewage area. Anaerobic decomp (what happens when bedding get wet, the water drives out oxygen at the microbial level) accelerates the release of ammonia. With deep litter, you hope to tie up the ammonia as much as possible in the bodies of the various critters and fungi living in the litter.

Thank you both for the reply! I was going to question about covering with deep litter method, but you beat me to the punch. It looks like rain is coming through later this week, so I'll just keep the hay in our garage for now... Dreams of deep litter will have to wait a bit until some kind of covering is built. I'm just somewhat impatient and am not in love with our Magoo-construction coop/pen, and want the best for my girls.

Ok, I am reluctantly posting both of my confirmed cockerels for sale (free to good home, really, but trying to deter soup hunters on craigslist since these guys have been pets and I have promised my kids that we will find them a nice home). If anyone here is interested in either a 17 week old Light Brahma or a 14 week old Olive Egger (Welsummer x Cream Crested Legbar) in the Pittsburgh area, let me know. The Brahma is really sweet and friendly, and the OE is really striking but more skittish, definitely keeps his distance from people, but gets along well with the flock. I wish I could keep them (my daughter and I were both excited about getting chicks from the OE), but the OE has just started crowing. It's not that loud yet, but I have to assume it will get louder, and we have way too many neighbors, complaints are almost guaranteed. No crowing from the Brahma yet, but it's a matter of time. Here are their latest pics:

Unfortunately, I can't take them, but WOW are they lookers!

Good luck rehoming