Pennsylvania!! Unite!!

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AnneInTheBurbs said:
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! :lol:

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Hope you all don't mind me updating you guys when I work on the project. :old
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I would like to know the progress. I cannot build anything myself like that, so it's always good to see people having great building skills. I plan to buy a new shed and let hubby modify it next year. Or if I'm lucky, I can find a house with coop.
 
dheltzel said:
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.
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DH:
Are you talkin CCL over Welbar or Welbar over CCL.....

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.
 
Anne:

The pic I posted is of a chook that is a direct sister to the ones I gave you....I do have two younger versions of "Rusty", too....
 
stake said:
DH:
Are you talkin CCL over Welbar or Welbar over CCL.....

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.
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Because this is autosexing and not making black sexlinks, it works equally well either way. I choose to use Welbar roos over CCL pullets because blue eggs are far easier to candle and seem to hatch in higher percentages for me. I also think that CCL pullets lay earlier and more than Welbars, but that is my impression, not something I can backup with numbers is any sort of controlled study.

Also, I have more Legbars growing out and it seems a waste to have Welbars producing OE's when Legbars would work just as well.
 

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