The Aloha Chicken Project

[runsw/scissors]

I would really appreciate help in choosing which youngin's to keep to breed and which to remove ("cull") from the breeding pens... The colour is amazing!! I have some nearly white chickens running around here.

I'm afraid to make a mistake and would appreciate any input~ pictures to follow!

TIA!

 

[notinoz2007]

i cant wait to see pictures of other alohas.
karens and taz, how are your chicks doing?

its been nice out so we sleep with our bedroom window open, the coop is less than 20 feet away so i hear every crow. this morning i shot out of bed at 6:30 in a panic. my alarm actually woke me up, instead of a rooster. king has been crowing at 4:45am for the past week, so when he didnt wake me i seriously thought he was dead!! dont get me wrong, i appreciated not waking up so early, but it kinda freaked me out! turns out all was well in the coop.
perhaps he checked byc while i was sleeping and saw what i said about him? LOL

 

[notinoz2007]

Quote:

Clearly, King does HAVE some white. So he does carry spotting. But if he has no tail and he's annoying you, so rehome him! Larissa needs a home for Pumpkin right now and he's a looker, and while he's not huge, he is certainly not tiny or in any way a "bantam". You could always use him temporarily until we get some new roosters grown up.


This is my pure Swedish "keeper" rooster. Good news - turns out Swedes are "quiet crowers". LOL!

i have been considering taking pumpkin, how is his size compared to cheeto? and compared to your current swedish flower roo? i think i am going to have to get out in the coop with a tape measure... if pumpkin is bigger than my 2nd in command i might take him and get rid of both of my current roos. is he gentle? king is fabulous with his hens and with any younger additions i introduce. he cares more for the babies than the hens do.

i have been sharing my classroom incubation adventure with co workers and they are all excited too! as a matter of fact i think i have spread interest in the aloha chicken project.

2 people are asking for culled hens just for egg production, and one more might be interested in breeding, i'll have to talk with him more about it.

*edited to add: i NEED one of those quiet crowers!!! <<jealous>>

 

[tazcat70]

Well the chicks are growing, There are already some that seem much larger. When I put my hand in the brooder there are some that come over and peck at me. Most of them flutter around and then flatten themselves like pancakes on the bedding. So I am hoping for about 90% girls.

The colors are still striking, I took pictures when I said I would and i just looked at them, and the red light doesn't help, but here are a few for your viewing pleasure. I ended up with 56 and I have lost one of the ones I helped out.



Now I know that they look really cramped, but every time I came close to them that is what they did.

 

[alohachickens]

Tazcat -

Cute babies! And I can totally spot Laree's "gift chick" peeking out at me in the bunch, LOL!!!

Yes, there is a tremendous difference in size on the chicks I have here. Of my nearly one month old chicks, the biggest are almost double the size of the smallest. Some small hens may have been tagged by Butterscotch, who has a good body shape (upright single comb, long tail) but is ridiculously small. Those chicks will practically be bantams.

I'm mostly keeping Butterscotch at this point because of his very unusual color. Funny side note - he spent a couple weeks in a pen full of pure Sussex hens (which is what he needs to be crossed with) and now he has a thing for "big brunettes". I had to bring him back for a month, and he's now only romancing my four pure Sussex hens. It's really cute! (And great news, I haven't seen him with a tiny hen in ages.)

I am starting to wonder how much more influence the hen has on the chick's final size. Perhaps I've been going about this a lot of the wrong way - using tiny hens? Doing it all backwards? Perhaps the hen controls the size of the chicks?

That would explain the huge difference in chick sizes in this last batch - the giant chicks would be babies hatched out of the large, pure Sussex hens? I can't wait to get more pure "outside" breed hens to try, like New Hampshire. Stephen has Cheeto's sister, who is half Buff Rock over an "old school" second generation Aloha. Can't wait to see how those grow out! (Wonder if they will be huge like the mom?)

I am hoping to do a lot more specific pairings next fall, where I can try out some of these theories. Have small groups of chicks to hatch, like I did with Cheeto's breeder pen, and look for specific traits to appear.

Also, our Pacific NW folks, Mabo and Tam'ra, have some big hens and colored roos to play with this summer. Maybe they can give us some info on how large the resulting chicks are? If the hen is controlling the chick size the most, Tam'ra and Ma'bo should have major size improvement by next year, because unlike myself, they actually have a good number of "outside" breed large hens to cross with.

For example, they have a few nice small colored hens with a big rooster, and they also have large hens with a small Aloha rooster. If the two of them worked together, and say MaBo raised the chicks out of the large hens with a small colorful rooster, and Tam'ra raised the chicks hatched from eggs of the small hens with a big rooster, and the two flocks were kept apart until adulthood so we could tell them apart, they could later compare the results, and see if the big hen/small roo cross created bigger chicks than the small hen/big roo cross. Or would the two batches of chicks ultimately grow to be about the same size? Hmmm! I wonder . . . .

I could maybe do something similar here this fall. Stephen has a big Sussex roo over small hens, and Butterscotch, a small roo, will be going back in with the nice big Meyer Hatchery Sussex hens. If I did two small test hatches, we could find out if there was any noticeable size difference in the chicks. But we're basically running out of time here in Phoenix . . . the brutal heat is right around the corner. Everything will be shutting down here, soon, and the hens go into "survival mode" for the summer.

 

[alohachickens]

Quote:
i have been considering taking pumpkin, how is his size compared to cheeto? and compared to your current swedish flower roo?]

Pumpkin has been at Laree's house for a while, so I haven't compared him to Cheeto.

Here he is in Laree's breeder pen, and the darkest mottled hens are pure Speckled Sussex. He looks to be about the same size as a Speckled Sussex hen. Keep in mind, that is not nearly as large as what a Speckled Sussex roo is supposed to be! LOL! So he's not as tiny as Butterscotch. I think they probably had different moms but the same father, because not only is the size different, but Pumpkin has muffs and a different comb. He's also a lot "thicker" than Butterscotch. More heavy.





He is not laughably small, but he's not going to help improve size at all. You'd pretty much just be doing a favor by "holding" him until some larger hens could be created to suit him and Butterscotch. Like the solid buff daughters of Cheeto that are only 2 1/2 months old right now? Those will be ready to breed by the fall. Then maybe this late summer or early fall when it's time to get hatching again, we could swap out and I could give you one of Cheeto's sons in exchange for Pumpkin, and I'd put Pumpkin in with Cheeto's daughters and maybe some half-Sussex hens to do one more round with Pumpkin, as I really want to make sure whatever color he's carrying stays in our Aloha bloodlines, somewhere . . .

 

[alohachickens]

I would really appreciate help in choosing which youngin's to keep to breed and which to remove ("cull") from the breeding pens... The colour is amazing!! I have some nearly white chickens running around here.

I'm afraid to make a mistake and would appreciate any input~ pictures to follow!

TIA!

I can't wait to see the photos! You know my one batch are "hatchmates" to yours, and just in the last couple of days they have begun to EXPLODE with color literally overnight. It's been kind of amazing! I am guessing yours are starting to do the same?

We still have probably another two or three weeks of "waiting" left before any real hint of who might be a cull or a keeper, though. I can tell a couple are clearly roos and a few are clearly hens, but a whole big bunch in the middle are ???????

LOL!

 

[Deerfield Acres]

My chickies are sprouting little wings -- so cute! They are really nice birds. My chicken tamers (AKA children) have done a really good job while I've had limited access so they don't mind being messed with and are curious little things.

Here's just a quick pic of a few of them enjoying their dust bath. It has sand and Chinchilla dust (DE) in it. They haven't quite figured out how to dust bathe yet, but they love exploring anything new. Look at those cute little wings, amazing how fast they grow.

 

[tazcat70]

Pumpkin has been at Laree's house for a while, so I haven't compared him to Cheeto.

Here he is in Laree's breeder pen, and the darkest mottled hens are pure Speckled Sussex. He looks to be about the same size as a Speckled Sussex hen. Keep in mind, that is not nearly as large as what a Speckled Sussex roo is supposed to be! LOL! So he's not as tiny as Butterscotch. I think they probably had different moms but the same father, because not only is the size different, but Pumpkin has muffs and a different comb. He's also a lot "thicker" than Butterscotch. More heavy.


He is not laughably small, but he's not going to help improve size at all. You'd pretty much just be doing a favor by "holding" him until some larger hens could be created to suit him and Butterscotch. Like the solid buff daughters of Cheeto that are only 2 1/2 months old right now? Those will be ready to breed by the fall. Then maybe this late summer or early fall when it's time to get hatching again, we could swap out and I could give you one of Cheeto's sons in exchange for Pumpkin, and I'd put Pumpkin in with Cheeto's daughters and maybe some half-Sussex hens to do one more round with Pumpkin, as I really want to make sure whatever color he's carrying stays in our Aloha bloodlines, somewhere . . .

I wondered about that, because I swear some of these have muffs, in fact my favorite little boy has muffs. I say boy because he is so much larger.

 

[tazcat70]

Karen, thank you for sharing this with me.