The Aloha Chicken Project

[alohachickens]

Oh and I told myself I wouldn't keep any of the boys from the Little Yellow Legs pen, because Little Yellow Legs was a smaller roo and I really need to work on size, but guess who is going to hang around to see how he grows out? Too flashy, gotta see how he turns out.





I bought two hatchery NHR hen chicks and they are now bigger than the Aloha gals their same age. So maybe this fall, if all goes well, I'll toss him in with those girls? (If he keeps his color, of course!)

Can you imagine this color on a NHR? Geez, I hope he stays like this . . .and doesn't fade out . . . sigh!

 

[horsiefly53]

Just dropping in and catching up with everyone's progress. I bought speckled sussex eggs and the chicks are about a week old. Also have a couple buff orpingtons and RIR-hatchery stock from feed store. In the fall I should be ready to experiment and can ask advice on what to do.
Interesting about the dieing chicks. I had 24 Ameraucana shipped eggs from Ray-n-Debbie on BYC. Ten hatched-all different colors. They slowly started dieing off one by one. Have 5 left now who have made it now the past two weeks okay. They are 4-5 weeks old. Two are half the size of the biggest one. Thought it may have had to do with shipped eggs. They have been kept in the house until today I put them outside in my raised wire mesh hutch. The feed store chicks purchased over last couple months all strong and vigorous. They are all from Ideal. The speckled sussex along with some australorpe, leghorns, wyandottes, and a maran or two from same hatch all strong except for a couple crippled/not hatched right ones died and one is very small so a not sure. They are from a breeder on ebay that lives about 90 minutes from me so I drove and picked up the eggs-66 eggs and about 40 hatched. My friend hatches them for me in her cabinet incubator.

 

[alohachickens]

. The feed store chicks purchased over last couple months all strong and vigorous. They are all from Ideal. The speckled sussex along with some australorpe, leghorns, wyandottes, and a maran or two from same hatch all strong except for a couple crippled/not hatched right ones died and one is very small so a not sure. They are from a breeder on ebay that lives about 90 minutes from me so I drove and picked up the eggs-66 eggs and about 40 hatched. My friend hatches them for me in her cabinet incubator.

The Ideal feed store chicks - were any of those Speckled Sussex? I've been very interested in the Ideal Speckled Sussex, because I saw an old BYC thread that had them, and they showed a TON of white. So my idea was to order 25 chicks from Ideal, and pick out the most white ones from the group.

But this plan was thwarted, when I ordered them the box arrived with the "extra" chicks already dead (I had been on a waiting list for Speckled Sussex so they were only able to get me 17 chicks and I bought other stuff to try and fill the box for warmth.) They also mistakenly sent me someone else's order of chicks, and those were mostly dead right out the gate. So mine were OK at first, but then they started dying off later. It was a mess!

And so much for my plan to raise up a huge mass of Sussex to pick out the ones with the most white feathering! Sigh.

 

[notinoz2007]

we didnt lose any chicks today. i am starting to really think it was the heat provided by the heat lamp it was just unnecessary since our temps were already around 95. i only had it on at night, but i guess even that was too much. i have a little fan for them that i will use later this week if i start to have more heat related problems.
i lost track of the 4 from pen 4.. i was so concerned about the dying that i wasnt concerned about telling them apart. now i am going to get in there and find their little red heads and separate them into a different area, hopefully they survived. also, i see mostly yellow legs in here. maybe 5 with grey/green going on.

 

[alohachickens]

Selling culls on Craigslist this week. Some pretty nice stuff, that actually is barely "cull" quality! But the heat is ON this weekend with expected temps around 107! Yikes!

Everyone is going to stop laying anyway, LOL, so I'm going to cull down to the "bare bones" and concentrate on raising the babies.

Just sent about 70 chicks up to Stephen's. Have maybe 40-60 more due to hatch in a few days, also for Stephen. These hens all have had their eggs in the 'bator for these recent hatches!

So between that and the 100 or so babies I've raised this season, (and by "season" that means Oct-May which is the breeding season in our backwards desert environment) I think we're doing good.

But we're making an exception for the Dun Sussex rooster that we're crossing with the Meyer Sussex hens. Goal is to improve size, introduce Dun gene, and lighten body color on Sussex. But we only need one rooster from that cross to keep. So in two weeks (mid June) we will start to collect eggs from that pen. Even if the gals are laying slow and we get only 10 eggs in one week, hopefully that would be enough for us to get a rooster who carries both Dun and Mottled!

Other than that, shutting down for the season and going to cull every last adult that I can possibly part with! Ugh, summer in Phoenix. Yuck.

 

[alohachickens]

Forgot to mention . . . sending the babies up to Stephen's because he has a cooler on a barn and an aviary. Chicks will start out in the cooled aviary, and then move into the cooled barn. Yay!

 

[Deerfield Acres]

Hey guys. Just popping in to update. Life has finally settled down a bit for me so I'm ready to assess damages to my program while I had to be absent as I helped my brother's family with a crisis.

I lost 8 or 9 birds a couple weeks ago to an unknown cause. I was so uninvolved with the birds that there is no telling. I had them in a pen inside the coop thinking they would be safer with all the coyote raids going on. I suspect it was poor air quality? We had a rain prior to losing the birds and it rained in the window on the south side and I wasn't around to tell the kids "Clean that wet litter out." The birds were right on top of the wet litter. The top layer was dry but the mold was there underneath. Once they told me we'd lost birds, I went out to see what on earth had happened. What a bummer. So that was half the birds I had. I still have some great birds but I can't afford to lose any of them. I have to physically be there every day to make sure everything is okay and it just wasn't possible during this time period. So sad.

I'll have to update photos and figure out which ones I lost. I'm glad I had them banded so at least I'll be able to tell who was lost.

Anyway, I haven't lost any of my Buff Sussex and they are growing like weeds. There is one of them that looks to have white spots evenly spaced all over. I'm sure they will disappear but it's really nice it carries them. They are very good sized birds.

The Tony Albritton Speckled Sussex were a great mix up and I am just now expecting shipment the first of next week. I sure hope they make it.

The 3 Ideal Speckled Sussex I picked up from the Atwood's bin are fine but not particularly spotted, except for one.

The weather is supposed to be a bit dicey with higher chances for severe storms so we'll see how that goes. We've been in the basement once so far this year. Oklahoma has sure had a rough time of it. It's so sad. I can remember 3 times when Moore, OK was blown away.

Notinoz, sorry to hear about your losses. What a bummer.

 

[horsiefly53]

The Ideal feed store chicks - were any of those Speckled Sussex? I've been very interested in the Ideal Speckled Sussex, because I saw an old BYC thread that had them, and they showed a TON of white. So my idea was to order 25 chicks from Ideal, and pick out the most white ones from the group.

But this plan was thwarted, when I ordered them the box arrived with the "extra" chicks already dead (I had been on a waiting list for Speckled Sussex so they were only able to get me 17 chicks and I bought other stuff to try and fill the box for warmth.) They also mistakenly sent me someone else's order of chicks, and those were mostly dead right out the gate. So mine were OK at first, but then they started dying off later. It was a mess!

And so much for my plan to raise up a huge mass of Sussex to pick out the ones with the most white feathering! Sigh.

No, the feed store didn't have any speckled sussex, BUT next year the lady who orders them told me if I wanted any specific types she would order them for me. so planning on making a list first of the year. Bad news about my chicks in the hutch tho. A raccoon came and ate the legs off 5 chicks thru the hardware cloth on the bottom of the cages killing them, except for a 6th that now has one leg. Killed two of my Ameraucanas. a leghorn, a RIR, and a BLW. I was just sick. I hate raccoons so much.

 

[alohachickens]

Horsiefly, that's horrible!!! I'm sick just reading that, ugh. Poor babies!

Deerfield - I'm glad you didn't lose any of the Buff Sussex. As soon as you mentioned losing some, I was like, "Not the buffs not the buffs notthebuffs . . .. . " LOL! We really need those guys to try and lighten up that Mahogany on our Speckled Sussex lines. I wonder, the one chick that showed spotting, do you suppose there was some Speckled Sussex in there or is it just some random thing? Will be interesting to find out.

Deerfield, after you go through everything, let me know how you stand. If you lost too many colorful prospects, maybe we can get you a fall shipment of colorful chicks? Our temps should cool enough to ship again by October. The nice looking chicks that I have running around my yard right now are about 3 months, so that means they will be of breeding age by September/October . . . so you'd be able to take advantage of the latest bloodlines. I still predict size issues, though, until we get the bloodlines of your Buff Sussex or my new Dun Sussex line integrated into the flock.

I need to seriously go over to Derek's and pick through what he has. I leased my horse out for the summer, and this is GREAT news for the chickens, because we are going to convert the barn into a temporary home for all the baby chickens. It's big enough to easily and comfortably grow out 50+ babies, and by that I mean, still giving them 10+ square feet per bird! (No crowding.) Plus it will have total and complete shade. That doesn't guarantee zero losses with our kind of heat, but it will do a lot to help.

The main coop (which is about 20 x 20 feet) will then be used to house two roos (Pumpkin-roo and a 3/4 Swedish roo) plus about 20 of the best hens that I'm keeping. The babies will get the barn. Meanwhile, Stephen will be growing out about 70 chicks of his own up at his place, too.

Our next project out here is to use this GIANT Light Sussex (with Dun neck feathers) and cross him with Stephen's big Meyer Sussex hens and hatch out a nice roo from this cross. The result should help improve size a lot. But, it will be tricky for me to try and breed out that "silver" gene from the Light Sussex. However, he's a huge guy, and if it works will do two things, introduce Dun to the Alohas (fun!) and also improve size a lot in his babies, yay!

 

[notinoz2007]

i havent lost any chicks since i wrote about it here. however, snickerdoodle, my oldest and best aloha hen died yesterday. i honestly cant say for sure what happened. it could have been the heat, it could have been the rooster, or maybe she choked on a cherry that i gave them as snacks one day. i think she was 2.5 years old, i've hatched so many chicks that i dont even know how long i've had her!! but i do know i've had her the longest of them all.
*sigh*
in other news, i have 32 eggs to incubate from my very own stock of layers. this will be the first time i've incubated anything from my breeders, lol.