I am finally making some headway. I got my breeding pen set up-2 SS roosters, the ones with the most white on them out of 4 that hatched last spring, 2 RIR hens, and 4 NH red hens. I had 6 NH hens and I have no idea what happened to the other two. I have about 100 chickens and they are free range, but there were no bodies or feathers on my property. The only thing I can think of is they go on my neighbor's property sometimes and sometimes her daughter comes over with her dogs that I know have killed some of their animals so something could have happened and they never told me. No more free eggs for them.
My SS hen just hatched 3 chicks (not her eggs). I'll have to wait on pairing her with my splash marans/leghorn rooster til she is done with the chicks and I can find some place to put the two of them. He's used to running around taking care of lots of hens, don't know how he would like it in a small pen.
I made some xtra $ and ordered my Brinsea incubator, which feels kind of silly since I have 6 broody hens here setting on eggs. It has auto turn, etc., but the humidity pump is another $160, so have to wait on that 'til I save up some more $.
A couple things. You mentioned buff orpington, I have one or two of them, should I put them in the breeding pen too?
And have you seen the mille fluer leghorns? I saw them on ebay. I think when I get the incubator where I know I can actually hatch eggs I want to order some.
K, back to drooling over everyone else's Alohas lol.
I had trouble getting spots on Buff Rocks and Buff Orps. Nobody has ever published or said this publicly, but I think there is some weird interaction with the Mottled and Buff (with buff tail) genes. Chicken color experts admit there is something "unknown" about this color, in that, they don't know what gene or genes are responsible for making the tail tip buff as well.
Try sticking with Buff Columbian. I learned the hard way the "all over buff" color is difficult to put spots on. It seems to resist the addition of all white spotting!
Buff Columbian is the yellow color but it has a ring of black around the neck and a black tail tip. It's found here and there in various breeds.
One is the Basque. The Basque could be good to use IF you started with the right chicken, and then bred out the Barring. Barring is the stripes on the feathers, like the Barred Rock has. The problem is it makes the spots of Mottling really hard to see. Plus, it is a Dominant gene, which means, not only does it make spotting hard to see, if you aren't careful, pretty soon ALL your chickens will have it! Some Alohas have Barring but I've tried really hard to push it down so it doesn't take over. You do this by making sure only one parent has barred feathers and never let a barred x barred cross happen.
So if you found a Basque with good mottling and yellow legs, and bred to say, a nicely spotted Sussex, probably all the chicks would be barred (because barring has totally taken over the Basque breed) but all chicks would be mottled, and if the Basque had yellow legs, they would inherit that gene. They would also now carry the Buff Columbian color, except you wouldn't see it that first generation, because the darker Sussex color takes over everything! The chicks would probably be dark brown mottled with stripey feathers and pink feet.
Those chicks, however, would probably be nice and big, and good healthy layers, and bred to the right chicken (like a colorful but small Aloha rooster with yellow legs) could produce nice big spotty yellow-legged chicks, and in the next generation, if Dad wasn't barred, only half the chicks would carry the gene. If you kept only non-barred babies, then you would have 1/4 Basque, 1/4 Sussex, 1/2 Alohas that would be half "big chicken" and really decent size, with mottling, and many with yellow legs.
It would just take a lot of hatching babies to get only the yellow-legged non-barred babies, as the odds would only be one in four. AND then to get ones with nice spotting to boot, and the best size? Basically it's a numbers game, the more you hatch and raise, the better your odds of getting what you want!
The Mille Leghorn are really small, the same size as Alohas, or even smaller. They also have fewer spots than Alohas. I have a few Alohas back there that I'm ready to cull, that ironically look better than those pricey Mille Leghorns! LOL. So they aren't going to improve the Aloha goals.
Right now, I'm leaning towards trying to look in new directions. The Basque sound like good prospects, but like Alohas, they have a lot of variance in type (some have yellow legs, some pink, some have mottling, some don't) so the key would not to use Basque in general, but to find the RIGHT few Basque chickens to use. That's the tricky part!! Same thing with what I'm trying with the Turkens. That breed, in general, is not an ideal choice, but if you found a big yellow one with yellow legs and mottling? That might be another story?
There are probably really nice "mutts" out there that would be perfect for this program as a "base" stock, but you'd have to breed out a few generations to make sure there were no weird things hidden in the background. If I use the Turkens, I could fully expect to cull the offspring back out of the program, if unexpected (and unwanted) genes pop out of the mix. Like wrong colors or breed traits. But sometimes, you don't know if you don't try.
