The Aloha Chicken Project

[RareBreedFancier]

80 eggs cooking? Congrats! I hope you have little fuzzy butts everywhere soon.

I have a favor to ask, since you know heaps about horse genetics, if I show you a few pics of my pony, can you tell me what color he is? He's a colored Shettie but his pattern is odd, it doesn't fit anything I've read but I don't know a lot about colored horses. I can PM the pics or post them here if you don't mind a little hijack.

 

[Tam'ra of Rainbow Vortex]

Friday we should see the first generation of Oregon Aloha crosses... it's so hard to be patient!
My eggs are all from my buff Orpington ladies and will be either half Aloha, or half Sussex on their father's side, its impossible to say for the time being. I wonder if I will be able to tell as they grow up? I imagine the SS will be bigger than the Aloha, but will the coloring be different as well?
I have some friends who are moving into a new place soon and want chickens, so I will have a good home for all my culled pullets from this hatch by the time I need to rehome them. If they're allowed they even offered to take my buff orp roo who is far to sweet to freezer camp. Huzzah for a backup flock!

Soon everyone will have chickens, and the world will be a better place

 

[RareBreedFancier]

I'm thinking you should be able to tell the half sussex by color too, Speckled Sussex have the Mahogany gene so the offspring should be red rather than buff.

 

[notinoz2007]

my chicks are coming along beautifully (literally) and i get so many people commenting on the colors. its a lot of fun and is sparking a lot of interested in my circle of friends. most people dont even ask how i'm doing anymore, they just ask about the chicks, lol.
i spend time with them every day but have 1 (possibly roo) that is very skittish, and i have 2 that i swear got all the banty genes from their original ancestor. they are less than half the size of my others now. so tiny, and able to escape the chain link run.

 

[alohachickens]

Send me a PM and I'd be happy to help! I'm generally crazy-good at figuring out horse genes.

80 eggs cooking? Congrats! I hope you have little fuzzy butts everywhere soon.

I have a favor to ask, since you know heaps about horse genetics, if I show you a few pics of my pony, can you tell me what color he is? He's a colored Shettie but his pattern is odd, it doesn't fit anything I've read but I don't know a lot about colored horses. I can PM the pics or post them here if you don't mind a little hijack.

 

[alohachickens]

Tam'ra -

Okay - little bit confused here - as to who is in your breeder pen?

Are there "only" Buff Orp hens, in with a Sussex rooster + an Aloha rooster? (Two roosters, in with a pen of Buffs) or is it Buff Orp hens + Aloha hens, in with a Sussex rooster? Let me know, I'm curious! (Pics?) I should be able to help you out on telling you what they'll look like, with just a bit more info.

About the Sussex/Orp crosses, those have been done before. A gal on here was working on a "Jubilee Orp" project (before they recently imported those - much as I was working on Alohas right before Greenfire imported Swedish Flowers.) Jubilees were/are a Sussex spot pattern on an Orp. Only available in the UK until very, very recently. So she was trying to "make" them here in the US.

For her project, she crossed Orp hens with a Sussex rooster. All the resulting hens looked like Sussex as chicks, striped as babies with spots on the wings, but the stripes and spots faded out at adulthood. When grown, the hens were solid light brown. Very pretty! There was absolutely no hint that the Mottling gene was back there in their pedigree. They were super uniform, too, no variations.

I emailed for more photos to see what happened if/when she crossed those babies together (would the spots come back?) but didn't hear anything. I wonder how they turned out on the second generation?

I am SO excited to see your chicks, Tam'ra!!!

Friday we should see the first generation of Oregon Aloha crosses... it's so hard to be patient!
My eggs are all from my buff Orpington ladies and will be either half Aloha, or half Sussex on their father's side, its impossible to say for the time being. I wonder if I will be able to tell as they grow up? I imagine the SS will be bigger than the Aloha, but will the coloring be different as well?
I have some friends who are moving into a new place soon and want chickens, so I will have a good home for all my culled pullets from this hatch by the time I need to rehome them. If they're allowed they even offered to take my buff orp roo who is far to sweet to freezer camp. Huzzah for a backup flock!

Soon everyone will have chickens, and the world will be a better place

 

[alohachickens]

my chicks are coming along beautifully (literally) and i get so many people commenting on the colors. its a lot of fun and is sparking a lot of interested in my circle of friends. most people dont even ask how i'm doing anymore, they just ask about the chicks, lol.
i spend time with them every day but have 1 (possibly roo) that is very skittish, and i have 2 that i swear got all the banty genes from their original ancestor. they are less than half the size of my others now. so tiny, and able to escape the chain link run.

I can't wait to see how they turn out! I wonder about the Banty ones, too - as I've crossed more of the Banty hen's descendants together for several generations, they have tended to get MORE colorful like her . . . but also SMALLER like her, too! Ha ha!

Those ultra-tiny ones? They are probably the babies of Butterscotch, the beautiful orangey rooster. He's a full Aloha and very small. He is lowest in the totem pole, and doesn't get a lot of action because the (larger) rooster Flame chases him off if he tries to jump on one of the girls. However, I have seen Butterscotch slip off behind the barn and get a little action. If he mated with a full Aloha hen in there, his babies could revert back even more to the original "Oddball" the banty. Means those teeny ones are probably packed with all kinds of interesting spots and color genes. The trade off is being too small.

Check the leg color on those tiny chicks - they might be gray? Butterscotch has gray legs. Only a few of mine have gray legs, been trying to breed that trait out, so I think only (maybe) one or two hens, plus Butterscotch, still have gray legs. Butterscotch's orange color was so rare I had to keep him in the program, despite the leg color.

 

[Tam'ra of Rainbow Vortex]

Right now I don't actually have my chickens separated (I know, I'm bad!) I was planning to wait till sping to hatch, but MaBo lives so close to me and he had extra room in his incubator... So I gathered the eggs from the 'project' pen, which currently houses all my sussex, all my Alohas, and most of my buffs.
The moment I decided to save eggs, however, everyone in the 'project' pen stopped laying but the buffs, whose eggs are easy to tell apart from the others because they are larger, rounder, and darker than the others' eggs. So I know who laid them, but the SS rooster and one of the Aloha roosters are vying for top of the pecking order and I just can't tell who's in charge. They seem to have reached an understanding and they coexist eerily well, considering how much terror they rain down on the other roosters. They seem to have no problem with each other mingling with the same hens. Hastur, the Aloha, is much smaller than Crazytail, the Sussex, but Hastur is meaner and he thinks he's big. I have no idea which one of them would win if they really decided to fight.

My plan is to put my SS roo with the Aloha hens, and pair each Aloha roo with either the buffs or the SS so I know for sure who is what. (Should I put one Aloha roo with only buff hens and the other with only SS hens or give each a few of both breeds? What is better?) Building the 3rd breeding pen is a spring project. It's too cold and dark still to be building.

I was really just too excited to see what I would get to wait. MaBo only had 2 hens laying, so he had extra room in the incubator, and I had extra eggs, who could resist?

I will post pics when I can. My internet has been super slow at home and I have no time to post pics at work, but I have some good ones of all my project chickens.

 

[notinoz2007]

Quote: they sure are gray, every time i go to play with the chicks i wonder where these two came from, good to know. my daughter has named them little mr man and the little mrs, lol. we're not sure if they're male or female, but she likes to name them all anyway. the aggressive one that i mentioned before is definitely mellowing out. and i think that one might be a pullet, but only time will tell. i would take some pictures but my camera battery is dead

 

[RareBreedFancier]

Send me a PM and I'd be happy to help! I'm generally crazy-good at figuring out horse genes.

Quote:

Thankies! I shall round up pics and PM you.