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.
