The Aloha Chicken Project

[alohachickens]

notinoz, that's a really good sized hen. That's so exciting!

Mine are coming up on 18 weeks and some of the NH/AL crosses are bigger than the one Red Star hen I kept. One of them is so big I have trouble telling it apart from my two full NH hens with it's bright red comb. It has white legs and that's the only way I can identify it quickly. I'll try to get some pics of the girls today or tomorrow.

This sounds so promising! Too bad it inherited the pink legs instead of the NHR yellow legs, but at least it did get the size, that's awesome! And it's a carrier for spots at least . . . .

 

[alohachickens]

OK, so here's my update!

I went out of town (AGAIN.) So I was out of town in mid-July, then back in town for like five days, then back out of town for a week last week of July into first week of August. Heat has been horrible in Phoenix (like everywhere else this year) and also my chickies caught some kind of bug floating around out here. That was SO not helping my already stressed out flock! Sneezes, swollen eyes on some. So, for the few days that I was actually in-town, I treated with antibiotics, but my "petsitter" boyfriend is not going to treat sick chickens for me so they were on their own after that for a whole week . . .

Plus, he doesn't work from home like I do, so they were not let out to free range while I was gone. (His dog cannot be trusted alone when we're gone, but she won't try anything while I'm here watching her!) Free-ranging in my yard really helps them in this heat . . . they find the coolest, breeziest, shady spots in the yard and hang out there. Three adult hens died over the last few weeks. Not my pure Swedish, or my big girl Nui or my "pure Aloha" Ginger-girls or Confetti-girls, so we're going to be OK, thank goodness! (Those six hens are the ones I'm most excited about using for breeding in a month or two.) No signs of trauma or major illness on two that died, so possibly just plain old heat stroke? Good weight, good plumage on both. The third adult hen drowned in the horse water trough, which was bizarre. I would have thought she would have been able to climb out? And why she was drinking out of that thing, when her own water bowls were only 15 feet away is beyond me . . . . ???

Also, one more baby Swedish x Aloha died while I was gone, and three have infected eyes now. Today, I took the ones with eye issues and put them in a new cage with more antibiotic water, plus I put special antibiotic eye ointment on their bad eye. (Each has an issue in only one eye, the other is fine.) Weight on two of these babies is less than their siblings, so let's hope they make it. They are not sneezing . . . but their poor body condition tells me they are not doing great, either. I'm going to reapply the ointment tonight when they are sleeping. I hope it hasn't gone so far that they have lost use of their eye on that side! Only time will tell, but two look VERY swollen on one side of the face. Don't know if it's an illness thing or simply debris from one of our famous AZ dust storms that got in their eye and infected it?

Will be watching the babies eagerly for signs of improvement . . . one already looks better just since this morning, but the other two may be too far gone. Hopefully will see some improvement on those two soon. Both are very nice looking hens. (Of course!)

 

[alohachickens]

Interesting note - the first trip I took was work related, but this second trip was actually a trip I *won* in an online sweepstakes to Hawaii! Can you believe that? For real! So I couldn't decide which island, and I let my sister pick, because the hotel chain that sponsored it had rooms in Oahua, Kauai, Maui, or Kona. My sister picked Kauai.

Now, I knew that Hawaii had "wild" (er, feral) chickens on it. I've seen a few on the Big Island and on Maui. But, I had no idea that the Kauai wild chickens would look SO MUCH like my Aloha chickens!!! I'm so excited about this, it's just silly!

MORE photos of Kauai wild chickens are coming soon . . . my sister had a really good quality camera so I let her take most of the chicken pics, and she's going to upload them to a shared web site soon, so my other sister (who came with us) and I can pick whatever we want of her photos to save for ourselves. These pictures are just my poor-quality pics shot with my cheapo digital camera at sites where my sister wasn't around.

The leg color of these wild chickens was pink, yellow, or gray. Many of them shared not only the Aloha mottling but the small size, and the jaunty little "fan tails" that I love on some hens. (Compared to tails of many farm breeds, who have downward-sloping tails, these happy hen tails stick up above their backs.) In fact, you could have slipped ANY of my "old stock" Alohas in with these, and they would have been totally impossible to tell apart from the wild Kauai stock!

Here is my fave, which my lousy camera could not capture well at all:










Moderately mottled hen up in a tree:






Cute solid colored hen with "fantail" feeding some babies. Note yellow legs on her chicks.

The minority were mottled, the majority solid brown or black, but I'd say about one in eight or one in ten did display mottling!

REAL live Aloha chickens! They do exist! Ha ha ha ha!

 

[notinoz2007]

UNBELIEVABLE!!!

ok, congrats on the trip but i have to tell you when i started work the music teacher was wearing a shirt from his trip to Kauai, it said something like just clucking around the island so i asked him if there was a chicken on the back of it, (cuz i thought that was a weird saying) then he told me all about the wild chickens and yes his shirt had an awesome rooster on it! he said he got 3 shirts for $10 and they all have chickens. so then i told him about the aloha chickens you started. it was such a fun conversation. and now i have my husband convinced that we are going to hawaii someday.

edited to say i just started work last week, what interesting timing...

 

[alohachickens]

I was in chicken heaven in Kauai, picking up so much "chicken swag" it was awesome! Got two car stickers featuring chickens, a chicken t-shirt for my boyfriend, chicken postcards, and two chicken mugs (one for me and one for a friend.) They had stuffed chickens, wood chickens, chicken ball caps (cute but too expensive) and a few t-shirts but all men's styles, and I like shorter women's t-shirts or v-neck tees, and none of those featured chickens, darn it! Saw a cool chicken bottle opener but I don't drink beer so that was out. (If it had been a wine opener, different story, ha ha.) I really wish they had chicken key chains, but I couldn't find any.

Just checked the babies out there and re-applied the ointment. The one that was looking good earlier is looking even better, but no improvement on the other two. Well, I'll treat with the ointment and oral antibiotics in the water for a full three days and see what happens . . . but the ointment worked so fast on one baby chicken, I was really hoping I'd see something start to improve on the two hens. Poor babies, it may have just gone on too long, with me being out of town!

 

[alohachickens]

Finally seeing some results on the swollen eye baby hens. One is looking noticeably better, and I think she's going to be fine! The other still looks pretty horrible, so we'll see how she does tonight.

Also, I'm gearing up for a MAJOR culling of the Swedish x Aloha babies. Unfortunately, it looks like the same story all over again! Here I hatch out 30+ chicks, and so far I'm seeing maybe three really top-notch hen prospects. I'm finding flaws in about everyone right now. Here's photos of the more promising ones, I have three Mille hens with yellow legs, I think? (One may have pink legs but they move around in a big bunch so it's hard to see.)






(sorry it's so blurry)

This one hen is smaller, and probably has too much black, but she's still flashy so she's staying to grow out:



Her legs are pink but that's still better than grey, so OK . . . . we'll see how she turns out?



I'm pretty sure this is a hen? Decent size. Lots of spots. There is also one hen in the "swollen eye" pen who is now improving that I'd love to grow out, if she can make it through. She is a very unusual "pink" color that is hard to describe. So that's it, I think . . . ? Three really nice looking Mille hens, a smaller colorful hen, this brown hen with white spots, (assuming it's not a rooster in disguise) and the "pink" hen if she can recover. Maybe 5 hens total, to grow out? Six at most?

The rest of the hens are small, too dark, don't show spotting, show too little spotting, and/or have grey legs. A frustratingly large amount of the hens have gray legs, about five total. Strangely, none of the roos have gray legs. (Of course.)

On to the roos! So, I'm looking for features on the roos that say "Hey, I'm not a Swedish Flower!" Something new in their color or pattern?

This guy has a LOT of white. I know Swedish roos have more white than Speckled Sussex roos, but this is WAY more. Frustratingly, he has pink legs, not yellow, but oh well:




His buddy here will also be grown out, because he appears to have way less black than a normal Swedish roo. Just a bit of black on the tail, but otherwise only brown and white mottling.



I've had my eye on this guy for a while, too. Lots of white. No barring. Very little black. I wonder how much white he's going to keep as he matures? Wish he had yellow legs!



I'm not sure if this guy is the same rooster as up top? There are a lot of 'em in there, it's possible that I have two "Confetti" half-Swedish roos.

So, I'll probably end up culling the vast majority of these in the next few days. I'll keep maybe five roos to add to the five or six hens, and grow those out for a while. If I end up with two roos and four hens, I'll still be happy with this hatch!

 

[alohachickens]

Just for fun, these are photos of my four PURE SWEDISH FLOWER chicks when they were (about) the same age:







NOT ALOHAS - SWEDISH. Just for comparison to the above pics!

Later pix of the same Swedes:





You can see that like the Cheeto babies, these pure Swedes lost a lot of white as they matured. So, the more white the better on this batch of half Alohas, half Swedish!

 

[normanack]

Howdy,
I love your Aloha chicken project, and drop in now and then to check out your gorgeous birds.

I'm no expert by a long shot, but I did notice a discussion about swollen chicken faces/eyes on (I think, bad memory here ) the Old Timer's thread "Chickens for 10 - 20 years or more". Somebody there massaged the bird's sinuses to clear it out.

 

[alohachickens]

Photos of the whole group before I cull a bunch of them:






A pair of roos that will be culled. The one on your left has a blue tail, and I don't feel like messing with that gene right now if I can avoid it. (Not a problem if you want to mess with Blue, but will make culling out black easier for me if I avoid it for the moment.) The one on the right has nice yellow legs, but he shows less white and too much black. Probably some Sussex in him?

 

[alohachickens]

Howdy,
I love your Aloha chicken project, and drop in now and then to check out your gorgeous birds.
I'm no expert by a long shot, but I did notice a discussion about swollen chicken faces/eyes on (I think, bad memory here ) the Old Timer's thread "Chickens for 10 - 20 years or more". Somebody there massaged the bird's sinuses to clear it out.

I'll go check it out, thanks!