The Legbar Thread!

[miohippus]

i love crested birds and blue eggs i am very excited to find this breed i would love to have some but i don't have enough room in my coop right now; so i will have to weigh a while before i can get some.

 

[lonnyandrinda]

Hi miohippus and welcome! Good to see you over here from the Okie thread. Hope you can get into Cream Legbars soon, they are an amazing breed!

 

[miohippus]

Hi miohippus and welcome! Good to see you over here from the Okie thread. Hope you can get into Cream Legbars soon, they are an amazing breed!

Thanks, i hope so too they look amazing, i can hardly wait. i would expand my run if i could but not very good at that kind of thing my DH is but he is way to busy right now to fix it for me and he thinks i have enough chickens already lol.

 

[flyingmonkeypoop]

So out of this hatch of legbars, a perfect example of my luck- 10 cockerels, 2 pullets. I have only sold 2 cockerels so far because of other issues that were showing early on like huge, hideous floppy combs and such. The others I haven't gone through yet, I am keeping all of my legbars so far just so I can go over them all and keep the best birds for the traits I am wanting. I am done hatching my rose comb legbars for the season and now just focusing on my pure birds from line A, C, and a flock that mixed their birds. I also picked up 2 cockerels from a local lady at the farmers market, she has no clue what line they are from but I figure they are distant enough from mine to be of use. They have a different body than my birds of the same age, these new ones are more loose feathered and rock-like but they are all still young

 

[newtwinmom]

Hi everyone! I just picked up my first two CCLs! I chose the breed for their looks and, of course, the beautiful eggs. I purchased them from a breeder in the Dallas area. A few questions though...

These chicks are TINY. I mean LITTLE! They are half the size of my EE and dottie chicks. Is this normal for the breed?

Also, I picked them straight off the hatcher tray and was not impressed with the egg color they came from. It was pale blue at best, really a tinted white. Is there any hope these girls will give me a pretty blue egg?

Thanks!

 

[TwoBit]

Welcome!
As to the size... My chicks were a little smaller then my Barred Rocks but not much. The color of the eggs..the temperature of the incubator can effect the color. So you could expect your girls to lay a bit darker than what you saw in the incubator.

 

[GaryDean26]

I am not sure what to say about the size. How old were you Wyandotte & Ester Eggers when you got them. If you got them at the feed store or shipped then they would have been 3 days to a week old before you got them. Chickens do a lot of growing in the first 3-8 days.

As far as the egg color goes, the Cream Legbars breed used Leghorns as one of the main breeds to build in its creation. The Leghorns have a white egg gene (name?) that seems to absorb some of the color in the shell. In general the egg color of the Cream Legbar is described more as a Power Blue, Pastel Blue, or Sky Blue. It will be the darkest at the beginning of the laying cycle. Many of my hens egg color fades over time. Other who have been working with blue egg layers (or any colored egg layer, brown, etc.) longer than me might have more information, but I think rate of production and egg size are a factor in how quickly the eggs fade. To improve egg color trap nesting to monitor and select the best producers over a multiple seasons are required. There seems to be a bit of variation of egg color in the U.S. lines so you will probably see a range of color saturation in your group of pullets.

 

[newtwinmom]

I hatched my last set of chicks and these are less then half the size they were on day one. Glad to hear about the egg color! I bought these to go under a broody that wouldn't break (only way I was gonna talk DH into more chickens, lol) and planned on putting them back with the flock in a few days. Due to their size, I feel as though I'm going to have to alter the nest box to reduce the side wall height and keep them in the private tractor longer. Thanks everyone for your help! Hopefully, my broody does her job and Ill be around for a while!

 

[normanack]

I hatched my last set of chicks and these are less then half the size they were on day one.

One of my broodies is raising two chicks, a bantam Silkie/d'Uccle and a (LF) Cream Legbar/Light Sussex. Talk about David and Goliath . . .

 

[lonnyandrinda]

Hi everyone! I just picked up my first two CCLs! I chose the breed for their looks and, of course, the beautiful eggs. I purchased them from a breeder in the Dallas area. A few questions though...

These chicks are TINY. I mean LITTLE! They are half the size of my EE and dottie chicks. Is this normal for the breed?

Also, I picked them straight off the hatcher tray and was not impressed with the egg color they came from. It was pale blue at best, really a tinted white. Is there any hope these girls will give me a pretty blue egg?

Thanks!

Couple of thoughts- as GaryDean26 said, the egg color fades through the season. My CLs that were laying bright blue eggs in March are laying faded blue eggs now. So I wouldn't worry too much about that.

My Cream Legbar chicks are slightly smaller than my Black Copper Marans and Ameraucana chicks, but Cream Legbars are in the "light fowl" size, so that's too be expected. In addition, as these chickens are so rare right now it is very common for people to push to incubate every egg- including pullet eggs- and that, too maybe why your chicks seem so tiny. They should catch up pretty quickly.