The Moonshiner's Leghorns

[KF0002]

Ya 3 buffs but there was 7 eggs so....
But ya happy for any that hatch. They'll add up.
I don't have any lavender gold just lavender silver DW.
The silver DW pen is a single gene (I think) barred blue silver DW over barred silver DW (silver crele) girls. So ya there's gonna be variations depending on blue or not and SF or DF barring or no barring.
The chicks from those 2 pens can easily get mixed up so I'm hatching in completely different hatchers.

3 is better than none. Hopefully you will end up with plenty to work with to keep the line going.

 

[KF0002]

What do you get when you cross a night shifter with a day shifter?

Me.

It’s gonna be a long day at clinical ya’ll.

 

[NagemTX]

I woke up at 5am and a thought occurred to me as I was trying to go back to sleep. My Legbars can’t be silver. Their chick phenotype has never looked silver, whether pure or crossed. Even split silver/gold duckwing chicks will hatch looking silver so that can’t be it. Sorry to keep beating a dead horse, it is just frustrating to want an answer and not be able to find one.

So the Legbars are not Silver/Gold Duckwing based Crele.

And they do not have the autosomal recessive Ig gene like typical Legbars have as a diluter.

So what causes the dilution of gold in their hackle/saddle?

All of the Legbar/Leghorn chicks looked the same at hatch. Like Gold Duckwings because they are all gold duckwing based single barred crele. And they all are looking diluted in their hackles as they feather out.

View attachment 4149408View attachment 4149496

There, I’m done. I won’t talk about it anymore.

It's not dead until it's solved.

 

[The Moonshiner]

I understand how frustrating that is, and despite hatching for literally over 20 years, I had a horrible time hatching turkey eggs when I first started out with them. Like no joke, I was getting about a 0-10% hatch rates with my first few sets. It was not nutritional, the birds were prime breeding age, they were not closely related and some completely unrelated, and fertility was 90-100% so the toms were doing their jobs. It forced me to nail everything down to a science in order to get poults to hatch. I had to buy new hygrometers (I love Govees that you can use to monitor temp/humidity with your phone). That is when I started doing a modified dry incubation and it has been a game changer, not just with turkey eggs but also chicken eggs.

But sometimes, no matter what you do, some breeds/varieties just don’t hatch well. We set a few clutches of eggs from a certain pair of birds this year and ZERO of those eggs hatched. It is due to a number of reasons, mainly the hen isn’t a spring chicken anymore and it getting up in years, and the line has just been kept pure and uninfused with fresh blood for so long, we had to infuse it with another line to try to salvage it. That may not be your case though if your birds aren’t older or the gene pool is bigger.

I store eggs in a spare turner as I collect them for the incubator so you can’t turn them too much I don’t think. And I think the sportsman turns every hour. But if the eggs are developing all the way to lockdown and then failing to hatch, it is likely a genetics issue at play or humidity. Usually too high of humidity will affect my hatch rates, and as long as you don’t incubate below 20% humidity, too low of humidity is probably not the issue. If it has been humid there, high ambient humidity may be causing the humidity in the incubators to be too high, even when running them dry. I would monitor the humidity in the rooms and in the incubators with some Govees. I get mine on Amazon. I have heard of people having to run a dehumidifier in the room with the incubator because their ambient humidity is high, so with as much rain as you have had, that could be possible.

The Govees are the main reason I got away from even watching humidity.
Someone recommended them and I saw others had them. I bought one. I liked it. Liked how small it was and that you could just toss it in and track from phone.
I decided to buy another 3 pack. Just to use in all the hovabator hatchers but to also spread around in my pepsi-bator to see how different the humidity may be from top to bottom.
I quickly realized none matched each other. I didn't like the idea of having to calibrate them but you could so that's what I did. I don't know how many times I did the salt test to get each one of them correct.
I put them back to work and figured things would be good but mine never held steady. Often I put all four of them side by side in one of the hatchers or on the dresser and I'd be lucky if two matched. It just seemed like constant recalibrating them. Honestly at this point I don't even know where they're at.
I don't know I might give them another shot and get some more but I might find a different brand.

 

[NagemTX]

I'm using these. They seam to work good. I just make sure the tem matches the thermostat of the ac and humidity matches the boreomter I have in the house.

https://www.amazon.com/Hygrometer-T...TY4CS35&psc=1&ref_=pd_bap_m_grid_dv_rp_0_23_i

 

[KF0002]

The Govees are the main reason I got away from even watching humidity.
Someone recommended them and I saw others had them. I bought one. I liked it. Liked how small it was and that you could just toss it in and track from phone.
I decided to buy another 3 pack. Just to use in all the hovabator hatchers but to also spread around in my pepsi-bator to see how different the humidity may be from top to bottom.
I quickly realized none matched each other. I didn't like the idea of having to calibrate them but you could so that's what I did. I don't know how many times I did the salt test to get each one of them correct.
I put them back to work and figured things would be good but mine never held steady. Often I put all four of them side by side in one of the hatchers or on the dresser and I'd be lucky if two matched. It just seemed like constant recalibrating them. Honestly at this point I don't even know where they're at.
I don't know I might give them another shot and get some more but I might find a different brand.

I have some acu-rite thermometers/hygrometers too and I like those probably better than the Govees because they have always been the most accurate. I use one of those in my Sportsman and one in the incubator room to monitor temp/humidity in there. I just like being able to see them on my phone with the Govees, and the Govees have been fairly close, within -+5 points of what the Acu-rite ones are so far.

 

[KF0002]

It's not dead until it's solved.

Thank you for your dedication to this saga. lol

I mentioned to the admin of the genetics group about the chick phenotypes of the pure Legbars and F1 Legbar/Leghorn crosses not ever appearing silver at hatch. I also included pictures of pure chicks and the F1 crosses, and she said it is possible another dilution gene like Cb is at play, which is my conclusion also. She said she isn't familiar with how Cb affects a bird's phenotype by itself without other genes at play.

It makes me feel better that she agrees that another diluter gene is possible. So at least I don't feel crazy. I'm not sure where the Cb came from in the Golden Crele Legbar line, but it's definitely there and I may experiment with it some. So we shall see.

 

[The Moonshiner]

I have some acu-rite thermometers/hygrometers too and I like those probably better than the Govees because they have always been the most accurate. I use one of those in my Sportsman and one in the incubator room to monitor temp/humidity in there. I just like being able to see them on my phone with the Govees, and the Govees have been fairly close, within -+5 points of what the Acu-rite ones are so far.

Not gonna lie the phone app was pretty cool in the beginning. You know redneck discovers technology thing.
With mine each sensor is like a different page. I had to cluck back then click on the different sensors and go through each one.
In the end I guess I'm too much of a simple guy. Easier to just walk over there and read the digital display on each.
but now that I wrote that I may be more behind then I thought. All my thermometers I use now that I purchased are dial thermometers.

 

[KF0002]

Not gonna lie the phone app was pretty cool in the beginning. You know redneck discovers technology thing.
With mine each sensor is like a different page. I had to cluck back then click on the different sensors and go through each one.
In the end I guess I'm too much of a simple guy. Easier to just walk over there and read the digital display on each.
but now that I wrote that I may be more behind then I thought. All my thermometers I use now that I purchased are dial thermometers.

There was a spell when I was having chicks hatch early in the sportsman on day 19-20, and a couple in one season were born with partially unabsorbed yolk sacs when I very rarely encounter that. I worried it was because the temp was too high, causing the chicks to hatch prematurely before they got their yolk fully absorbed. I got the Govees to monitor the temp closer. I found that the set temp of 100.0 was too high and it was ranging all the way up to 100.8-101 at times, so I lowered it down to 99.5 and that fixed the issue.

 

[WallyG74]

Love redneck ingenuity. Introducing the hillbilly helper truck step.....
View attachment 4145903
The rope looks like it runs up to where the seat belt attaches. Once safely seated he used the rope to fish the crate up to him then tossed it into the back seat.

Pure genius!