Category: Chicks

Posted on by

4 different pullet chicks from a single breeding pen?

Taking care of a multitude of pens can really add to your workload. But, if you are serious about selling chicks, having a variety available will really increase sales. To help with that, you can combine some pens to create more than 1 kind of chick. This takes advantage of colors that are distinguishable at hatch, and also creating desirable hybrids.

Hybrids have some advantages both to the buyer (better overall productivity and vigor) and the seller (buyers need to come back for more, they cannot generally breed their own to the same effect). They can add some complexity to breeding, but once understood, they can reduce the number of breeding pens needed.

I am going to describe a single pen of autosexing breeders that can produce 4 distinct types of pullet chicks. These constitute 4 of my 6 best selling chicks.

  • Cockerels – Silver Welbars that are known to be heterozygous for gold. It can be tricky to determine this unless you know that parentage.
  • Welbar pullets – these can be silver or gold, that will have no effect on the colors of their daughters.
  • Legbar pullets – these can be Cream or Opal (Lavender), but there is no advantage to using Opals over Creams as the resulting chicks look identical.

If you use Gold Welbars and no Silvers as the pullets in this pen, then every Silver cockerel chick (easily identified at hatch) will be heterozygous for gold. For this reason, I usually hold back only gold pullet chicks for next years breeders. If you like silver hens, you can certainly keep them as well, but if you use them in this breeding pen, the cockerels from those hens will all be silver, but only half will be the desired heterozygous for gold. If you use a silver cockerel that is homozygous for silver, every resulting chick will be silver. You can still sex them easily, but you will not have gold chicks to sell from this cockerel. There is a genetic test for the number of copies of the silver gene that a cockerel has. I have not tried that, but it is an option if you do get into this situation.

The Legbars in this pen will lay blue eggs of course, and it is essential that you mark them if you have other blue egg layers, and that you hatch them separately from the Welbar eggs. The blue eggs will hatch into autosexing olive eggers, both silver and gold (assuming the Silver Welbar cockerel is het for gold). You will not be able to tell the olive egger and welbar chicks apart! so hatch and brood them separately. You can use tiny rubber bands, but I find they often fall off. I sell almost all the Olive Egger chicks within a few days, so this is a very temporary problem for me.

These are 4 colors/types of chicks you can hatch from this pen, all autosexing:

  • Gold Welbars (from the dark brown eggs)
  • Silver Welbars (from the dark brown eggs)
  • Gold Olive Eggers (from the blue eggs)
  • Silver Olive Eggers (from the blue eggs)

In the next post, I will explain how a second pen can produce 2 colors of Legbars, to finish out the “big 6” of chick demand.

Posted on by

Shipping day old poultry

I have always had much better results sending and receiving day old poultry than eggs. I now think of buying shipped eggs as mostly flushing money down the toilet. Shipped chicks sometimes fails, I have had a few boxes that were complete losses, and a few with poor survival after delays in shipping, but well over 90% are what I would call “very successful”.

Materials needed:

  • Shipping boxes – unlike eggs, you must have post office approved boxes for day old poultry (really, for any live poultry). These are available from a number of sources
  • Pads/Liners – usually wood excelsior glued to paper or in mats, cut to the proper size for a 25 chick box. Sometimes these come with the boxes, but often not, so check that and see if you need to buy some
  • Grogel – the green stuff that is sold to give chicks a probiotic boost. They readily eat it and it is a good source of water
  • Cups for the Grogel
  • Hole punch for punching holes in the cups (if using tie wraps)
  • Way to attach the cups to the boxes – small tie wraps or hot glue work
  • Packing tape

Boxes are sized by the number of chicks they hold, 25, 50 or 100. Do not buy 100 chick boxes, it is cheaper to ship 2 boxes of 50 chicks each than a single box of 100. Don’t ask me why, the USPS is run by the government, so probably no one has a cogent answer for that. I use both 25’s and 50’s. It is not much more to buy and ship a 50 chick box, so if you ship a lot of chicks, start with those or get both. Here are some sources for shipping boxes. These also have the excelsior pads to use as liners.

Grogel is manufactured by Dawes for commercial use with day old poultry. I use it for all my newly hatched chicks, as well as putting cups of it in the chick shipping boxes. It keeps well if kept in a dry place, and the larger packs are much cheaper per unit. Here are the sources I have used for Grogel:

Cups for the Grogel can be found at Walmart. Tie wraps or hot glue, and packing tape, are commonly available.

Packing

Get the boxes you need folded before the morning you plan to ship. It can be tricky figuring out how to fold them. You can setup the boxes, put in the pads and attach the cups that will hold the gro-gel. The morning you are shipping, mix up enough grogel to fill the cups. I use 2 of the cups in each section (holds 25 chicks). Now you are ready to move in the chicks. If you are using a double box, divide the chicks between the 2 sides. The numbers of chicks varies by their size, ambient temps (fewer chicks when it is hot) and the number purchased. After putting in the chicks, I usually take a pic of the chicks, then put on the top and use packing tape to attach the top. Add the label and write the customer phone number on the top – “Hold and Call XXX-XXX-XXXX”.

Mailing the chicks

This varies a lot between branches, and sometimes you have to train the postal employee how to mail them. I almost always use Priority, not Express. Express is rarely enough faster to justify the much higher costs. There is a $15 surcharge on Priority chick shipments starting in 2025.

Posted on by

Silver gene and autosexing breeds

If you have not read my previous post called “Working with the gold / silver gene”, I recommend reading that first, as this post builds on the concepts of the sexlinked silver gene.

Is it possible to use 2 different sexlinked genes at the same time? Of course! There is no linkage between the silver gene (used for red sexlinks) and the barred gene (used for black sexlinks). This won’t use both genes for sexing, though it is possible to do that (more on that later).

In this example, we will be using autosexing chickens, specifically welbars. The genes needed to make a line of chickens autosexing are 1) wild type chick down (partridge, black breasted red) and 2) sexlinked barring. Some other genes can interfere with autosexing, but some genes are compatible with the autosexing combination. Silver is compatible. Most autosexing breeds are gold-based, for example Legbars and Bielefelders. Welbars are gold-based in their original form, but silver has been added to some lines (though it is still rare). I have heard of the existence of Silver Bielefelders, and I think it would be fairly easy to create a line of Silver Biels if you had a silver Welbar to cross into the Biels.

So, Welbars are well established as autosexing, and available in both silver and gold. They remain easily sexable no matter which silver/gold genes they possess. So you can use the examples in the previous post with Welbars to create a pen that produces both silver and gold chicks. This is great if you are selling chicks, as most customers want some of each color.

If you use a silver pullet and a gold cockerel, you will get red sexlinks, where all the pullet chicks are gold and all the cockerels are silver. This is a fun experiment to prove how sexlink genes work. It does not help if you want to produce more silver pullets, but the cockerels from this cross are heterozygous for gold, so if you cross the F1’s, you will get both gold and silver pullets and cockerels, that are still sexable at hatch (because they are autosexing). This is much better than you can get from the commercial red sexlinks, where the F2 is not sexable at all.

As you build a breeding pen of Welbars to produce both gold and silver pullet chicks, keep in mind that only the genetics of the cockerels matter in regard to the proportion of gold to silver pullet chicks.

  • Gold cock – all pullet chicks are gold
  • Silver cock that is homozygous for silver (no gold gene) – all pullet chicks are silver
  • Silver cock that is heterozygous for silver (1 gold gene) – pullet chicks are about half silver, the rest gold

Best pen for producing salable Welbars chicks

Gold pullet with a Silver cock that is heterozygous for silver. This is a self-sustaining group. When you want to raise replacement breeders, keep gold pullets and silver cockerels. All the silver cockerels from this mating will be heterozygous for gold. If you keep silver pullets in this pen, you might consider separating the best looking gold pullets for a time and raise cockerels only from their eggs. You don’t need many replacement cockerels, so this should be doable.

Posted on by

Working with the gold / silver gene

In chickens, the gene for silver is dominant and sex-linked. Gold is the wild or normal version. This gene is the basis for creating the very popular red sexlinks. To create sexable chicks with this gene, you need a silver female and a gold male. Some white breeds are really silver (Rhode Island Whites, for example) and those will work, but most breeds we think of as white are based on either the dominant or recessive white, and will not work as the female side of the cross (unless the hen is recessive white and silver, but you can easily determine that from the appearance. If a white hen has a pattern, like silver laced) then it is almost always silver. This presents an interesting opportunity for small breeders to create sexable gold-laced breeds (polish, wyandottes, cochins, etc).

Apart from creating sexable chicks, this gene can also be used to produce both silver and gold chicks from a single pen. Doing this requires that you know the genotype of the cock, as his genes control the color of his daughters. If he is heterozygous for silver (looks silver, but has only 1 copy of the silver gene), then about half his daughters will be silver and the rest gold.

The colors of the male chicks is more complicated because the hen’s genes also come into play. If the hens are gold, half of the male chicks will be silver, but have a copy of the gold gene (from their mother), and the rest will be gold (gold gene from each parent). This creates a self-sustaining breeding group as long as you only keep gold pullets to replace their mothers and silver cockerels to replace their father.

If the hens are silver, then all the cockerels will be silver (remember the red sexlinks where all the male chicks are silver since their mother is silver). The pullet chicks will still be half gold (the mother’s genes do not come into play at all with her daughters when it comes to sex-linked genes). Half of the cockerels will carry a gene for gold and half will have 2 copies of silver – but you can’t tell by looking at them.

In this situation, where half the pullet chicks are gold and half silver, it is really most useful if you can also sex the chicks. You can’t use the silver gene to sex them, as you are using that to create the color ratio. Is there another way to color sex them? As it turns out, there is. More on that in the next post.

Posted on by

Locally bred and hatched poultry

Are you concerned that when you buy chicks some might turn out to be roosters? Very disappointing, and in most cases the seller is not going to help you with your problem. You can buy from us with confidence because we breed several different breeds that are easily sexable as chicks, and I will stand behind that by replacing (if I have a suitable replacement pullet) or refunding your money.

We can do this because we use the genetics of chick down color to show the sex of each chick as it hatches. With the autosexing breeds, the difference is substantial, making them sexable as soon as they are hatched. Read about our guarantee here

There are details about each breed we raise in the links above. All chicks will be vaccinated for Marek’s. Please read our page on vaccinations for information about caring for vaccinated chicks. Only chickens get Marek’s, so ducks, turkeys, guineas and quail are not vaccinated.

We try to keep the availability page sort of up to date, but this is a challenge as some go quickly. There is also a waiting list I can add you too, but honestly this is difficult to keep up with as well.

Posted on by

Changes for 2023

Every year I “tweak” the way things are run with chick hatching. Mostly that is getting some new breeds and getting rid of other breeds. In 2023, I am planning to cut back on the numbers of chicks I hatch for sale. Most of my flocks are smaller now and will produce fewer eggs than last year. I want to concentrate more on my genetics work to create new color varieties. For anyone wanting new and unique birds for their flocks, I will often have surplus chicks with great genetic variation.

Breeds that are new in 2023

In 2022, I added several new breeds of chickens, plus my first geese. After expanding my flocks, I should have these to sell in 2023:

  • Ayam cemani – these chickens are almost mythical. All black, and I mean completely black. Their blood is red and their eggs are normal (light brown), but everything else is jet black – eyes, skin,combs,wattles,flesh, even their bones. These are prized for their meat in some Asian cultures, but are really just pet chickens, IMO.
  • Ayam ketawa – the Laughing Chicken. These are close to wild jungle fowl in appearance and behavior. Rooster’s laugh is supposed to sound like laughter. Haven’t found that to be true in my flock yet.
  • True Blue Opal Legbars – Previous years, the Opal Legbar chicks could end up laying light brown eggs instead of blue. Because of breakthroughs in genetic blood tests, I hope to use only roosters with 2 copies of the blue egg gene, guaranteeing that their daughters will lay blue eggs.
  • Sexlinked Ameraucanas in black and lavender – These are the culmination of years of genetic work to overcome the greatest drawback of standard bred Ameraucanas – they are not sexable at hatch. These sexlinks are sexable, and they are pure Ameraucanas. Blacks are easily sexed, lavenders a bit harder, but still sexable at a much younger age than the Ameraucanas I used to sell as straight run only.
  • Sexlinked Olive Eggers – These were new in 2022. What is new this year is that I am using Copper Marans instead of lavender Marans for the black sexlinks. Hopefully that will produce darker green eggs.
  • Lavender Olive Egger project – Unique line of autosexing lavender birds that lay medium brown or olive colored eggs. Project is still not complete, but offering some of these for sale for the first time. They are Welsummers that contain genes for sexlinked barring (making them autosexing) and lavender, as well as some having a copy of the blue egg gene making their eggs dark green.
  • Jumbo Coturnix quail – 2 color varieties and a sexlinked hybrid of the 2 for those interested in raising all females for egg production
  • Shetland ducks – a lightweight egg layer breed that is calmer than the Campbells and Welsh Harlequins I have raised in past years. They are also super rare, so having more people keep flocks of these is a help in conserving them.
  • Hybrid laying ducks – I am taking hints from Metzer’s hatchery. They sell a hybrid duck called a Golden 300. They don’t say what they use to create the hybrid, but looking at the pictures, it seems pretty obvious that they are using Khaki Campbell drakes over Blue or Black Swedish hens. The Campbells are top-notch layers, but much too nervous for my taste. My flock of Shetland ducks are much calmer, more like the Swedish breed, but lighter in weight, and a result, probably better and more efficient layers, so why not use them instead of Swedish? I recently obtained some nice looking Khaki drakes and will be pairing them with some of the Shetland ducks. This will be a new cross, so no track record here, but if you are looking for locally bred laying ducks, I think these may be just the ticket. My goal with this hybrid are ducks that look like, and lay like, pure Khaki Campbells, but have a calmer disposition. Oh, and as a bonus, the ducklings are sex-linked, males will be black and females will be khaki (brown).
  • Pilgrim geese – Autosexing geese. These are medium sized and a very practical breed if you want to try adding geese to your flock. Goslings that are hand reared become deeply imprinted on humans. Geese are often used for protection of other birds. They are large and can be intimidating for the smaller predators.

Breeds that are being retired in 2023

This will be the last year I have these chicks available. I would love to find a local breeder to take over supplying these chicks. Contact me if you are interested.

  • Lavender Marans (keeping Copper Marans)
  • Lavender Cochin bantams (keeping mottled frizzles)
Posted on by

Vaccinating Chicks

Equipment and supplies to vaccinate chicks for Marek’s

This is a reference list for my use, but sharing it with others seems like a great idea as well.

Specialized equipment and supplies

Updated prices as of August 2024. These are the best prices I could find. With shipping considerations you might find some are cheaper at other places.

Other supplies

  • small disposable plastic cups (for mixing partial dose vaccine). I have started using the empty vaccine vials.
  • small tweezers (to section vaccine disk and pull 1 piece out)
  • empty vaccine jar (or similar) with permanent rubber stopper (needed if you do partial doses)
  • small pliers to remove sealing band from vaccine bottle
  • Rubbing alcohol and cotton balls to sterilize the tops of the diluent bottles

Work area

  • well lit and clean
  • absorbent work surface (newspapers or paper towels)

Storage considerations

The vaccine comes with 2 parts:

  • Diluent – 200ml glass bottle. Can be stored at room temperature, but I refrigerate it.
  • The freeze dried wafer with the virus in a small glass bottle – Needs to be stored between 2 and 7 degrees C (35 – 45 degrees F)