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Given those experiences, I can see why you are avoiding hatchery chicks. My own experiences have been very different. Over several decades of time, I have ordered from at least 6 different hatcheries, with multiple orders from some of them. I have never had an experience as bad as you...

That sounds like a reason to avoid vaccinated chicks, not all hatchery chicks. The hatcheries I have looked at are selling unvaccinated chicks, unless you specifically choose vaccination and pay extra for it. So getting unvaccinated hatchery chicks does not seem difficult.

Bluebeard? (He is not blue and he has no beard, but it sounded good to me anyway.)

My thoughts: If "extremely game" means that the males fight each other, and kill each other if given a chance, then it sounds like a nuisance to manage them. Roosters that will just spread apart and co-exist on free range would make management easier. I can see why you want all the other...

That's an interesting possibility. The way you state it there, it fits nicely with what you have observed. But the internal worms and the lack of grit also sounded quite plausible when you explained them, and I think there was a possibly-toxic plant as well. Maybe you have more than one thing...

Oh, very different plant! Yes, yours would have trouble with cold weather. I think of them as a kind of tomato, so it didn't occur to me that someone might call them "currants," any more than I would call other tomatoes "cherries" or "grapes." I was talking about the woody bush things that grow...

I wouldn't be too concerned about the currants. They tend to be quite cold hardy. I know someone who had currant bushes in Alaska for 20+ years. They spent all winter buried in snow, with the ground around their roots frozen. They also went through multiple freeze/thaw cycles in the fall and...

When someone shares a thing I have never heard of, I like to understand how it works. I've learned some useful things that way. So I would definitely be interested in understanding more about what you said, of coconut oil killing worms and other parasites and boosting egg production. If the...

Do you think they might fare better if you let broody hens raise them on range from their very first day? That way they could learn about the hazards from her, instead of learning it later by trial and (fatal) error. Of course, there's the chance that you would just lose them sooner that way...

I agree, the odds should be 50/50 for pea and single comb when Pp breeds pp. Ratios can be really off when you have just a few chicks (like when 4 chicks come out the same gender as each other), but if you have several dozen chicks from Indo and single comb hens, that should be enough to see...

As long as each generation has at least one pea comb bird that carries single comb, and that bird passes on single comb to a bird in the next generation, it can continue forever. As a practical matter, it is likely that breeding only from birds who show pea comb will eventually yield a line...

I don't feel especially bad about it. I was just acknowledging that I tossed out a suggestion without thinking through the details very well (not a big problem in this case, but something I should watch out for when I make suggestions to inexperienced people, who may not see the problems for...

Yes, that is definitely a concern. I probably didn't think it through well enough before mentioning it.

I wonder if you could affect that by providing some greens in their pens before you let them loose-- either safe ones so they can learn that THESE ones are good, or maybe some of the saltbush so they can have a mild bad experience with it, and will know to avoid it when you do turn them loose.

I agree that's the only way to know for sure. But since we do know that the usual Oocyan mutation is linked to the pea comb locus, a few generations of test matings with pea comb birds could give some indications. If the blue egg gene she has is linked to her not-pea comb, it's more likely to...

That would select in favor of winter laying (which always sounds good to me, but I don't know if you want that in your flock or not.)

Are you trying to avoid blue eggs, or are you also trying to avoid the other genes they might bring to the project? Because if you just want to avoid blue eggs, you could check the egg color of each pullet and use any of them that lay the correct color. The blue is caused by a dominant gene...

Or it could be both. Maybe some gene makes the bird more sensitive to incubation conditions :idunno

Pea comb is caused by one dominant gene, and you can probably tell which birds have one copy vs. two copies of the gene, so it's not too hard to get rid of. The birds who are pure for pea comb will have a smaller comb and smaller wattles than the ones split pea/single. So it shouldn't be too...