Cream Legbar rooster questons

[Little Coop on Salt Creek]

Hi everyone!

We are considering adding in a Cream Legbar rooster to add in over our EE hens. They are indeed EE hens and not Ameraucanas.

Our questions are:

1. What is general temperament of the CL rooster?

2. Is our thinking correct that we will get guaranteed blue eggs from that pairing as the EE hen lays blue?

Thank you all for your help!

 

[happyhens1972]

I have a stunning CL cockerel called Tarquin. He is a fabulous cockerel....he looks after his girls extremely well, diligently watching over them, leading them to food, not eating until they have had their fill and keeping a very vigilant eye out for danger. He gets an absolute 10 out of 10 for doing his job. He can be aggressive if provoked...I recently had a rat issue which led to one of the girls being injured. I had to treat her on a daily basis with antibiotics and painkillers and he began attacking me when I tried to pick her up. Again, he was just doing his job, as he should, but he hurt me more than once. I had to pin him to the floor to show him who was boss and this was pretty effective.....he seemed to 'learn his place' but he now frequently fluffs up his hackles at me and does a bit of a fake 'charge' as a warning not to touch his girls and whilst it is no problem to me, I wouldn't trust him at all with kids, for example.

If you get a CL cockerel and you want to guarantee blue eggs from his progeny, your girls need to be laying consistently blue eggs and you need to know that he came from a good blue egg himself as many CLs are 'diluted' and not to standard, laying olive eggs instead of blue.

 

[azygous]

I got some Cream Legbars around five years ago, and one turned out to be a cockerel. I know. It shouldn't have happened because the chicks are auto-sex. I named him Strawberry, and when he came into his hormones, he did so with a couple other accidental cockerels which were Marans (also auto-sex but MPC really messed up two consecutive orders of pullets.)

Anyway, the Marans were sex-crazed anti-aircraft missiles, and Strawberry could mate a hen right next to me and there would be no squawking, feathers flying, or drama of any sort. He's been the kind of rooster that has never needed any guidance or discipline whatsoever. Five years later, he's still a perfect gentleman.

His son, Toots, is a different matter. Toots is from Strawberry, a pure Cream Legbar and an EE hen. He's beautiful and looks a lot like an EE roo except for lack of muffs and he has the CLB crest.

Toots doesn't have the gentlemanly regard for the hens his daddy has, but he's still well behaved and has never been the least human aggressive. In fact, his only flaw is that he refuses to listen to a hen that is trying to refuse his advances, in fact, he will give chase and not give up until she submits. He definitely has the wear-her-down-wear-her-out technique that his daddy simply has never had.

Toots, however, is a perfect protector, as is Strawberry. They will always be on sentry duty as the hens dirt bathe or are scratching up bugs. In fact, the two roosters saved the entire flock from two renegade dogs that swooped in to attack the flock. The roosters led the dogs a merry chase at risk to their own lives, disappearing with the dogs. I had resigned that they were lost or dead. They surprised me by showing up the next morning with badly frost bitten combs from being out all night in sub-freezing temps.

The female offspring from Strawberry have all been blue egg layers since they were eggs from blue egg layers. But I think that it's the rooster that carries the gene for blue eggs so it may not matter what breed you would mate him to. I could be wrong since I'm not a genetics expert. I'm willing to be corrected.

 

[Little Coop on Salt Creek]

I got some Cream Legbars around five years ago, and one turned out to be a cockerel. I know. It shouldn't have happened because the chicks are auto-sex. I named him Strawberry, and when he came into his hormones, he did so with a couple other accidental cockerels which were Marans (also auto-sex but MPC really messed up two consecutive orders of pullets.)

Anyway, the Marans were sex-crazed anti-aircraft missiles, and Strawberry could mate a hen right next to me and there would be no squawking, feathers flying, or drama of any sort. He's been the kind of rooster that has never needed any guidance or discipline whatsoever. Five years later, he's still a perfect gentleman.

His son, Toots, is a different matter. Toots is from Strawberry, a pure Cream Legbar and an EE hen. He's beautiful and looks a lot like an EE roo except for lack of muffs and he has the CLB crest.

Toots doesn't have the gentlemanly regard for the hens his daddy has, but he's still well behaved and has never been the least human aggressive. In fact, his only flaw is that he refuses to listen to a hen that is trying to refuse his advances, in fact, he will give chase and not give up until she submits. He definitely has the wear-her-down-wear-her-out technique that his daddy simply has never had.

Toots, however, is a perfect protector, as is Strawberry. They will always be on sentry duty as the hens dirt bathe or are scratching up bugs. In fact, the two roosters saved the entire flock from two renegade dogs that swooped in to attack the flock. The roosters led the dogs a merry chase at risk to their own lives, disappearing with the dogs. I had resigned that they were lost or dead. They surprised me by showing up the next morning with badly frost bitten combs from being out all night in sub-freezing temps.

The female offspring from Strawberry have all been blue egg layers since they were eggs from blue egg layers. But I think that it's the rooster that carries the gene for blue eggs so it may not matter what breed you would mate him to. I could be wrong since I'm not a genetics expert. I'm willing to be corrected.

So would the offspring from that mating pair, CL over EE, be considered an EE then?

 

[azygous]

No, it would be a "mix".

 

[GaryDean26]

I have a stunning CL cockerel called Tarquin. He is a fabulous cockerel....he looks after his girls extremely well, diligently watching over them, leading them to food, not eating until they have had their fill and keeping a very vigilant eye out for danger. He gets an absolute 10 out of 10 for doing his job. He can be aggressive if provoked...I recently had a rat issue which led to one of the girls being injured. I had to treat her on a daily basis with antibiotics and painkillers and he began attacking me when I tried to pick her up. Again, he was just doing his job, as he should, but he hurt me more than once. I had to pin him to the floor to show him who was boss and this was pretty effective.....he seemed to 'learn his place' but he now frequently fluffs up his hackles at me and does a bit of a fake 'charge' as a warning not to touch his girls and whilst it is no problem to me, I wouldn't trust him at all with kids, for example.

If you get a CL cockerel and you want to guarantee blue eggs from his progeny, your girls need to be laying consistently blue eggs and you need to know that he came from a good blue egg himself as many CLs are 'diluted' and not to standard, laying olive eggs instead of blue.

I have worked with dozens of Legbar cockerels. I have small children and the two breeding cocks that I have right now are non-aggressive. My 4-year-old can go into their run and collect eggs or pick up the hens, etc. without our cocks being concerned in the slightest way. That has NOT be the case with all the Legbar cockerels we have owned. When we started with the breed back in 2012 we worked with five cockerels in the first year that were all varying degrees of aggressive. The worst one would flog you every time you went into the chicken run if you didn't have a rooster pole in your hand to gently place on his breast to keep him out of striking distance. The more mild ones would only flog you if you picked up a hen from his flock and she started squawking in distress. Every year after that, we have grown out enough cockerels that we could be really choosy and have culled any cockerel that has been aggressive and only worked with non-aggressive cockerels. This has worked well. I don't think we have seen an aggressive cockerels in about 5 years. Temperament is less of a breed things and more of a function of the individual cockerel's personality and how you work with / train him. About the same goes for every breed of chickens out there. Some will be aggressive and some won't. Culling aggressive cockerels can breed the tendency out of a line. Crossing lines or breeding aggressive cockerels brings it into a line.