Recent content by Slothinc

I guess I’m wondering if it’s possible to tell the difference between sun bleached black and chocolate from just looking? Or do you have to know the genetics?

Hello! I have this silkie hen (she doesn’t really look like a hen because she has no crest, but she does lay eggs!) and I have always just assumed she was a sun bleached black. But I was looking at her today wondering if she might actually be chocolate. Especially next to my black chicks. In the...

I am still having a very hard time trying to tell 😂😂

Oh they are so cute! And that is such an amazing surprise to get silkied chicks out is smooth birds! What a fun project!! I was going to take a pic of my silkied frizzle guy but someone came yesterday afternoon to take some of my cockerels off of my hands (they are incredibly hard to get rid of...

Incredible that all 12 are developing!! So excited to follow along!!! 💕

If just looking for something super simple, I would only mark one gender (either all the males or all the females) then you know the unmarked are one gender and the marked are the other. I would probably use zip ties and change them every couple of weeks. But even just a permanent marker stripe...

By the way, I haven’t gotten a single one of these eggs with the watery air cells to hatch, but I have set all of them just in case!! Some of them start to develop but they all end up quitting somewhere in the first couple of weeks. Now if the air cell is still in tact but just a little bit...

This year I have gotten a whole lot of shipped eggs and MOST of the eggs have had that “air bubble” instead of an intact air cell. I call it a watery air cell but yes it is basically just a bubble with no membrane around it to keep it in tact. This has been happening in the eggs shipped to me...

So did you end up with silkied birds out of your smooth birds? That is so awesome so the roo and hens must have been carrying the silkies feather gene! Did any of those end up having the frizzle gene as well? I have a silkie with the frizzle gene and the feathers are kind of weird. I’m going to...

Oh my goodness isn’t he just gorgeous!!! I hope I don’t get this surprise in a couple of weeks with my am bantam babies! Fingers crossed that your last chick is a lovely female!!!

That is so exciting!!!!!! Fingers crossed for the rest of those eggs to keep hatching!!!!

Oooh please keep us posted on how that goes! Also I think that is a great idea - I had some eggs not develop under the Broodies when I put them under right away. Then after several days realized the air sacs were very jiggly. After being in the incubator for several days, you can make sure that...

I had the same question with my girls - whether or not they would stay broody! The two nicer hens had been broody already for several weeks before I got these shipped eggs. Then it turns out that they broke themselves like 2-3 days before the eggs hatched (because I had another not so nice hen...

Well, I think my incubator is trash. The one egg I kept in the incubator the entire time quit early (around day 19-20 if I had to guess) which is what happened with all my chicks the last round of incubation. The 4-6 eggs that made it far in incubation all quit between 17-21 days. Now I didn’t...

Your idea of using a male silkie over females of the blue egg breeds is very smart, as I recently found out that fibro Roos over light skinned hens create sex linked offspring, with the females retaining the dark skin. So that is a great starting place in my opinion.