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  1. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    For the lighter colored one, her chicks (especially daughters) are likely to be darker than herself. Either she's got genes to make red shades into lighter tan shades, or else she's got the silver gene (will be inherited by her sons but not her daughters, because the gold/silver genes are on the...
  2. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    Is that for color reasons?
  3. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    I tend to solve that problem by chopping the meat into small pieces. If I had a meat grinder, I might use that instead. (I make stock first, then after the meat falls off the bones, I chop it small and use that too.)
  4. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    Too old to eat? Would that be a matter of toughness or flavor?
  5. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    Come to think of it, their Cornish Bantams are rather meaty little birds, reasonable layers, may go broody sometimes (good or bad depending on whether you want it). If you get in a pinch, maybe consider some of them. But McMurray's been starting to have pullets of some of their good laying...
  6. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    Yup. A month back, there was nothing at all. It should just get better from here. Since they're in Texas and you're in Florida, they can hatch and you can buy when the northerners are staring at snow instead of thinking about chicks ;)
  7. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    If you want to order from a hatchery, I notice it's easier to find chicks either after the spring chick rush, or before that rush the next year. So depending on when you are ready for more birds, you might have a better chance of getting breeds you want, as compared with the trouble you had the...
  8. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    Are you choosing for aesthetic reasons (want a uniform flock of a particular appearance) or for practical ones (predator avoidance)? If you are going for predator avoidance, you could leave a few of those in the flock and see how they do. For the exact photos you posted, I think this one...
  9. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    Have you tried putting a few fake eggs in the nest when you take the real ones? Sometimes that works to keep them using the same nest. Of course "fake eggs" can also be golf balls, smooth rocks, leftover plastic eggs from last Easter, wood eggs from a craft store, etc.
  10. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    How old are the next-youngest? Could one of them have taken a ridiculous amount of time to begin laying? (Not likely at this time of year, but maybe worth considering.) Or it could be a one-off from one of the older layers, unless you find more over the next days and weeks. I've had times when...
  11. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    That one might get more red/brown as it grows older, especially if it is a male. I'll be curious to see pictures of it in another month or two, assuming it survives that long.
  12. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    Smoking it before rigor mortis has a chance to set in? I'm definitely interested in the results if you do that.
  13. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    Do you remember which chick grew into this pullet?
  14. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    I was stuck too. Would this be what they make out of logs across a stream?
  15. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    Genetically, green is yellow (recessive to white) and dark (sex-linked, recessive to light.) The possible pairings of the two genes are: white/light (=white) white/dark (=slate/blue) yellow/light (=yellow) yellow/dark (=willow/green) If you don't actually care about leg color, then of course...
  16. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    What leg color do you prefer?
  17. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    I remember he wanted the egg color light enough to candle easily, but did not seem to care otherwise. First post: Nearly a year later:
  18. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    If you want to check, you can collect eggs from different hens and see if the hatch rate is different. Collecting eggs from the original hens, sired by grandsons of your original rooster, might be a way to get non-inbred chicks-- unless the remaining original hens are also the ones that your...
  19. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    It is at least partly true. At a very basic level, it is easy to demonstrate. If you breed two chickens with the ear tuft gene (Araucana) or the short legs gene (Japanese Bantam or Dorking), then 1/4 of their chicks will die before hatching. For the short legs, you could breed one Japanese...
  20. NatJ

    Making Lemonade [Selective Culling Project - very long term]

    That's a good point. The most obvious check: if these eggs came from the same parents as previous batches, the genes are probably not an issue (so the incubator, or the egg handling, or the diet, or something else might be going on.) But if these eggs are a generation later, or from a set of...
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