A Small Summer Flock

Recently, I re-homed almost the entire Aloha flock.  A small group of my best (Pumpkin roo and several nice hens) went to a close friend.  I can still get hatching eggs from that tiny group, if I wish.  The rest went to a lovely pet home that I inspected personally.  An acre of land with lots of shady trees to climb and play on.

There were six young hens that I couldn't bear to re-home, however, even though my new plan is to start "fresh" every year with an all-in, all-out management policy.  These hens just started laying in the last month or so.  These are the closest I've come to the project goals.  A couple were featured on the last Blog post.

Here are a bunch of the most recent photos with evaluation of their good/bad traits.  I'm happy to say on some of these hens, they are almost totally to project goals.

Above:  This hen is a Sussex X Aloha cross.  I'd like to see a little lighter base color, and golden yellow legs, not pink, but she has great size and gorgeous tail shape.

This part Swedish hen has incredible size, and the added Aloha bloodline has improved her spotting.  However, she has a tiny trace of a crest from her Swedish ancestry, and her tail does not have the nice "fan" shape, it's peaked a bit at the top.  I'd grade her color and height as perfect, but her body shape could use a few improvements.

I find the Swedish tend to be more "lanky" chickens than American Heritage breeds.  They grow a large frame first, and then eventually fill out.  However, it often takes a full year for Swedish to finish growing.  Their eggs also start small, but eventually become Jumbo sized in year two.  American breeds such as New Hampshire are typically finished growing by six or seven months, and all American breeds that I've raised tend to mature much faster.  I've had New Hampshire roosters breeding at 5 months while the pure Swedish boys were still totally clueless at 7 months old.

She will probably grow into her long neck and perhaps widen a bit over the coming months.  However, I still prefer the overall body shape and type of the half-Sussex hen.  This hen has better color and is taller, though, so for right now I'd grade the two as being equal.  Both need improvements, but are nice colorful, large hens.

Here is the hen that I highlighted in a previous post.  As she fills out, her long (Swedish) neck is beginning to look less awkward.  Overall, she is the closest to the Aloha goals.  I would like for her to not look quite so unbalanced, with a straighter, shorter back.  She has a "downhill" build and needs more height in front.  But her tail shape is good, she has great size, is deep through the chest, has a ton of white feathering.  She does not look like a Speckled Sussex, and neither does she look like a Swedish Flower.  She is something totally new, which is what I was hoping the Aloha breed could become.

I do believe she has the potential to create the "perfect" Aloha babies!  I can't wait to hatch out her chicks!

Next is that cute little baby hen that I took a photo of perched on the water dish last time.  She's still adorable!

Her overall color is the best, in terms of being the most unique.  In Swedish, you do see the "Mille" coloring which is a gold color with black and white spotting.  However, I have not seen this particular orange mottled color with black tail striping in any other breed.  It's very unique to the Aloha strain.  I call the color "Ginger".

Her body is OK.  It's compact and fairly wide, but could be deeper and more square in the keel.  The tail set is all right but not as "neat" as the half-Sussex hen's.  Feathers look a bit messy.  I'm trying for a neat, tidy fan shape in Alohas.  She is more balanced than the previous hen with all the white, without the "downhill" effect, but she is not nearly as large.  She still is a wonderful and really flashy hen, however.

And speaking of flashy, there is also this girl:

Her mom was my most favorite of the Ginger hens.  Mom Aloha had amazing spots and a gorgeous cinnamon orange color, but was small, gamey in type, with slate legs.  This hen has similar flaws but is a huge improvement over the mother in terms of type.  Yet she kept almost all of the good color traits I liked about the mother hen.

Her legs are slate but have an overlay of yellow, which means she carries the gene and her chicks may shed the last of the gray leg color.  This is an improvement over Mom who did not carry the yellow leg color.  Her body shape is thinner, and smaller, with a too-straight and too-long back.  However, she still has more heft and weight than a regular Game hen.  Here is a photo of a Game hen from the wonderful chicken breed site "Feathersite.com" so you can compare the two.

Much of the Aloha coloration is from Mexican and American Game stock.  Games are very popular in Phoenix, both because fighting was legal until very recently, but also because Games are strong, tough, hardy chickens that handle heat extremely well.  They are not "fussy" chickens and live off very little while still being good layers of small eggs.  This makes them popular in neighborhoods like mine, where they can live in a semi-feral state.

You can see she still has many hints of her Game heritage, but is not nearly as slight or leggy in build.

She is also the most shy and wary of all the new hens.  I'd vote her "Most Likely to Survive" if a dog attack or illness invaded the flock!  So we're not totally there yet on this one, but she's still a wonderful little hen.

And then we have this white-tailed hen, who also shows a lot of Sussex influence, but mostly has Aloha showing through:

She has a ton of white and a lot of flashy color, but is not quite as deep bodied as the half-Sussex behind her.  Still another beautiful hen.  Great Aloha color and better type than the older, smaller hens.

For now, I have two Sussex-Swedish bloodline roosters running with them.  These boys could use more white and a lighter base color, but they are big with excellent body type and bright yellow legs.  They will help improve the size and type on their chicks.  My favorite in terms of color is this guy with the reddish neck:

Bright, bright yellow legs.  They show Swedish influence in addition to Sussex, and since the Swedish are slow to mature I expect him to get even bigger over the next few months.  His brother is darker, and shows more Sussex breeding.  I don't like all the black in his brother's coloration, but the brother is even wider and heavier in build.

My neighbor also has an enormous and very-spotty rooster, who right now is exactly the same size as her pure Rhode Island rooster.  (And here I thought the Rhode Island of hers was large!)  I may borrow him later this summer to try with the hens, but for now, this little group has a lot of potential.  I want to hatch out chicks from these while my Aloha babies mature.

I've hatched out and am raising about 100 baby Aloha chicks, but those will not be laying until November or December of 2014.  Here is a photo showing just a few of the new babies that will not be mature for months:

I'll post more about the babies later.  Right now many of them are going through too many changes.  Many of the youngest are still in baby fluff.  It's not until they are three or even four months old that I can start to tell if the chicks will work in my breeding program or not.

This little group of adults shown will be the only source of "new" chicks here at home.  But what a nice tiny flock it is!  I'm very excited to see what hatches from these.  Here's a few group shots of the Summer 2014 Aloha flock.

What a future Aloha flock will look like.  Yay, progress!!!

Two hens shown in this pic, the all white and all brown hens, will be re-homed soon.
The spotty hens are the "keepers".

A Peek Into the Future

I've had a few Alohas growing out from this past Fall.  Not a lot, just a handful of random chicks.

Most are really lovely, but typical Alohas.  Fantastic colors, but smaller in size.  Not Banty, but like a small Leghorn.  Here is one girl, who is just so darn adorable.  Perfect in every way.  Except size.

She's not ridiculously tiny, so I'm keeping her to try her with a larger rooster.

Here is another really pretty Ginger hen.  She shows slightly better size than the previous generation, and has yellow overlay on her slate legs.  She does show the lovely "tiger stripe" tail feathers that I love in the older Ginger hens.  Another who is beautiful, and colorful, and totally lacking in good body size.

That's been pretty typical of the past couple of years.  Many gorgeous hens who would be perfect, if just they were bigger!  The size issue has been such an obstacle.  It seems the second I get a hen to full size, the spots disappear.  I was beginning to think maybe it just wasn't possible?

But over the last few months, I've been waiting for this BIG baby girl to suddenly drop her color.  Here she is pictured on April 4th.  She clearly stands out next to her "normal" tiny Aloha siblings:

That monster-sized girl to the left.  Towering over the colorful little girls.  But, is she going to lose that color?

So, now 22 days have passed, and this is what I see today:

There she is now.  That's a full grown, pure Speckled Sussex behind her!  Another shot:

Pure Sussex behind and in front of her.  

Here she is again, with her itty-bitty and really pretty tiny Aloha sisters.

OK, now that we've established size, on with the photo spamming:

We are still not 100% there, but this is REALLY darn close to the final goal.  I'd like to see a little more depth and width to the body.

She has a looooong neck that doesn't show in the above pics but is more apparent in others:

And her tail set is a bit low.  Here is a photo of her SISTER who has other flaws (not quite as big as this girl, has pink legs) but sister is being kept for a breeding hen because she has a great tail and also shows wonderful extreme white coloring.

This is more of the tail set I'd like to see on the Alohas, a perfect boxy upright fan shape:

*NOT the same hen as above - her sister!
Note pink legs, heavier shading towards back, and fan-shaped tail.

Last, here is another wonderful hen growing out.  She is clearly half Speckled Sussex, but you will note, she is Sussex "with a twist"!  Much lighter color, a bit more pronounced spotting:

This hen is a perfect "in transition" hen.  She's not an Aloha yet, but halfway there.  I can see her chicks could possibly be wonderful Alohas.  Her size?  Exactly the same size as a regular Sussex.  Here she is shown with a hatchery New Hampshire Red, which are larger than Sussex:

I would eventually like to see the Alohas at the same size as a New Hampshire, which is why those NHR hens are in there!  I already have two half-Aloha, half NHR hens up at Stephen's house.  They were hatched in January, which means they are about four months old.  Both are large and show a stray white spot that indicates they carry the Mottling gene for spots.  So that big red hen?  Her daughters, are doing great, and her grand-chicks should be showing spots next year if all goes well!

This is a photo of the group of chicks back in January, that I raised and took the best of the group (three roos and about seven hens) up to Stephen's.  They are about four months now, and next month I'll really be able to see final size and pick out who to keep and who to sell.  Looks like only three or four hens will stay, and maybe one rooster?  Out of 30 chicks raised.  Such a lot of work to find those gems!

But it's all worth it when you do find a pretty one!

Trying to Improve Size - The New Sussex!

For a while now, I've had some "SECRET" chickens hidden in the Aloha flock.  There's a good reason I've been keeping mum.  It seems in the past, every time I touted a promising new addition, that chicken would suddenly meet a sad fate.  The Aloha Project has had many ups and downs, and several tragic losses along the way.

You know that saying, don't count your chickens before they hatch.  So I've been trying to hatch chicks from this pen, before I announced that it exists.  I have ONE chick hatched so far.  He's about two weeks old at this point.  Not much of a start, but it is a start.  I've had the parents for over three months now.  I guess it is time for the big reveal!  I have Buff Sussex!  And I have . . . something else.

I've been trying to find Buff Sussex for AGES now, to add to the Aloha flock.  They were imported by Greenfire Farms from Australia back in 2010, but they are not sold by Greenfire any longer, and are hard to find from secondary sources.

Buff Sussex video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSrBkhevWzM&feature=player_embedded

I know their large size and light color would be the PERFECT addition to the flock.  And as far as bringing in fresh bloodlines, you can't go any further than Australia!  They are incredibly hard to come across, today.

Sometimes, I do a nationwide search on Craigslist, and doing this now and then, I have found stray Buff Sussex flocks in different places like Iowa and Washington state.  Unfortunately, none of those folks shipped chicks or eggs, so they were all dead ends.

This past August, when after doing this random search one day, I found a pair advertised for sale on Craigslist in Southern CA!  I thought surely the owner was mistaken, most likely it was a mis-labeled Buff Orpington.  (The ad had no photos.)  I tried not to get my hopes up.  Imagine my surprise, when the owner sent pics, and yes, they were Buff Sussex!

Now, the plan was to find Buff Sussex, breed them to Speckled Sussex, and try to introduce the Mottled gene and basically create a Buff Speckled Sussex (or "Mille Sussex") and use that to improve size on the Alohas.  Well, I looked at the photos, and it turns out, not only was this a Buff Sussex rooster - but someone had saved me the trouble and already ADDED spots!

Yep, the Mottling was faint, but it was there.  A few speckles on the chest, a bit of white in the wing.  We'd need a lot more, but at least the gene was present, which means, when crossed to Speckled Sussex hens, they should all show some degree of Mottling.  Very few Buffs were imported, so no doubt the spots were from out-crossing to Speckled to expand the gene pool.

Okay, now here is where things get really, really, really weird.

The owner mentions, would I also be interested in a Red Sussex?  At first I said no, because while Red Sussex are a very rare strain, if I'm going to use a red bird, the New Hampshire has the yellow legs that I'm looking for, instead of the pink legs of Sussex.

But later, when I talked to her on the phone, she mentioned the Red Sussex . . . was kind of strange.  Like, strange how?  She offered to send me a photo.

My heart stopped when she emailed me the photo.

Well, basically, strange as in . . . it's an Aloha.

Big hen, yellow legs, tons of spots.
Wait a second . . . I didn't make this!

Except, it's not related to my stock at all.

I have never sent any Aloha chicks to the state where this hen's breeder lives.  However, the breeder she got these from, has similar breeds to what I have been working with.  Speckled Sussex, Swedish Flower, and more.  The best I can figure, is that while trying to improve or expand bloodlines (Red Sussex, for example, have a very small gene pool in the US) this breeder used a similar cross to what I've been trying here, and in some strange, freaky happy accident, hatched out the "wrong" kind of chick, that has now found the PERFECT home.

It is possible that it is just a uniquely marked Swedish, perhaps.  But it had a lot more white than any five month old Swedish hen I've come across.  However it happened, whatever it is, someone created exactly the kind of chicken I'd been trying to make for years, and it landed back here in Arizona to join my flock.  My Mom and I did a road trip, and the caring owners of this lovely trio met us half-way.

I hesitate to get my hopes up, because so far, due to a number of reasons, we've only managed to get ONE chick from this pen.  First, when they arrived, the hens weren't quite old enough to lay, and the heat was still going strong.  (It was 110 the week they arrived from CA.)

This photo shows size, spotted hen smaller than Buff.
Similar in size to Rhode Island or Speckled Sussex.

We kept them super-safe in a cooled indoor budgie aviary at Stephen's.  A few weeks later, the first egg appeared in the pen.  Unfortunately, the dim light in the aviary, has not been enough to stimulate good breeding and laying behavior.  I have been terrified that anything would happen to this hen and rooster before I can hatch some chicks from them, which makes me desperately want to pen them indoors.  However, to increase light exposure, we recently moved them to one of the outdoor breeder pens.

Note size difference.  Hen in front - a small gold-mottled Aloha.
Behind her, the "mystery" hen who is full size.
To the right - a Dun Light Sussex hen, who is enormous.

I am still holding my breath.  When we brought them to the outdoor pen, I added three more girlfriends, which brings the total up to seven hens in there with him.  However, while the hen's egg production has been discouragingly low, they are not the real problem.  Of the previous two dozen eggs that I tried hatching from what was laid in October, all but two of the eggs were infertile, and only one from this pen hatched.

I don't think it is the rooster's fault, because there is also a breeder pen of Silkies in the same budgie aviary.  Two Silkie roos with several hens, and those eggs also had terrible fertility.  I hatched two chicks (one Silkie, one from the Buff rooster) from three dozen eggs collected from the two pens.  Therefore, the fertility issue has to be environmental, or I would have had better success with the Silkie eggs.  It was not the incubator, because eggs from my own pen had a hatch rate of 80%.  I am pretty sure the dim light in there is to blame.

So with trepidation, we have now moved the group to the outdoor pen, and I will anxiously be hoping for eggs to hatch.  If this pen gets going, this could give us the final ingredient we've been needing for this program.  We need a really HUGE rooster, with spots, who can overcome the size issue this breed has had from the very start.

The NEW outdoor breeder pen.
Three big Meyer Sussex, the Mystery Aloha.
One Buff Sussex, one Dun Light Sussex, one nice Aloha.

I am seriously hoping that now that I have posted this, my beloved new additions will not meet an untimely fate.  I really, really need to get some chicks hatched from this pen.  They survived the last of our Phoenix heat, now we are in the darkest time of year, so laying is slow due to reduced daylight.  I am hoping the added sunlight, plus being sandwiched in the breeder pen between two other active flocks, will encourage this rooster and his hens to get busy making some fertile eggs for me to hatch!  I would really love to keep MANY roosters from this pen.  In fact, if all goes according to plan, roosters from this cross would be added to almost every breeding pen next Fall.

It is possible for chicks from this cross to resemble the hen.
The yellow legs color is recessive, so they would have pink legs.

In addition to this very promising pen, I also have a Dun Sussex rooster, who will be mated to very small but extremely colorful Aloha hens.  The chicks from this cross will not show mottling the first generation, but will carry the gene.  (Half may also carry Dun.)  I am hoping that if I keep some hens from this pen, and cross them with a rooster from the Buff Sussex pen that would carry Mottling, that perhaps we can produce fully mottled offspring that are 75% Sussex, 25% Aloha, light in color, and huge in size.

My understanding of the Silver gene (that is the "white" color of the Light Sussex) is feeble at best.  But I am hopeful that I could pull the Mottled colors back out in the next generation.  A kind person on BYC was very helpful trying to better my knowledge of how to work with this color.

This Dun Light Sussex rooster painfully illustrates my size issues.

Another shot of the Dun Light Sussex with tiny colorful Aloha hens.

I will move a few of the most colorful yellow-legged hens
 to the Dun Sussex pen, to make sure the chicks carry
the yellow leg color gene, even if it doesn't show.
(This hen is not laying yet.)

Whether or not all of this works, depends on if these chickens will finally cooperate . . . .

And if it does work, in one year, the Aloha Chicken Project could finally reach its goal of large, super-spotty chickens with yellow legs.

To be continued . . . .