Broody Hen Timeline

I thought it would be useful to have a timeline of my broody silkie, Fluffy, raising her chicks.

• Day 1-3 - Fluffy acting broody and sleeping in the nesting box.  Gave her two fake eggs.
• Day 4 (at night) - put Fluffy in a cardboard box in a dog kennel with two fake eggs.  She settled right in.
• Day 7 - gave her real hatching eggs

Starting the count over from when she got her eggs

• Day 1-19 - sat on eggs.  threw her off the nest once a day to run around and relieve herself.
• Day 19 - stopped taking fluffy off the nest
• Day 20 - two eggs hatched
• Day 21 - final egg hatched

Starting count over from when the first chicks hatched

• Day 1-3 - Fluffy still in hatching mode.  She did cluck to chicks.  I could hear the chicks, but saw no sign of them unless I lifted her up.
• Day 3 - Fluffy clucking to the chicks encouraging them to eat mash that I put in the nest.
• Day 4 - Fluffy took the chicks out of the nesting box to eat at the chick feeder.
• Week 2- Fluffy took the chicks out of their pen to go play outside. Chicks have about half their wing feathers and are getting tail feathers.
• Week 5 - chicks and Fluffy moved to box in run.  Protected from big chickens by plastic fence.
• Week 7 - barrier removed so chicks and big chickens can mingle.  Fluffy done caring for chicks.
• Day 52 (7 weeks 2 days) - Fluffy and chicks roosting in the coop.
• Week 11 - one chick started to crow. Rehomed
• Week 13 - chicks starting to bawk instead of peep.  Chicks mostly hang out on a high perch we put up in the run.  (The bigger chickens don't usually go up there.)

Other dates that might be useful:

2.5 weeks - age when chicks were using a ramp up to the brooder coop just fine.  They might have been able to do it sooner, but I didn't trust them before then.

Easter egger odds (chicken genetics)

A few weeks ago, I got some haching eggs to test out if my constantly broody silkie would be a good mama hen.  One of the eggs was a houdan and three of the eggs were easter eggers.  The silkie has been faithly sitting on the eggs for 18 days now (fingers crossed).  To distract myself from the waiting, I had to ask: what are the odds a chick (assuming a hen) would also lay a colored egg?  

There are several different egg color genes, the wild white color, a blue color (dominate to white), a brown egg color (which is controlled by several genes), and  a pink egg color.  A dominate gene means if that gene is present, you can't tell the other gene is there (it is not expressed).  A co-dominate gene means both genes will show (be expressed).  The blue and brown are both dominate to white, but co-dominate to each other.  If a hen has a white gene and a blue gene, she will lay blue eggs.  If a hen has a white gene and brown gene, she will lay a brown egg.  If a hen has a blue gene and a brown gene, she will lay an olive colored egg (blue and brown combined).  This is because blue is the color of the egg shell, but brown is an overlay to the egg shell.  A person can scrub the brown off an egg, but the blue eggs are blue even on the inside of the shell.

The most likely scenario is the rooster has at least one copy of the blue gene and the hen definitely has at least one copy (she laid a colored egg).  So, if each had a copy of the blue gene and a copy of the white gene, 25% of their chicks would lay white eggs and 75% would lay a colored egg.  So if there were four chicks, three would lay blue eggs and one would lay white eggs.  (Keep in mind this isn't strictly true.  If a person hatched hundreds of eggs, then these numbers would be right, but for small numbers of eggs like 3 or 4, a person could have all white eggs or all blue, who knows.)

The best case senario is that either the rooster or the hen has two blue genes.  In that case, 100% of the chicks would lay blue eggs.

Worst case is the rooster had two copies of the white gene and the hen had one copy of the white gene and one copy of the blue gene.  At that point, 50% would lay white eggs and 50% would lay blue eggs.

Now an interesting thought is what if the rooster had a copy of the brown egg gene?  If the rooster had two copies of the brown egg gene and the hen 2 copies of the blue egg gene, then all would be olive eggers.  If the rooster had one copy of the brown gene and one copy of the white gene and the hen had one copy of the blue gene and one copy of the white gene, then 25% would lay white eggs, 25% would lay blue eggs, 25% would lay brown eggs, and 25% would lay olive colored eggs.  So, 50% of the chicks would lay a cool colored egg of some kind. 

Resources:

http://sellers.kippenjungle.nl/page2.html

http://www.utilitypoultry.co.uk/eggcolour.shtml