Knowing The Breed

When we purchased our chickens, we purchased them from Cookie's brother's neighbor. The nice lady who sold them to us told us the breed when we bought but that information went in one ear and out the other. So after weeks of working with the hens and enjoying their eggs, I thought I should get to know a bit more about the breeds of our first chickens. Maybe even learn how to spell the name of the breed properly.

We have: 4 Black Sex-Link, 4 Ameraucana and 4 New Hampshire Reds

I found an excellent site to help me on my quest for chicken knowledge. http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/chooks/chooks.html

Wow! What a resource. But wait a minute, there isn't anything on our Black Sex-Link birds. Could I have misunderstood what the seller said about these four birds? (Actually a pretty high chance of that.) The more I scratched around  the more confused I became. Then I stumbled onto another site which helped bring clarity to my understanding of what a black sex-link chicken is. 

http://www.backyardchickens.com/t/261208/sex-linked-information

This site contains everything I would ever want to know a+bout sex-linking chickens. As near as I can figure, the term "sex-link" describes a chicken which is the offshoot of two other breeds. The nearest parallel I can come up with is when a horse and donkey mate it produces a mule. The mule is an 'end of the reproduction line' product of both species. So, in a sense our black sex-link are 'mule chickens.' 

Overall we are getting about 7 eggs a day on average. Some days are better than others but we have been told that 7 eggs a day for winter production is actually pretty good.

The 'black sex-link' appears to be the most prolific layers. They crank out the nicest brown eggs and they do it on a daily basis. At 10 months of age they are doing just fine.

The New Hampshire Reds are great looking birds. A striking orange/red in color they strut around and serve as the guardians of the hen house.

The Ameraucana are our 'older girls.' They are about 16 months old. These girls were traumatized by Coal (our Labradore Retriever) and didn't lay for a number of weeks. Lately, however, they have been laying again. They lay light blue oblong shaped eggs.

Over the past couple weeks the temperature has dropped significantly. This has brought our daily egg count down to about four. This is normal (so I"m told) and will (hopefully) change once the temperatures rise above freezing.

Now that I "know" what the breeds are I feel at least a bit more comfortable as a back-yard chicken farmer.