How a Breeder Builds a Flock

"They're all the same."

I had the unfortunate situation of having someone message me to complain about the price of my Whiting True Blues because he could "get sexed chicks from McMurray Hatchery for $4". No. You can't. First off, sexed pullets from McMurray are running at $9 each and they're almost always sold out for the year as soon as ordering opens. Second, just because a hatchery has a specific line of birds, does not mean that they are sending you what they should. It matters more what a breeder does with a line than where the line came from.

We started our Whiting True Blue flock with birds from another breeder. When we decided to switch from Ameraucana to Whiting True Blues as our main blue egg layer, we acquired 50 pullets and 20 cockerels from McMurray hatchery to add to our flock. We spent the time and money to grow all of them out. Of the 50 "sexed pullets", 11 turned out to be cockerels. We separated out each and every pullet when they started to lay. Of the 39 pullets, about 41% (16) laid either green or green-tinted eggs. Those 16 pullets were removed, even before breeding, leaving us with 23 pullets. We lost 3 to chicken stupidity. We culled an additional 5 more for laying small or deformed eggs. Of the 15 left, we sold 3, leaving us with only 12 pullets who all laid large to extra-large powder blue eggs.

24 of the 31 cockerels survived to adulthood. They really loved to get themselves stuck in the mud or trampled to death by their buddies. We DNA-tested all of the birds for double blue genetics at $20 each. Whiting True Blues are supposed to all carry double blue genes. Surprisingly enough, they did not! We found that about 20% of the birds only had one blue gene. All single blue gene birds were from McMurray hatchery. All single blue gene birds were removed from our flock. We culled cockerels that were too small, aggressive, or just overall not a good looking bird. Then culled further for feather colors, choosing those cockerels whose coloring best complimented the colors of our pullets. We wanted to be able to create chicks of various feather colors and also have cockerels who would work in our sex-linked breeding pens. In the end, only 4 cockerels remained.

So, here we are. We spent over a year, went through 85 chickens, almost $1000 not including feed, housing, or time. We then separated the chickens into their own pen for 3 months, test hatched to confirm both fertility and hatchability. And are now, finally, able to offer hatching eggs and chicks. We know that birds coming out of our pen will all have double blue genetics, and lay large blue eggs and only blue eggs. I highly doubt the hatchery is doing all of this. That is where the difference lies. Sure, the hatchery can sex their chicks but they don't even do that very well as evidenced by our 11 pullets that turned out to be cockerels. I know for a fact that McMurray sexes their WTB using feather sexing and not vent sexing. Let's be honest, most hatcheries hire people to feather sex who know nothing about chickens and who are oftentimes high school or college students who couldn't care less. Feather sexing is a much less specialized skill and can be faulty if the parents are not correctly identified or maintained. That also means that anything bred from those birds is no longer feather sexable. So no, I can not sex WTBs. I'd work on an autosexing blue egg laying variety but that's what Cream Legbars are for. Next project: Ermine and Chocolate Ermine Ameraucana. Hopefully, once I get these close to where I want to be, I can get back to working on Ayam Cemani.