The Crested Cream Legbar cockerel went to cockerel heaven a few weeks back now. This means that we are no longer able to produce pure Cream Legbar chicks, which is a shame as they are a lovely looking bird and lay the most wonderful blue eggs.
However, the young cockerels are just too 'rampant' at a very early age and do their very best to maraud about the chicken pen upsetting all the other inhabitants. Typical loutish teenagers really.
Not only that, but they don't make a particularly meaty meal at the end of it. Here the comparison with teenagers has to stop.
Our Cream Legbar cockerel has, however left us with the legacy of several blue egg laying hens (blue eggs, not blue hens), which together with the other eggs makes for an attractive half dozen eggs.
Now, if there are any egg colour genetic experts out there, your input would be most welcome. For the question is, will the mixed offspring of the Cream Legbar hens, whether first or second generation, still lay blue eggs? Or will the cockerel's genes dominate? Or will the eggs come out a different colour altogether?
We don't need any more chickens at the moment, since we are getting up to 16 eggs a day already (plus duck, goose and guinea fowl eggs) and it's still only March.
But some friends of ours wanted some hens to lay blue eggs, so a month ago Sue placed 12 blue eggs in the incubator. The day before I headed to Latvia, they started hatching and we ended up with 6 healthy chicks.
The picture above shows them all packed up in a little box ready to head off in the car to their new home. It would appear that 5 of them come from our barred cockerel and 1 from the white cockerel. Let's hope that most of them turn into hens and that some of them eventually lay blue eggs.
50% of hens hatched from a legbar mother will lay blue or green tinted eggs
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