Black Ameraucana Day Old Chick (straight run)

Description

Who knew that the demure and elegant Black Ameraucana would become our favorite keeper on the farm?

We started working with Brad Stonebarger’s quality standard bred black Ameraucana in late 2021 with some hatching eggs that left us flush with pullets (we were looking for a male haha), then a show quality male we received in early 2022 that Brad graciously allowed us to bring on to our farm to round out our flocks. Our original intent with Black Ams was simply to build out our Ermine project pens— it’s widely known that the best way to breed quality into a project line with unknown genetics is to pair them with a quality closed line that is standard bred, and then keep working that closed line to see what pops up along the way. Brad’s black ams had incredible muffs and beards, great type and conformation, and silky iridescent green sheen in their plumage, and an excellent saturated blue egg. They have wonderful quirky personalities and give us full size orbs that pair well with our large Marans eggs. Because of their obvious quality, we are breeding Brad’s closed line of blacks forward, and using those blacks in the line cross that is our Ermine project. So we’ve been flush with lovely black growouts from black x black pairings and  black x ermine pairings for the last couple seasons, but still, we didn’t expect to fall in love with them!

As babies, they are little black bundles that would hard to distinguish from Marans if not for their muffs and beards. As teenagers, they are little miniature adults— while my Marans and marans crosses go through a very awkward teenage stage, the black ams are perfectly feathered out, shiny, and peeking through their muffs. They run around like tiny versions of their future selves, and I just have fallen for them.

For 2025, our blacks are generated out of our ermine pens from a closed line that is three years/three to five generations in production. So, rather than black x black parents, you’ll be receiving a black bird that has one ermine parent and one black parent. NOTE: they are not carrying any Ermine-pattern related genes, and cannot produce and further ermine color patterns in subsequent pairings. They are simply the 50-70% offspring from the black-ermine pairings that did not inherit the dominant white genetics needed to produce ermine plumage. They are solid black in phenotype.

Are black ams from Ermine pairings the same as solid black ams from a closed line? This is an excellent question, and it can be answered in two ways by those of us working on the ermine project. The best technical answer is no, the solid black phenotype may be carrying other unexpressed genetics such as blue or one copy of recessive white that can’t be seen in the bird until it’s bred to another generation. So while our birds are solid black in phenotype, they may carry other genes accumulated in the Ermine line we’re working with— which was known to be a Heinz 57 recipe! That said, so far we’re pretty happy with the quality of our all black ams, and I can honestly say this is a cleaner line that other black and bbs am lines I’ve worked with in the past.

You can expect good type and conformation, black plumage with lots of green sheen, more-than-ample muffs and beards, and eggs that register as A7, A9, A11, and A15 on the Ameraucana Alliance egg color reference chart, with an occasional saturated B2, B6 or C5.

Photos coming soon! Presales for 2025 open Dec 21, 2024.