(sold out) Rainbow Egger Hatching Egg Mix— Pigments & Heavy Blooms!

Description

Our 2023 Rainbow Egger mix offers all of our heritage crosses from our most bloom-worthy and pigment-rich pens. You can expect our full rainbow— later gen mauve eggers in deep to light blush blooms (later gen olive egger hens under our purple copper black copper marans), rich olive eggers in shades of sage green, grass green, olive, gray blooms and speckles (later gen olive egger x olive egger crosses and backcrosses under our purple copper Marans). This fall we’ll preview one of our Spring pure breed offerings with soft pinky blooms from our Mottled Orpingtons, and if you manage to get a clear blue egg in your box it will hatch either pure White Legbar or a new Ermine project we’ll reveal for next year. Feel free to leave me a message in the notes at checkout if you have a preference, I’ll do my best!

Fall hatching egg shipments will be served as heat allows, between our location in Southwest Ohio and yours. We’re offering just 10 boxes of hatching eggs this Fall! Once payment processes you’ll see your invoice in your Paypal account email, and I’ll follow up to give you an estimate for your ship window as things begin to cool down.

FAQ/IMPORTANT NOTE: Purple Coppers (our heavy bloom line of pure Black Copper Marans that lay dark brown to plum, purple, lavender and lilac when under heavy bloom) will be listed Dec 21 for 2024 presales (chicks only). It is not likely we will sell pure bcm hatching eggs again. We’re committed to practices that support every egg growing into its genetic potential and most people struggle to get good hatch rates on Marans after shipment in home incubators. Our Mauve eggs and many of our olives are 50% purple copper stock and can look very close to the purples— this hatching egg mix will get you some of the heritage cross genetics we work with across the Crosshatch Farm pens but you will not have pure Black Copper Marans stock through this listing. If you’re interested in getting a good closed line of Black Copper Marans that can serve as your foundation for both great pigment depositing genetics and the Standard of Perfection, please plan to get chicks next year.

Please see our policies page before ordering. Hatching eggs are shipped buyer beware— we put a great deal of care into packaging but there is no hatch rate implied.

Backcrossed Olive Egger Pairings

Our olive egger pens are under constant rotation. This fall we’ve put our resident first gen olive egger birds (i.e. legbar under marans or ameraucana under marans) back under our heavy bloom Black Copper Marans males for a cross often called BC1 for short (first back cross). And we’ve put our resident BC1 birds back under Black Copper Marans for a second back cross (BC2). Back crosses tend to deepen the olive egg color to a rich and darker olive, or can sometimes result in a mauve egger if the blue gene is lost. We’re also experimenting with first gen and later gen hens back under White Legbar and under Welsummer, which is giving us some lovely wild type and brown barring in our plumage. Backcrossed egg color will generally intensify toward darler olive and bark colors when under a brown-pigment depositing male, or toward spearmint/teals when under a male with genetics for blue egg shells. Though we’re working on some sequences to avoid this, birds back crossed to our Black Copper Marans can sometimes look very similar to their pure bred cousins, so you’ll want to be careful to not mix them up.

Later Gen Pairings

Our main Later Generation Olive Eggers stem from an experimental bloom pen manned by Big Blue (the largest rooster you ever did see) and a variety of olive eggers laying speckled sage green, olive green, and deep gold kiwi-olive green. You can expect future egg laying hens with blooms, speckles, and greens towards teals from this pen, with majority blue/black/splash feathering and a good chance of muffs (puffy cheeks from Ameraucana lineage). Chicks can hatch blue, black, splash, smoky, silver, or yellow and are usually rotund with muffs and sometimes feathered feet. Big Blue is an enormous male, standing hands above any other rooster we’ve ever kept, and we see his significant muffs, long legs, and deep chest carry over to his offspring, which tend to be unmistakeable at our homestead no matter the maternal genetics!

Olive Egger Genetics— Tints and Pigments

Egg-in-hand, there are only two types of egg shell color in chicken-dom, the world over. White egg shells (the OG), and blue egg shells, which are said to have originated in poultry in South America through genetic mutations after infection with a coronavirus, coming to the rest of the world as the Araucana breed. You’ll often read that blue egg-laying breeds produce oocyanin early in the laying process, which permeates the egg shell and actually turns it blue throughout— this is where the O/o genetic notation comes from, where capital O stands for blue and lowercase o stands for white. Current research has identified Biliverdin-IX and Zinc Biliverdin Chelate as the actual biochemicals responsible for the blue tint we observe in blue eggs. Some hens that lay blue are heterozygous (Oo) for blue pigment production meaning they carry one gene for blue and one gene for white, while some are homozygous (OO) and theoretically tend to be deeper blue (what we affectionately call double blues). Some blue tint can even look a bit blue-green. (Next time you crack a blue egg, peel the membrane away and see the level of blue tint from the inside!)

Brown eggs, on the other hand, are always a white egg shell from the inside. Though small amounts of brown pigment can bleed into the shell and tint it tan, all brown eggs are best understood as a white egg shell coated in a brown pigment (protoporphyrin) that is deposited on top. In the rainbow egg community, some breeds have gained popularity for being heavy brown pigment depositors, such as Marans. The darker and heavier the brown pigment deposited, the darker your brown egg. (Note that all heavy brown pigment breeds including Marans will lighten through the year and often will show variation in one given week per their rate of lay— biologically speaking, hens can only produce so much pigment to coat their eggs!)

Olive eggs, then, are a cross between a blue egg shell producing breed and a brown pigment depositing breed, plainly speaking. A blue egg shell coated in brown pigment gives us the greens we find along the olive egger spectrum. The depth of the green color is wholly dependent upon the depth of the blue shell tint and the amount and tone of brown pigment your pigment depositing breed can muster. Light brown and light blue laying birds will produce olive eggs that are generally lighter mint or lighter sage green. Birds with excellent blue tint and deep brown pigment will give you olive eggers that lay medium green to olive. (Next time you crack an olive egg, peel the membrane back and examine the shell color— it will be blue very time!)

Assuming you are crossing pure bred or tested lines, hens resulting from first generation olive egger pairings will always bring about a green egg, because they received the genetics to permeate the egg shell with blue tint early in its cycle, and brown pigment genetics to coat the that blue egg in brown pigment. Later generation pairings and backcrosses will lose their blue gene if not carefully paired to maintain it. We rotate all of our hens back under blue in sequences, but remember that browns from later gen or backcrossed pairings can be really interesting in their own right. Ours can range from mauve to bark and chocolate, or even sometimes mustard!

Heavy Bloom & Speckles

Bloom (called ‘cuticle deposit’ in the literature) is the last layer deposited on an egg when it passes through the oviduct. Made of calcium and protein and such, it is the antibacterial coating that protects the egg from invading organisms before it would be set upon by the hen, and therefore contributes to the shelf life we enjoy by keeping our homestead or farm sourced eating eggs on the counter. The commercial eating eggs industry doesn’t consider eggs sporting heavy bloom to be ‘grade A’ so we have become accustomed to a layer of bloom that is essentially invisible (and also mechanically and chemically washed off before the eggs make it to the grocery store shelf). Many breed clubs also discourage heavy bloom in their standard of perfection (Marans included). But in the rainbow basket, bloom is often partially responsible for the wow factor!

Heavy bloom can be solid and coat the entire egg or have a mottled or ombre apperance; heavy bloom can look slightly matte or be completely opaque and chalky. According to the literature, about 38% of bloom is genetic, with other environmental and nutritional factors playing a role in its deposit and prevalence. Bloom can change through the season, and often becomes more curious as a laying season progresses. An olive egg with a heavy bloom will often appear medium to dark gray, or even chalky sage to light gray with a very heavy bloom. Breeding for bloom increases the visual variety in your egg basket, but remember that eggs without discernible bloom still have it! In fact, a quick rinse under a stream of sink water doesn’t even remove it.

Speckles are essentially malfunctions in the brown pigment depositing stage— some liken it to clogged ink jets. Those hens that are prone to deposit partial and random pigments give us our speckles and freckles, which we also love combined with heavy bloom!  Any given hen can lay bloom one day, ombre half blooms the next day, and speckles by Saturday, but we often see a hen who goes into full opaque bloom lay that way for the remainder of the laying season.

Breeding for deep pigment, bloom, and speckles involves many factors and even a little random luck! We select for deep pigmentation, bloom, and speckles across all of our pairings, and we see a lot of fun variation in our olives each year.

Cull the Dull, Keep the Deep

I like to think of deeply pigmented flocks as a result of duration and selection, which can’t be ‘bought’ in an act of consumerism. In the same way that an antique wood utensil takes on the marks of a hand over time, your flock will develop its own terroir over time, given your base genetics, your selection of further pairings, and all the environmental factors of your region and place including nutrition and soil and water.

To establish your program or back yard flock, commit to the process. Commit to duration. You’ll want to ‘cull the dull’ by identifying which hens in your flock lay lightly pigmented or otherwise dull eggs and rehome them, which allows you to ‘keep the deep’ tints and pigment depositors. Breed these together, or if you must, bring in further birds with desired characteristics and understand that in each generation you will have culls. delight in the surprises the following spring.

Those with the most delightful egg baskets cull the most from their flocks!