New peeps, rescue hen and so many eggs!

My hens sure do think it's spring! i'm finally getting lots of eggs again!! Remember all those chicks that hatched out last summer?  They are all laying now. Unfortunately, of all those crazy peeps that hatched out, i only ended up with one olive egger and one medium brown layer. All the others are laying white/cream/beige eggs. i thought for certain that breeding my olive egger with the maran would create a dark olive layer...but it did not. :/ The olive egger i did get is a complete mystery since it hatched from a feral hens clutch (all brown/beige eggs)...not an olive egg. 

More daylight means more eggs! They are really starting to come in now!  i'm super thrilled with my variety of colors, but am still missing blue!!  The majority of my eggs are boring white, cream and beige. i really need blue eggs! 

So, i got some (hopefully) blue egg layers! :) With all the chicks hatched out last summer, i must have lost my mind to actually purchase more chickens!  When i saw a local farm store was selling EasterEgger/ Americanas i had to get a few. EEs lay blue eggs! They actually lay blue, green or pink eggs,,,but i'm hoping at least one will lay blue.

They are so freakin' cute. 

i also recently took in a rescue hen, We've been calling her Lola.  She is an older Easter Egger, and i was told she doesn't lay anymore. She was offered on a free site for butchering/stew pot, but i offered to give her a home and let her retire here.  The last rescue hen i took in was my Olive Egger, who became one of my best layers. So i'm secretly hoping this girl  will eventually starts laying blue eggs, but i'm fine if she doesn't.  She seems to be fitting in well with my other hens, i have several retired ladies already.  

So just when i was feeling overwhelmed by all the eggs, i found a nest under the deck with 16 eggs in it!  Several of my hens have been laying in this nest.  These dark brown eggs are from the offspring of the Olive egger hen and Maran roo.  They are not even slightly green, and just a shade lighter than my Maran eggs.  They are also the same size and shape and my maran eggs. 

So yeah, i have no idea why this hen doesn't lay green eggs and why the other one (my mystery olive egger) does.  All my theories on color breeding just went out the window. lol. 

Olive Egger Mystery

You may remember earlier this spring when we ended up with a bunch of new chicks.  i was trying to hatch out olive eggers. Olive Egger chickens are not an actual breed, but a cross of two breeds — usually a blue egg layer and a dark brown egg layer. For example, when an Ameraucana hen's egg is fertilized by a Marans rooster, the resulting chick will be an Olive Egger who will lay olive green eggs. i only have one olive egg hen, and i've been trying to breed her with my Black copper Maran rooster, so that the female chicks would then lay dark olive eggs. When i tried this last year, i end up hatching out all roosters.  This year, i tried again, but the olive eggs kept disappearing or breaking.

Then my wild hens began disappearing and returning with chicks. We had to give away a bunch of them. i bet those crazy hens hatched out 60+ chicks. It was so frustrating, because i really didn't need any more chickens, i just wanted to have a couple more olive eggers.  Many of the new chicks look just like my other wild/gamey birds. A few have the same striped look of my Olive egger hen, leading me to believe one of the Olive egg roosters may have fathered them. 

 i was under the impression that the roosters wouldn't carry the olive egg gene to pass on to their chicks, so imagine my surprise when a couple of my spring chicks started laying and i got an OLIVE EGG! It's a really dark olive too.  All three of these eggs came from chicks from that first clutch of 16.  There are two large fluffy gray hens in that batch that looks more like domestic hens than the wild girls. One has started laying the brown eggs that are just a shade or two lighter than my maran eggs, and the other is laying the olive eggs.  The bright white egg came from one of the wild girls, even though they typically lay an off white cream. 

My egg color variety is really fun right now. My marans are currently molting, but when they start laying again they lay the chocolate brown eggs. My original olive egger, Olive lays olive eggs like the one above but much larger and maybe just a hair lighter.

This is my beautiful mystery hen that is laying the olive eggs. i named her Gracie. She is such a gorgeous and unusual looking hen. My wild hen hatched her out, and she wasn't sitting on any green eggs...so i have no idea what Gracie  is a mix of.  Here, i've been trying to hatch out the green/olive eggs to get an olive egger and i get one without even trying. With the amount of wild birds we hatched out, i have to think she's probably not the only one. Although she is the only one with this look.  

In all my efforts to actually hatch out an Olive egger from an olive egg, i only ended with two chicks. As they grew i was pretty excited, because i was certain that both were girls. Then one morning i found one of them dead in the coop.  i believe my Maran rooster who is quite large may have crushed her, as they were fully feathered but still tried to climb under the other birds like they did with their mama. That left me with one Olive egger. This girl.  She is not laying yet, but when she does she should lay dark olive eggs. Even darker than the ones i'm already getting. She is a mix of Olive Egger ( americana/maran) and Black Copper Maran.  So i'm really excited for her to lay, although it probably won't be until the spring.

i've been trying to thin out my flock and give away as many of the new birds as i could, but now i feel like i need to wait until spring to see who may be laying olive eggs. One of the main things i had wanted to do it get the green gene introduced into my flock, so i wasn't dependent on my one olive egger for green eggs. If something happened to her, i would no longer have olive eggs and Olive eggers are difficult to find. However, Gracie has proved that i don't have to hatch them out of olive eggs, the roosters must also carry the gene.  So i really think i've succeeded in that. i can't wait to see what other egg colors we end up with.