Friday, March 20, 2009

The Chicken Experiment Continued

Some of you may remember our chicken experiment where we crossed our Plymouth Rock rooster with an Ameraucana hen.
The Beneficial Bee: The Chicken Experiment
We have been waiting patiently for our hen Clumsia (another pet named by Oliver) to start laying eggs. Clumsia is the offspring of a chicken breed who lays brown eggs with a breed that lays blue. I was hoping for some sort of amazing blue spotted brown egg. Here she is-our beautiful hen.

Recently things started getting interesting. Clumsia began trying to mate with the other hens. Still deep in denial, Glenn and I agreed that we were thrilled to have a gay hen.

My dream of cool eggs faded more every day as Clumsia began acting like a male. Glenn still held out hope that she was a female and we had daily discussions comparing her female attributes to her male features. Could it be that we had a transgender chicken?

Then we heard it. And finally we had our answer. Below you can see a picture of our rooster Clumsia crowing.

7 comments:

  1. Bummer! He is beautiful though!

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  2. This is GREAT! I really got a good chuckle out of your story! What a beautiful rooster ;-) Love that name, by the way, Clumsia!!!!

    Great post!

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  3. Oh boy! Well, he's a stunning roo anyway. Too bad it didn't turn out the way you'd hoped!

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  4. Thanks. He is a beautiful guy. We just don't quite know what to do with him. Three roosters is two too many.

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  5. Jess, if you are like us, you won't be able to get rid of one rooster too many...we're more attached to our roosters than our hens. I'm sad Clumsia turned out to be a rooster because we were looking at crossing a blue-laying rooster with brown-laying hens & I was hoping you'd do all the hard work of figuring out what kind of eggs we'd get first! Oh, well. LOL Julia

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  6. You're right Julia. We have been thinking about dividing the hens into different coops to spread out the roosters. I just feel bad for the hens having to be jumped on so much. I guess we will have to see what kind of eggs you get. I don't think we will be having more chicks for a while!

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  7. I thought that you might like to know that we have one auracauna/americana hen that lays brownish eggs (probably from a pink egg laying hen.) that has darker reddish brown spots. Another lady in our small rural community has an auracauna/americana hen that lays green eggs with brown spots. This is the first year that either of us have had one of the chicks hatched out that lay spotted eggs. Mine wre not cross bread except with other aurracauna/americanas. Here is wishing you success! Daneann@aol.com I have other chickens, too. Some are posted in my chicken gallery at Daneann.freehost10.com Good luck with your experiment. Would love to hear more.

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