Lavender LF day old chicks for sale

[crystalcreek]

Crystal Creek will be offering a few hatches from our purebred Lavender Ameraucana pens for the Spring 2012 breeding season.  A lot of hard work, meticulous record keeping, and intense selection has gone into the flock I currently have, and I feel the birds I am producing at this point are beautiful, productive, and capable of being competitive for you at shows.  I am not yet where I want to be in the area of egg color, and this crop will still have some slow feathered birds even though I am diligently working to eliminate that trait.  I am interested in placing my birds in the hands of ABC members who will exhibit and move toward the goal of having this variety fully recognized.  

I am still using blacks to improve my lavenders, and two of three pens are comprised of split females exclusively, so buyers should be prepared to order at least some splits, especially when ordering a full box (25).

Interested parties please contact via email crystalcreekqh@sbcglobal.net

[crystalcreek]

These are some of the chicks I hatched at Christmas.  They were pretty consistent across the board.  No feathered shanks and no clean faces, which is an improvement from last season.  

[crystalcreek]

This is my pen B lavender cockerel for this season.  He is a son of a nice split hen from Ribbeck\'s 2010 split x split pen.  She laid the most blue egg of any Ameraucana I have owned so far.   Fretting is minimal and there is no gold leakage and no brassiness anywhere on this bird.  I would prefer to see a tighter comb and darker eye, and I wish he were slightly larger, but overall, I like him pretty well.  He is extremely valuable to my program this year because he is producing fast feather offspring for me.

The females in this pen are all Smith splits with nice size, excellent feather quality, and from a female line that lays really big eggs.  One was shown by Cloverleaf Farm, with a nice Champion AOSB win in Oregon.  Eye color and wingset is also superior in these birds.  Most of my keepers this year will be from this pen.

[crystalcreek]

Smith split pullet.

[crystalcreek]

This is the lavender cock that was used to make the Smith splits, including the pullet shown above.

[John]

I am still using blacks to improve my lavenders,

That is a good idea and something that should always be available to us.
Congratulations on the improvements you\'ve made.  The lavender cock, in the photo, looks extra fluffy and reducing that fluff in his offspring will give you more to work on.

[crystalcreek]

He did carry excess fluff, especially as a young cockerel.  Here is a picture of him after he was a year old.  Eliminating excess fluff is not the only battle--low wingset, sloppy tails, messy combs, fretting,  slow feather, gold leakage, poor egg color,  feathered shanks.  You name it, we\'ve had it.

He nicked well on the Smith pure black hens I had and the offspring they produced were very nice.  I no longer have those hens because I lost several adult birds this past summer during the epic drought and heat wave of the century here in Texas.  If I had them, this pen B cockerel would be in with them instead of their daughters.   I do have some chicks ordered from Paul to replace them.  My gameplan is to go back to pure black with the offspring produced this year by the pen B cockerel and the Smith split females.

After reading this, I realize that it might be a bit confusing so I wanted to clarify--Pen B had the lavender cock (the one we\'re describing as having excess fluff) in it in the 2011 breeding season with pure black Smith hens.  For the 2012 breeding season, I took females produced by that cross in 2011 and added the young lavender cockerel who is producing fast feather.  Hope that clears things up a bit.