I was right to expect several more hatchlings yesterday. In the first two boxes, the chicks must have hatched at close intervals. I'm not able to tell which chick is the older one. But in the third box, which is Maude's, I can see that her older chick has had time to grow bigger than the younger one.
It doesn't really matter if I get the oldest two chicks mixed up. Whichever one gets big enough to wear a leg ring first will be assumed to be the oldest. And even if I put them backwards in my records, the hatch date would only be off by one day.
The only thing to keep track of at this stage would be eye color.
It doesn't really matter if I get the oldest two chicks mixed up. Whichever one gets big enough to wear a leg ring first will be assumed to be the oldest. And even if I put them backwards in my records, the hatch date would only be off by one day.
The only thing to keep track of at this stage would be eye color.
So far all of the chicks have normal black eyes. That doesn't indicate anything about their genetics. But plum colored or red eyes would, so those I will want to keep track of. Red eyes stay red for life, but plum colored eyes turn to black around 10 days old. Fortunately, I can usually get the numbered leg ring onto a chick while the eyes are still plum, so I then have a permanent record of what color eyes each chick was born with.
The reason that could be important is because hatching with plum eyes indicates either cinnamon, double factor spangle, or recessive pied. But on some chicks the cinnamon can be hard to distinguish. (Greywing will mask it.) So knowing the chick was born with plum eyes lets me know that it carries one or more of those mutations, regardless of what it ends up looking like.
I am expecting cinnamon in Collin and Astrid's clutch and recessive pied in Seaweed and Tiffany's clutch. Daniel and Maude might have the potential to produce recessive pied as well, if Maude inherited it from her mother, Finnie. (And just to confuse matters further, of the many recessive pied chicks I have produced, not a single one of them hatched with plum colored eyes, so I am beginning to believe that plum eyes and recessive pied are not necessarily connected.)
I am also hoping for red eyes from two of the pairs, which indicates the "ino" mutation. (Ino means lutino, albino or creamino.) I know that Seaweed is split to ino, since he produced creamino daughters last time I bred him. And Collin is Seaweed's son, so there is a 50% chance that Collin inherited the ino gene from him. If Collin did inherit it, then he can produce red-eyed daughters as well.
With this many eggs, I'm sure we will get some red and plum eyed chicks sooner or later.