Egg colours

I have a bit of a fascination with egg colours at present, and I am trying to get a good collection of different colours. here are is a collection of my current egg colours produced by a gold laced wyandotte, Rhode Island red, Lavender and Black aruacanas, a barred Plymouth Rock, a Wheaten French Marans, and a speckled Sussex.

Me too BJM.  My first birds 20 years ago  were Cream Legbars that lay beautiful blue eggs and I still breed them to keep the line going.  I've had a number of French Marans (copper black, copper blue, wheaten and splash) for lovely dark eggs but currently don't have any.  Pale brown eggs are no problem - we have a commercial egg unit up the road and I get the odd floor layer from there to keep up egg numbers.  I struggled to find a white egg layer until I found Exchequer Leghorns - truly stunning birds and the chicks are like little penguins.  Do you know the breed - I'll post a picture if I can get one.  I could do with some speckled eggs for the mix so must get looking.

I find that people like to buy my eggs for the colours.  I sell them at the farm gate & one day a lady, having taken some & put her money in the box, came to the house just to tell me what beautiful colours they were.

Keep us posted with your hatching progress - when are they due?

My two hens are Marigolds, and lay pure white eggs (I was quite surprised, because all my other hens have laid brown eggs, and although I know you check the little patch by their ear to see what colour eggs they lay, I hadn't looked, and had assumed they would be brown!)
We went to the poultry place yesterday to get some wood chips for the run, and had a good look at the hens there. It's probably wrong, but we've already decided what breed we want next!! Beautiful Speckedy hens - and they looked placid and well behaved. Our last hen was a Rhode Rock, and mad as a box of frogs!

We have white leghorns in Australia and they are the white egg layers...great for dying for Easter eggs! I also had an ancona, a really nice looking bird but had a jungle fowl personality, it kept flying into trees and jumping fences (so I get the mad as a what was it? a box of frogs haha!)....but it had white eggs so I put up with it for a while. I currently am tryin to work olive eggs into my flock, tried breeding with my French Marans rooster and my Aruacana but they weren't well matched, so I bought some olive eggs and have those in the incubator right now. only 12 days to go! I only had thee chicks in my last dozen, and none survived, so I am bot sure how I will go with this lot. It is a friends 'bator and I am not confidant in it's functioning....maybe I will get a new one for my birthday

http://www.newlandpoultry.com/

This is a link to the place we buy our hens and supplies - I've posted it because they have a good FAQ and information section which is very helpful, as well as some great pictures of poultry. What I was impressed with yesterday when we went there was the fact that they had laminated photos of poultry lice and stuck them up to show people what to look for, and there was also a lot of other advice about other parasites. (OK, it's a good business move, as they sell the products to get rid of the parasites, but i still thought it was helpful!)

ahh that is actually very timely thankyou! THere are teeny tiny mites in the coop right now, smaller thn I have seen before, so need to treat them asap.

This is so interesting.

I buy my eggs from the supermarket so they are always brown. I remember when I was a child eggs were always white and the occasional brown one was seen as a bit of a treat For the last don't know how many years, I've always wanted to get white eggs at Easter to dye them and never succeeded.

I too have to buy my eggs from the supermarket, and I remember just what you are saying JG - eggs always used to be thin shelled and white. Brown was a treat. Then they all changes to the current thicker shelled brown ones.

I made potato cakes last night but with some small leeks rather than spring onions because that's what I had to hand. They are rather nice dipped in egg, but I had to make do with supermarket ones. I feel a bit jealous looking at those lovely photos of multi-coloured eggs ...