Cream Legbar Chicken

Cream Legbar Chicken

These birds are both useful and beautiful! Why you say? Well because they are auto-sexing vs sex-linked they can reproduce sexed chicks for generations and you can have a self-sustaining flock. Imagine a flock customized the way you want it. A sex-linked birds are the first generation hybrids of two separate chicken breeds. They are produced by the millions each year in large commercial hatcheries. When the sex-linked chicks reach adulthood and breed with one another they will not produce visually sexable chicks in the second generation. In other words, if you want to buy visually sexable chicks (sex-linked), you would be ordering from a hatchery or feed store year after year to buy sex-linked birds. Your flock of sex-linked birds will not be a self-sustaining flock that can produce visually sexable chicks unlike the auto-sexing birds like the Legbar.

Feed Recommendations: we recommend starting baby chicks out with Sugar Feather Farm chick starter for the first 3 weeks, then switch to our Chicken Grower. Use the Grower Feed until they hit maturation (which is when they start to lay) then switch to Sugar Feather Farm Adult Feed. 

We highly recommend using the Oil of Oregano in their water daily as a supplement to aid with digestion and overall health.

History

The Cream Legbar was presented at the 1947 London Dairy Show as a new breed of cream colored autosexing chicken, friendly in temperament, and prolific layer of blue eggs. The recessive nature of the cream color, the dominate blue egg color, and the crest which sets this breed apart from its similar Legbar relations was discovered in genetic experimentation performed by Professors R.C. Punnett and Michael Pease.

Professor Punnett received blue egg laying crested Chilean hens from botanist Clarence Elliott in 1929. One of these hens led to Professor Punnett’s monumental discovery of the recessive cream color in poultry in 1931. Professor Punnett experimented with these birds at the University of Cambridge to create crested blue egg layers with the heartiness, production, plumage pattern and type of the Danish Brown Leghorns he used, except with cream replacing the gold coloring.

Later Professor Pease performed his own breeding experiments using Gold Legbars and an inbred UK type White Leghorn from Reaseheath College in Cheshire, England, which also resulted in a number of cream colored birds.

Professors Pease and Punnett bred their cream birds together to see if they had stumbled upon the same cream gene, proving it upon the hatching of all cream offspring. Descendants of these birds were selected for straight single combs, crests, production blue egg laying, and the remarkable autosexing feature that allowed the sexes to be identified at hatch. These qualities were stabilized by 1947, and The Poultry Club of Great Britain adopted a written standard in May, 1958.