dragonlady7

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Possible! Barred Rocks are a common colorway of the venerable Plymouth Rock https://www.thehappychickencoop.com/plymouth-rock-chicken/ heritage breed. Henrietta is one of about 400 hen chicks purchased last year to be the egg flock for the farm, and at the same time, we bought a run of I think ten young male chicks from a different breeder, so that they’d be unrelated; the idea was to use those eggs to hatch out a new batch of chicks this year, to replace the egg hens next year on a multi-year cycle. (Egg-laying hens take at least six months to mature, and produce for two to three years before their productivity tapers off. The high-production hybrids we’ve used in the past tend to spontaneously die around this time, but we’re not sure how these heritage hens will do as replacements. They do seem a little less insane…)

But Henrietta was free-ranging, not closed in with the other chickens; it’s not likely her eggs were fertilized by any of those Barred Rock roosters, but rather more likely they were fertilized by a rooster I bought a few years back (as part of a batch of Fancy Chickens, because I wanted Fancy Chickens), who has escaped and promoted himself to free-ranging– he’s about four years old, and has been roaming the barnyard identifiably for about two or three of those years, and he is a purebred Silver-Spangled Hamburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg_chicken.

So– if they are hybrids, it’s hard to say what they’ll look like. But Silver Spangled Hamburgs are polka-dotted, and in fact Lil Roo, for so the little hamburg rooster is called around here, looks like nothing so much as a fellow in a neat suit featuring a polka-dotted waistcoat and knee breeches, with a white tailcoat and cravat. He’s very attractive and extremely attentive, and has a little flock of three other Barred Rock ladies that he escorts around the barnyard very busily. [image: image]

[img description: the aforementioned Lil Roo, patrolling next to the feed wagon; he is a smallish chicken whose translucent white hackle feathers from his neck are mostly covering the black polka dots on his white wings. he has a very keen brown eye with which he is regarding the camera speculatively.]

We’ve tentatively named the new hybrids Hamrocks. We’ll see; a hen can lay fertilized eggs for quite a while after a single encounter with a rooster, so it’s possible Henrietta actually did not involve Lil Roo in this business at all. We won’t know until the chicks mature, if we even know then. (Your picture was not posted)