Spring has come around again, and spring means Easter! Today I’d like to talk about Easter and about Easter Eggers. It’s your season, everyone!
Easter and colorful eggs
Easter is the Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus. The Easter bunny, a symbol of new life, hides colorful eggs for children to find. People used to hide painted eggs; these days they fill plastic eggs with candy.
Easter Eggers are known for laying eggs that look like Easter eggs. Blue is the famous color, but there are pinkish and purplish eggs too: the bloom, the coating that protects an egg, varies by hen, and a bluish bloom over a brown egg looks purple.
Easter Eggers are really more of a group than a breed. Thousands of years ago, a virus happened to infect an ancestor of the chicken and changed its genes so that it laid blue eggs. People bred the darkest blue layers, which led to the Ameraucana. Ameraucanas are delicate and rare, but the blue-egg gene is strong, so crossing them with ordinary brown-egg layers gives blue, green, pink or purple eggs, as if the colors were mixed. In the US, Easter Eggers are sometimes sold under an Ameraucana-like name at a higher price. That’s just a sales tactic, so be careful.
Our Easter Eggers
Most Easter Eggers in the US are orangey brown like Tease-chan, light yellowish orange like Pro Wrestler (who just pecked me, ouch!), or dark brown like Poppy 2. White ones are rare: ours are Suzume and Yukinko. And we have just one black one, Black Tiger, who lays beautifully shaped olive eggs. Olive takes dark brown plus bright blue, so she may be part Cuckoo Marans or something similar. (Four years ago I bought a box of 20 unsold birds without choosing; most were orange.)
Meet Sonata
Sonata is our only Easter Egger rooster, and my very first rooster. He spaces out and moves like a grandpa, though he’s only four. As a chick he was sold as a hen, then returned to the store because the owner couldn’t keep a rooster. I couldn’t wait for blue eggs, so I jumped the gun. He was a rooster, so my first blue egg came six months later.
Blogs said Easter Egger roosters are hard to tame and often aggressive. Not at all: he became the gentlest rooster in the world. His pneumonia tends to flare up when the seasons change. His coloring is unusual too. He was ash gray with beautiful red when young, and he’s gradually turning reddish brown, with gorgeous red feathers toward his tail.
Thank you for watching Chicken Paradise Hawaii! See you in the next episode.