My email inbox has been buzzing with links to yesterday’s NYT Straight From the Home Coop story. It’s a great article and includes recipes as well as anecdotes from urban and rural flock keepers. While reading it, I was reminded yet again of the mysterious and soothing effect a flock of hens has on the soul.
Those wise little feathered ladies know how to mark the rhythms of the day: rouse with the first light of dawn, preen and peck, then forage in the yard for morning bugs. After that, it’s time to get to work – there are eggs to be laid and egg songs to be sung. Loudly! More bug searches ensue and then, perhaps it’s time to find a sun-lit spot for a relaxing dirt bath. Late afternoon walkabouts to work off all the treats that have been begged that day and finally, time to cluck softly about the day’s events and meander back to the coop as the light fades into the western sky. Good work if you can get it!
Tulip and Hope seem to have worked out the nest arrangement.
Much of what I read in the article was already familiar to me – I’ve seen first hand the uptick in egg-laying as winter passes to spring and daylight hours lengthen – we’ve been spoiled with eggs of late! And I knew that the chocolate-brown eggs from Black Copper Marans like our Tulip were designated by Ian Fleming as James Bond’s favorites.
Our very own 007 egg from Tulip!
But I hadn’t heard about the Cream Legbar; a breed that sounds like a yummy confection and lays a pretty blue egg.
The venerable Greenfire Farms, which claims to be the only U.S. source of the breed, provides an informative description of the Cream Legbar’s history on their web site. Developed in England from a cross of the brown leghorn, the barred Plymouth Rock, and the South American Araucana, the Cream Leghorn combines the prolific laying ability of a Leghorn with the colorful egg of the Araucana and makes for a lovely little lady of a hen. I’m guessing the inclusion of Barred Rock makes for a more settled temperament since Leghorns are known to be flighty.
A Cream Legbar hen (image from parcydelyn.co.uk)
This image from poultrykeeper.com shows the egg of a Cream Legbar to be slightly bluer than that of an Araucana.
For flock keepers, in addition to the lovely eggs, a major benefit of the Cream Legbar is that they are what is known as an auto-sexing breed, meaning that the pattern and coloring of the newly-hatched chick is different in the male than the female so that the birds can be easily sexed.
I thought I had every chicken breed I wanted, and now along comes the Cream Legbar. Little Luna had better watch out – if she doesn’t decide to lay an egg pretty soon, she could find herself swapped out for better model!
She looks more like a llama than a chicken - maybe that's why she doesn't lay?
Polloplayer 
I wonder if I should put one of my pretty eggs in the basket I am donating at the Senior Lunch tomorrow but tell them it is uncooked. They are a real gift from the flock!
Supermodels don’t lay, silly goose. #lunaistoopretty
I love it! I just ordered some cream legbar hatching eggs… blogging about everything is a hoot but I keep returning to the topics of chickens. I must have lost my mind to these creatures.
Just wondering about the success of your hatching cream legbar eggs. Where did you get your eggs from? We recvd13 from My Pet Chicken and only had 3 hatch…..It was our first attempt at incubating and we wish we knew what went wrong. MPetChicken sent me a form letter back, when I asked for help. We had a new totally automatic digital incubator.Is it common for the eggs to be very different sizes and soiled with feces when they arrive? They did not respond to this question. They cost 10 dollars per egg which is bad enough…but the disappointment was very hard for my adult daughter who is mentally disabled. We also purchased 12 BCMarans eggs. Only one hatched and it died after 2 very weak days of life. Same order. When we cracked the unhatched eggs, there were only 3 others that looked like they might have begun to develop. Any advice you might offer would be appreciated.
Hi there and thanks for visiting Polloplayer.
I have not hatched any legbar eggs but I would like to! I’ve never ordered hatching eggs from My Pet Chicken but I did order day-old chicks from them and I was very happy with the birds and with the service from MPC. Have you called them? Whenever I have had to call them they were always very helpful on the phone.
From what I’ve read about hatching eggs, things can easily go awry for any number of reasons. The Backyard Chickens web site forums have lots of threads about it. I hope you have a better experience next time.
Over the years I’ve found that there seem to be a lot of problems around using small incubators whether fully automated or not – in fact the less automated ones seem to perform better. And a broody hen performs best of all. For beginners day old chicks are a better bet. I don’t know the company in question (since I live on a different continent). I wonder too whether the eggs could have got either chilled, over heated, or dried out between the supplier and you (or damp). There are an awful lot of things that can go wrong in the course of shipment. Do you know anyone close to you who would give you half a dozen mixed breed (as in goodness knows what it is but there was a known to be fertile cock running with known to be fertile hens) to check out your incubator with. Of course this means that you’ll probably finish up with half a dozen too small to eat male birds or females that eat everything in sight but don’t lay eggs, but at least you’ll know if you have a problem with the incubator. There is a good reason why you find so many second hand small incubators for sale. And wow! ten dollars for Cream Legbar eggs – they are about two dollars here in Ireland. I’ve got a couple of interesting mixture hens at the moment and I’m trying to work out who is laying a very pretty olive green egg
Blue eggs… reminds me of a picture my granddaughters colored for me today at lunch after church. They thought blue was the perfect color for both the eggs… and the carrots!
I have not read any of your stuff yet (and my word, there seems to be a lot to get through!) I am reasonably new to blogging, but I know, just from your tagline ‘searching for the meaning in life through the occasional poultry epiphany’ I am just going to love you posts!
Thanks so much for discovering Polloplayer – it looks like we both love chickens!