06/22/2026
If you have followed me for a while, you know that I always say “I never let my birds free range during breeding season”, I’ve never been willing to take the risk.
This weekend I broke my own rule and I paid the price for not following my own personal policy.
It’s a post I wouldn’t ever want to make, I didn’t loose a couple birds, I lost 6 years of breeding into a multi generation olive egger line. I lost the entire bunch. Every single one gone.
One of the best roosters I’ve worked with, my absolute favorite little teal laying hen, a silver olive egger, several f3 hens, and my f2 that’s lays the super intense dark olive. A couple piped super dark laying Marans hens and welsummer. There are literally piles from one end of my property to the next. Some of the lilies tell me exactly which bird it was, I knew them by their piles.
It wasn’t an infrastructure issue, my pens are like fort Knox. I broke my own policy, and bc they were the only ones out and because it’s not my normal routine free range this time of year, I forgot to close them up. I left them open all night long.
My water color egger pen has been having snake after snake this year. Robbing the broody of eggs, and at one point two snakes at once, so it’s been throwing me off my normal practice of being with the birds, putting my hands on them, checking them, watching them walk, eat etc, the olive egger pen is the largest and also the darkest pen bc it’s attached to a shed not free standing. I let them out so I could see them really good and observe them and hang out with them. And then I forgot them and fell asleep without securing them properly.
Over the next couple days I’ll be reaching out privately to anyway who is waiting on olive eggers, or rainbow dozens. Either I will refund your deposit or alter your order.
I still have my f1 olive egger rooster here who started my line. He’s the best rooster I’ve ever had and I wasn’t filling him so he’s been hanging around. I have two f3 olive hens here and I have 2 f2 olive hens, one of which paired with this particular f1 male is the cross that produced that insanely dark olive you see in some of my photos.
I planned to pair them this season to hatch for myself. He’s old, he’s 6 years old, so I can’t give him but a few hens.so my plan is to put him back over that f2 and the two f3s. He carries a heavy speckle gene.
I still have some backcross3-4 olives under the welsummer (so there are still speckled olives this season)
However in order to give fair advertising as to what “multi gen” means for the rest of this season it means f2 offspring and late generation speckled olives.
I haven’t been regularly testing the speckled olives because if you remember my welsummer had frost bit toes and he did loos his toes. They self amputated and look great, and he functions as a normal chicken. He does have fertility in the pen! I just haven’t confirmed it to be consistent yet.
I feel confident enough in the f1 cross with this particular hens to fill chick orders for sure and to probably still fill rainbow dozens too.
I’ll need to put them together wait about two weeks (and start testing fertility) and start testing to double check speckled olive fertility too. Depending on how fertility looks with the new groups will depend on if I feel confident to ship olive dozens. As of right now I’m leaning towards no only bc both boys are older, I usually add a heavier number of multi generation into the dozens and frankly, I’ve had enough stress this year and need to just be done as easy as possible.
All of my birds are stressed out right now. I’m not pushing any of them to perform. I’m not testing fertility in any of them this week and maybe not the next. I’ll be moving birds around, tending to them and working through the stress with them. THEN I’ll resume trying to get orders filled. Please done message me right now about your order. I’m still processing the magnitude of my loss (years of work in that line) and I really don’t care for the pressure of the business side of it right now.
I will absolutely reach out to anyone waiting on olives in the next several days and we will talk about the new option and what you want to do. Yes I realize everyone is still waiting on watercolor eggers. They were having their own trims with this multiple snake issue. I moved them to a new pen which was next to where this attack happened. My birds are stressed out, I’m giving them a little time before I start pushing for performance again.
