Bi> (...)   The closest I come is that it *might be a Phoenix, one of the 
Bi> Japanese variety in which the roosters grow very long tails.  With my 
Bi> luck, however, it'll be a hen. 
LM> Any luck yet in determining?  I have two chicks  who
LM> I  THOUGHT were going to be Rhode Islands but i'm sorry to say, they've
LM> turned out to be "butt-ugly" in my opinion... maybe they will look
LM> better grown... They are yellowish bodied with varigated yellow and
LM> brown wings and brown heads... interesting...
    No luck yet, either determining variety or sex.  (One thing I *don't 
know how to do is sex chicks.)  It's a creamy yellow chick with black legs 
and is very leggy (tall).  It's really easy to tell it from the rest of the 
chicks because of the difference in color.
    As far as your chicks go, Rhodes are generally a light brown all over, 
about the same shade, perhaps a little lighter, as the adult feathers.  There 
are a couple possibilities for what yours are, but I couldn't put my finger 
on it.  Did the hatchery sell them to you as Rhodes?  Sounds like youve got 
something more unusual than that.  If they turn out to be brown egg layers,  
one possibility is the Speckeled Sussex.  As a white egg layer they may be 
the Brown Leghorn.
 
Bi> (...) and even get an  occasional double yolker.
LM> How do you get a double yolker?
    Just get lucky with a chicken that's prone to laying them.  We dont get 
many any more, they were more regular when they first started laying.  From 
my experience, both now and when I was younger, Rocks are the most likely to 
lay a double yolker.  When we were younger, it was the White Giants that did 
it most often.  Now I believe it's one of my Barred Rocks.
    The most fun right now is that I have an incubator with 14 Guinea eggs 
sitting next to me here in our computer/bird room. (We also keep and breed 
several varieties of pet birds.)  The first eggs have been in there for 26 
days and the rest were put in ovr the span of a week.  They're supposed to 
take 28 days to hatch, but the first four are begining to crack and you can 
hear chipping and peeping going on.  Looks like I'm going to be a Dad soon.
    We have ten Guinea Hens which we got because they have an exellant 
reputation for eating wood ticks.  We got them last year at the same time we 
got our first chickens and overwintered them with the rest of the flock.  One 
of them started laying (a total of 16 eggs, but I didnt catch the first two 
early enough and so didn't take a chance) and we decided to throw them in the 
incubator just for fun.  We just moved the Guineas out to a coop on the lawn 
where they'll stay for a week before we turn them loose on the farm.
    More on other happenings this weekend in a seperate post.
        Byrd Mann
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