Ameraucana vs Easter Egger: Splash Color Genetics, Melanin, and Wing Banding Deep Dive – w/ Gina from Wrather Farms

Welcome back to the Poultry Nerds Podcast! In this episode, we're joined again by Gina from Wrather Farms as we dive deep into the genetics, color varieties, and mislabeling surrounding the Splash Ameraucana. What's the difference between a true Ameraucana vs. Easter Egger? We break it all down – from melanin expression, APA standards, and blue egg genetics to leg color, pea combs, and the reality of chick color at hatch.

You'll also learn the truth about breeding Splash to Splash, the genetic pyramid behind feather coloring, and whether or not those "chipmunk stripe" chicks are really what the hatchery says they are.

Plus — we nerd out on wing banding techniques, color dilution, and using spreadsheets to track flock data like pros. If you're working with Ameraucana chickens, curious about color genetics, or just trying to avoid getting sold an “Americana” imposter, this one’s for you.

#Ameraucana #EasterEgger #PoultryPodcast #SplashAmeraucana #ChickenGenetics #BackyardChickens #BlueEggs #HatchingTime #ColorGenetics #WingBanding #APAStandards #ChickenBreeds #PoultryNerdsPodcast

Valley Hatchery is a proud sponsor of Poultry Nerds, find more at ValleyHatchery.com

Transcript

Jennifer 0:01

Welcome poultry nerds. We are back again with Gina from Wrather Farms I'm gonna butcher your name.

Carey 0:11

That's what I thought. While we're name dropping, let's make sure it's right.

Jennifer 0:17

Look, I, so I had the

Carey 0:19

privilege to go by there the other day and see some of the stuff that I've heard her talk about. And I'm just gonna say for those listeners that can't see me holding two thumbs up, two thumbs up.

Jennifer 0:32

Aw, thank you. So I've seen pictures of her store on our Facebook page. It's cute.

Carey 0:37

Look, it is really neat. Like when you pull up and it's, boom, here it is. And you walk in and you feel like you're in a monstrous store, and it's got everything there. And then all the. She looks like a hatching time commercial behind her. Which, we can, we on here, we understand and support each other's addictions. Yeah. So we get it. But it was really nice

Gina 1:01

works, man. Hatching time has done us good. Really good. Yep. Yep.

Jennifer 1:08

They do. So today we've gone through all of your breeds and we're hitting the last one, I think.

Gina 1:14

Oh, we haven't talked about the black copper maran.

Jennifer 1:18

Oh no. We're gonna put them on hold. So today we're talking about splashing the maran. We actually got some requests to talk about this, and that's when I messaged you and I said, Hey, we've got requests to talk about these genetics. So first of all, I wanna start with the most basic of basic. What's the difference between an Americana. An Americana.

Gina 1:45

Oh yeah. Okay. So if you see birds advertised as, Hey, Americana, chicks for sale, they're probably not true Americana. So anyone that breeds true Americana is always going to proceed The Americana name with the Keller variety, there are 10. A PA recognized color varieties for Americana and a number of project varieties. So anyone that is doing the breed or trying to do the breed, any kind of justice, is always gonna specify what color variety they're working with. The chicks that you see at Tractor Supply, the Americana spelled with an I and I've even seen 'em spell it correctly with the a u. They are not actually Americana. The Americana, with one exception, the silver Americana will never have chipmunk striped chi down. So if you look in a bin or you look in, you know somebody's brooder and they tell you that they have Americana and they have chipmunk stripes, they are Easter Eggers.

Jennifer 3:00

Oh, you just got a whole bunch of people hitting the off switch right there,

Gina 3:05

or they had an aha moment as that was a key thing for me. When I first started learning about Americana, I was like, wait a minute. All of these chicks in the bin at TSC have stripes and I'm a fool for chipmunk stripes. I love the wild type chick down. But then I looked at, the good breeders of Americana and none of those chicks had stripes. And I said, what's the difference here? And that was before I really got deep into the color genetics. So that splash recognized,

Carey 3:40

like the color genetics thing is a rabbit hole that you can get on and not look back.

Gina 3:48

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Flash is a recognized variety as of November 20, 23. They are a PA recognized.

Jennifer 3:57

And that was the show that you went to that got you the show bug, didn't it? If I remember correctly,

Gina 4:03

I actually wasn't able to get away to attend that show, so that was the first show that I was an exhibitor, but I was not in attendance. Lindsay Hilton. She was kind enough to take a bird up there for me and show on my behalf and yeah. I was like, I don't want to miss this again.

Jennifer 4:24

Yeah. So now you got the show bug, huh?

Gina 4:28

I do, and I'm sitting out show season this spring because everything's in breeding pins. I don't really have anything ready. I didn't. Didn't raise much of anything last fall except for the I sha so I don't have any pulls. I don't have any Cockrell. I am going to the show in Dixon in two weeks and I'll take what I've got. But yeah, I don't have much, but I still I need my fix, so I'm going,

Carey 4:56

it's a thing.

Gina 4:57

I'll be there too. Awesome. I think it's gonna be a really good show. Yeah. Yeah. It's an Americana Breeders Club meet. It's an Americana Alliance meet, and I think it's a meet for many other breed clubs, and we're gonna have a bunch of I'm chimani there too. Awesome.

Carey 5:14

That's pretty awesome.

Gina 5:16

Yeah.

Jennifer 5:18

Okay, so back to the Americana thing. Do you have any idea why the hatchery started calling the Easter Eggers Americana?

Gina 5:29

That is a great question. I don't know. Really don't know. You've stumped me. Stu me. Yeah. Hey, I'm not afraid to say, I dunno something. I'm not gonna just make something up. Yeah, it's always irked me, but I've never said why do they do this? Other than I feel like it's deceitful. I can't think of any other reason. It's like the Rhode Island Red. They're not real Rhode Island Reds not in my book. Not at TSC. Yep. Yeah.

Jennifer 6:04

All right. Since we're, just because it's red doesn't mean it

Carey 6:06

has that mahogany look.

Gina 6:09

No.

Jennifer 6:11

Since we don't know the answer, do you wanna continue with the show or we wanna end right here?

Carey 6:18

If we so much more to

Jennifer 6:18

talk

Carey 6:18

about if we did that. We would never hit a rabbit hole and we would never discover anything.

Jennifer 6:24

Nope.

Carey 6:25

Can't give up. All

Jennifer 6:26

right, so well, let's talk about Splash. So tell us the basis of Splash. Where does it come from? So think

Gina 6:37

of Splash as a dilution. So when you hear about splash, you always or often see people say BBS comes from A BBS pen, and BBS is black, blue Splash.

Jennifer 6:54

And splash

Gina 6:55

is two dilution of blue on black. So you go black and you add in a dilution gene, like adding creamer to your coffee. All right. I'm gonna add a little bit of creamer and it's gonna lighten that coffee up. So it's gonna lighten the black to blue, and then if a bird gets two copies of blue, one from each parent, then that's when you get into splash territory. So you add a double dose of coffee creamer and you get even lighter. But the cool thing about Splash is that. The tricky thing about Splash really is that while you want to double up on that blue dilution, to get the splash color you need to try to keep the melons that make the blue feathers that the splash does get pop. So you'll hear people say you can't breed Splash to splash, because when you do that, eventually you're just gonna end up with a white bird if you keep doing it several generations. I. But what's happening when that does happen is that people aren't paying attention to the subtle details in the blue feathers that they did get in that first generation or that second generation, and they're unintentionally breeding out their meins that they needed to hold onto while reading those splash. So it is possible to have an exclusively splash block. And work to keep good color.

Jennifer 8:32

Interesting. So

Carey 8:35

now I couldn't imagine somebody could not keeping good records and letting that happen,

Gina 8:39

nobody does that.

Jennifer 8:41

It's hard. I've been known to just, records is hard. Yeah. It's, you get so busy and you mess 'em up too. Okay, so you're starting with a black bird and then you have a blue bird. Do you have to keep a black or a blue to I don't know emphasize the splash more later, I guess is the word I'm looking for, rejuvenate it.

Gina 9:02

A lot of people do. And the reason for that is so on a bluebird, a good blue Americana. We'll have a darker lacing around the edge of the feather, and on a blue you can clearly see that. You can see whether they have the mein or not. And I say the mein, technically they should have two copies of the melan, a Meno gene, and they should also have two copies of the pattern gene. So you can look at a blue and you can say, that's a good blue. That bird has good color. On a splash, it's a little bit more difficult and it's more difficult on the females than it is on the males. So when people do screw up or their birds start getting lighter and lighter, it is common practice to go back to the blue so they can pull their melons back in. But when you do that, you only pulled one copy of the meins back in. Let's say you went back to a blue cop, so you're only. Your offspring is still only gonna be heterozygous for the melanins that you need. You still need to work to get your splash homozygous, which is a key thing in any variety, is that you have homozygosity that will read through.

Jennifer 10:27

Okay? I don't know anything about Splash because I don't breed it and I don't need to know it. So I'm trying to think of questions from a completely ignorant side of the ball game here. So the splash pattern, is that a distinct pattern or can those splash swatches come up anywhere on the bird?

Gina 10:51

It can come up anywhere. The males, typically it's still sexually, dimorphic, plumage, we call it. And that's when the boys look different than the girls. So the males are still going to have a darker head and shoulders all the way through the tail. The females are going to be a little bit more evenly colored.

Jennifer 11:11

Gotcha, gotcha. But, and so these, but the color

Gina 11:14

can pop up anywhere on the body.

Jennifer 11:17

Okay. So these melons you're talking about, how do you see those?

Gina 11:23

In the, in my females, I will look at individual feathers, whether I have to lift that feather up, put my hand underneath it, and I'm looking for the lacing that I would be looking for. In a blue, you can stand way back off of a blue and you could see all of that lacing would be splash. You have to look at feathers individually.

Carey 11:44

Now when you're talking about the lacing, what does that look like? Is it like similar to barring is the way it follows around? How does it look?

Gina 11:54

It's not true lacing. It's technically, I guess probably called edging. Okay. And there's some argument as to whether it is a truly darker edge on the feather. Or if it only appears to be darker when it's laid over another colored feather. And so what I want to do with my splash, and this is why I say I, I lift the feather up, lay it in my hand, or i'll pluck the feather. I want to see a definite darker border all the way around the edge of that feather where it has color and it's just on the edge.

Jennifer 12:35

So it's kinda like when you're coloring a little kid is coloring in the coloring book and then they have the outline of the color.

Gina 12:42

Yes, that is exactly, that's a great analogy.

Jennifer 12:47

Yeah. It's just chickens. Chickens aren't that hard until we start breaking them apart into pieces which we tend to do well. We are nerds. It's, yep. So do the splash Americana have blue legs? They have what Color? Color? Legs? Light. Color legs. Cool. And is that easily kept for color or is that bleed out to If you don't pay attention, it's

Gina 13:17

pretty easily kept. So it the leg color follows the extension of black locust, the extension of black jean. The splash are, they can be built on er, which is virgin, or they can be built on the actual extension of black, extended black. Either one works, but that leg color kind of follows that along with a lack of inhibitor or an inhibitor of dermal melanin. A lack of that will give them that darker leg.

Jennifer 13:54

Interesting. Okay. And then they have a beat of the comb. Their comb is, which kind? They have a Pete comb. I wanted to call it a be comb and I was like, no, that's

Gina 14:13

should be. Low in the front and low and tight to the head and the back. Raised in the middle. You want three nice clean rows of peas, and that goes for any Americana. Pretty much. Same for the slate legs, the Americana standard for almost every color variety calls for slate legs. The Americana as a breed as a whole is described as a medium sized ve. So many. Medium is the most commonly referenced word in the Americana standard. You know your tail is the medium link. Your beak is a medium link. Your saddle's a mediumly, your beard and your mouths, your neck, your back, your thighs, your shanks. Everything is medium.

Carey 14:55

Is what is medium,

Gina 14:57

exactly. It's not. Is

Carey 14:59

medium fist width or is it like fist and stick your pinky out to the side. Are we talking like somewhere between a game foul and a large foul? What?

Jennifer 15:12

Yeah. All those things. Yeah.

Carey 15:14

So they define it as medium. They don't have I think game foul is like five pounds, two ounces or something like that, and they have different style ranges. But like they just, for the Americana's, they just say medium.

Gina 15:32

The Americana Cox should be six and a half pounds. Okay. He should be five and a half pounds.

Carey 15:38

Okay.

Jennifer 15:40

Yeah, those are little tiny chickens.

Carey 15:44

Yeah, those, so I'm guessing those are just for. WW would that be considered a dual purpose bird?

Gina 15:54

They are considered a dual purpose bird. And the Americana from my line anyway that I've processed, I had been I not disappointed with them as table birds. They grow fairly fast. I've got I'm growing out my Rhode Island reds and my Americana together. My Rhode Island reds they're tall, they're lanky. They take much, much longer to finish out. My Americana excess cock rolls. They they finish out pretty good and they'll have more meat on them than the reds at the same age. Yeah. And they're not they're not terrible layers at all.

Jennifer 16:35

Okay so we haven't talked about the laying yet. So they lay blue eggs, right? They do, yeah. Is it like a robin's egg blue or like a sky blue, or can you brief for a different blue

Gina 16:48

range of colors that are acceptable for Americana? Some of them range from pretty green to. Robin's egg blue. The robin's egg blue is pretty rare, but somewhere in the middle is where most of us fall.

Jennifer 17:08

And,

Gina 17:08

There are those that select for egg color. I've done that a little bit, but I've got some greener layers in my flock that I'm holding onto because they have some confirmation traits that I want to keep. And I'm not ready to cull for egg color just yet. So

Jennifer 17:28

do, yeah. Does the blue get lighter with the season or with the age of the hen? I have

Gina 17:35

not experienced that in my birds. My best, my biggest bluest layer, she will hold onto her color right to the end of her cycle. I don't, I'm not sure what drives that. I know it's really common in like the cream leg bars. I hear that a lot, that they'll start off really blue and by the time they get done to, down to the end of their cycle, they're, very pale. But yeah, I have not experienced that in my Americana.

Jennifer 18:04

Does the Blue Egg taste different than the White Egg? Of

Gina 18:07

course

Jennifer 18:08

it does.

Carey 18:09

Yes. Yes. It's just like saladon eggs. They taste different.

Gina 18:15

An egg is an egg unless it's a duck egg and then it's fantastic

Jennifer 18:19

uhhuh. Yep. I see that question a lot on social media. Fertilized eggs, blue eggs. Do they taste different? An egg is an egg, I think. I can't tell a difference.

Gina 18:30

That's one of the moron claim to fame is that moron eggs tastes better.

Jennifer 18:36

Uhhuh. Yeah. Yeah. I can't tell a difference.

Gina 18:40

No, I can't either.

Carey 18:43

That's, you want people go

Gina 18:47

right, Carrie?

Carey 18:49

I was gonna say there's, you can tell a difference when you taste them, when you feed them differently. But I don't know about the eggs. I know you could

Gina 18:56

tell a difference when you feed them too much fish meal.

Carey 19:00

Now you get a little heavy handed with a fish meal during breeding season and you accidentally go to eat one of those. Taste a little fishy. You'd

Gina 19:10

be sorry. Is terrible. I've done it twice now and I don't ever wanna do it again.

Jennifer 19:17

So you are just keeping Splash on Splash in the pen. Are you keeping blues and blacks also?

Gina 19:24

I'm not. I am exclusively Splash.

Jennifer 19:28

So you've you've stunned me. I just was under the impression that you had to keep a BBS pen. So

Gina 19:35

that's what everyone

Jennifer 19:36

I'm really stunned. So if you kept a, let's just say you kept a b, S pen and you have one of each, does that mean you're just gonna get a variety in the chicks also, when they hatch? So

Gina 19:51

if you put a, let's say you've got a black male over blue females, you're gonna get 50% hatch black, 50% hatch blue because those females are going to have one blue gene in themselves that they can pass to their chicks 50% of the time. If you put a black over splash hens, the splash is gonna contribute one blue gene 100% of the time. So 100% of your chicks there will be blue. It'll be one dilution on black. If you have a blue male on splash ends, you can get blue or splash. Yeah, you can just keep mixing it up. All of this, you have to have a strategy ideally, unless you're just multiplying.

Carey 20:49

Whoa. You wanna have a plan?

Gina 20:52

Yeah, ideally

Carey 20:55

I thought it was just a hatching addiction. I have a question.

Jennifer 21:01

Okay.

Carey 21:02

Have you noticed with them having the melan gene, do they have some of the same hatchability issues that other breed with a melanin gene have?

Gina 21:16

No, the melanins that they have are common to a lot of breeds,

Jennifer 21:21

right?

Gina 21:21

There are a lot of different meins. There are plumage melons, there are skin tissue, organ bone melons,

Jennifer 21:31

Gotcha.

Gina 21:32

These are pretty much just plumage melons and I should say one mein in the meno gene, and then the pattern gene, which just organizes the black color. It doesn't. Recognize it.

Carey 21:51

Okay. I was curious how that was worked with them because I don't know a lot about Americana's. I have not gotten into that rabbit hole. But I was curious about the other, I recently got sent down one rabbit hole about a me gene and hatchability issues and trying to figure that out. And I was wondering if. All the melan genes were tied together or just how different they were still in the, trying to figure all that out.

Gina 22:24

I think you get into the hatchability issues when you try to stack all of those meins.

Jennifer 22:31

Okay,

Carey 22:34

that

Jennifer 22:34

makes sense. So gimme an example of stacking them.

Gina 22:38

So I think of chicken colored genetics as a pyramid. So if you think about the base of your pyramid, every chicken in the world is going to be either silver or gold based. That's gonna be your foundation. So we're talking splash Americana today. We'll say the splash Americana should be silver based. And then the next layer of the pyramid up, every chicken in the world has some sort of, or one of the five extensions of black. That they need to be homozygous for, meaning they inherit a copy from both parents, which is what causes any variety to bring breed. True. Okay. So for the splash Americana, it's going to either be extended black itself or burin. So then the third level of the pyramid, we know that we need the metic gene or the, I'm sorry. We'll back up. We'll say blue. All right, so we've got this silver based bird who's gonna be black with the extended black allele. Then we're gonna add the blue dilution. So we're gonna turn it into a blue bird two copies of blue, or going to turn it into a splash. Then I'm gonna stack another level on the pyramid, and I'm gonna add in the metic gene, which is going to give a little bit more color to those. Double diluted feathers. And then I'm gonna add another LE level to the pyramid, and I'm gonna add the pattern gene, which is gonna push some of that extra melanin right to the edge of the feather and give us that lacing or edging. And that's how you build a ticket.

Jennifer 24:28

Okay, so I thought of something that somebody might not realize. So when you take the birds to the shows, it doesn't, it's not going to matter if your bird came from a BBS pen or a true splash pen. Okay. Because they're just being judged on the phenotype at the shows.

Carey 24:54

Correct.

Jennifer 24:54

And the judge doesn't know if it came from a exclusive splash pen versus a mixed pen,

Carey 25:03

nor does he care. He does know who your daddy is.

Gina 25:07

No. And you can get good results both ways genetically. They can be the. If you have your genetics you can breed splash to splash perpetually, but your genetics have to be right. Yeah.

Jennifer 25:26

Cool. Do these birds come in banham or only large foul?

Gina 25:32

Yes. So I, every variety of Americana also comes in a bantam size. I don't know, which, I'm not hip on all the Banham news. But for the most part, all the a PA accepted large file varieties are also a b, a accepted, except I don't think that splash is a VA accepted yet. I think that they just got self blue bantams accepted last fall.

Jennifer 26:11

Yeah. All right. Interesting. Yeah. Everything's a work in progress. That's true. Once you grasp in the chicken world that everything is a work in progress to some point. Then you realize that you just jump on the train and keep on trekking with everybody else.

Carey 26:31

In some instances it helps with your anxiety when you're trying to perfect your line. In some instances, it makes it worse knowing that it's a work in progress. I guess if other people are having the same problem, you are you don't feel by yourself. But once you've improved the line so much. It's it's a thing.

Jennifer 26:53

Yeah.

Gina 26:54

So a splash to splash. I just wanted to, there's a one breeder in mind in particular that has been working on proving that you can breed Splash to Splash successfully and. Generation after generation, he has some splash that look almost ermine. He's got his melons down

Carey 27:17

all right, so

Gina 27:18

that's for me too.

Carey 27:20

I have a question that probably all of our listeners have been waiting over 20 minutes to find out the answer to what is the difference between an Americana and a Easter egger?

Gina 27:33

The difference. Did we covered this at the beginning though, right? Or did I cover it in my head?

Jennifer 27:41

No, we talked about it. He just wasn't paying attention. But I think now that we've got all the details, now we can go back. So if you have Americana, regardless of where you got them from, but now we know that they have to have Slate Lakes. They have to have peak combs. And if, and they have to be spelled with the a u in them and they have to have a color before their name or they're just Easter Eggers, right? Yes. So that's what I wanted

Carey 28:14

to get at. That's like we talked about different parts of that over the last. 20 minutes or whatever, but I wanted people to know, because you do see a lot of people saying they have one thing and they don't. So you need to know that you're looking for a bird that has slate or a gray colored legs. You need to know that you're looking for a bird that has a peon, or somebody's trying to tell you they got something that they don't. And it's not worth what they're trying to charge

Gina 28:49

and delay it's chicks, if you're buying chicks, the big tell for me was always these Easter egger chicks that they're marketing as Americana's with an I or even marketing as Americana. With the correct spelling you are, there's one single variety of Americana that hatches with the wild type chick chipmunk down, and that is the silver Americana. And you will not find a silver Americana through any hatchery. Silver Americana are bred by only a handful of breeders. But you look off in that bin at TSC or rural King or whatever farm store you go to, and you see all those chipmunk striped chicks. Just know now, you know they are not true Americana.

Carey 29:38

Somebody lying.

Gina 29:38

Yeah.

Jennifer 29:40

Okay. So now I wanna talk about your farm for just a minute. How do you keep your records straight with all these breeds? Do you wing band?

Gina 29:49

I am a spreadsheets nerd, yes. We band, we like band multiple leg bands if need be. I have wing bands and I just told Keith last night, I'm like, I am getting the nerve to use these wing bands this week. I've got birds that I don't have a choice this year. I have to wing band.

Carey 30:12

So you meant tell you how to do it.

Gina 30:14

Tell me.

Carey 30:15

All right. This is what you do. You go look at your group of birds that you want to wing band, but you're terrified to wing band them. And then you find one that's a coal. All right? Then you pick 'em up and you hold 'em in one hand and find the little spot between their wing and their body. You feel the tendon on one side of your thumb and their body on the other side. Poke it in the middle and snap it together. And when you discover that you freaked out all this time over absolutely nothing because there's not even any a drop of blood that comes out and you didn't kill it. It was a cold bird if you accidentally did, but it wasn't that bad.

Jennifer 30:54

Yeah,

Carey 30:55

because this guy right here, the one that will call a bird because it don't like the chirp, was terrified of killing a bird from wing banding.

Gina 31:08

Yeah.

Carey 31:09

And like I watched Jennifer even has a YouTube video. I watched her video. I listened to her make fun of me. I listened to her laugh at me. I. And pretty much shamed me into it. And I was like, you know what? Bump it. I'm gonna go out here. I opened the brooder up and I looked and I was like, I don't really like you. Let's do you first. Boom, grabbed him up. Chicken one hand fell for that little spot between the tendon, the wing and the body. Popped it right through and was like. I'm, people can't see me, but my eyes are like the size of a half dollar right now. They're like, woo.

Jennifer 31:51

Oh, you squealed like a little girl on Christmas.

Carey 31:53

I didn't see any blood and I was so excited that I could hardly get the pliers to clamp the thing together while I was doing all this, and I was like.

Gina 32:05

That's, I didn't kill, I think I'm more worried about the pliers than anything. I'm like, I'm gonna I fumble with tools. I'm a do it yourselfer girl. I love tools. I don't back down from using tools, but I will fumble with them. So I'm the fumble. They're pretty

Jennifer 32:21

well, there's two kinds. Did you get the zip or did you get the other one? I don't think you,

Carey 32:27

the jiffies or the zip.

Jennifer 32:29

So if you got the Jiffies, then you have to have 'em on the tool to do it. We have the zips. They're better.

Gina 32:36

This is 8 93 Jiffy.

Jennifer 32:40

All right, hold it up. Let me see it.

Carey 32:41

Yeah, let's get scientific for our listeners, or we can say it.

Jennifer 32:46

So there's two kinds of wing bands. That's what we're talking about. So I use the zips and they're a lot, just like putting an earring in is all they really are.

Carey 32:56

That's what that is.

Jennifer 32:59

Yeah, that's what, yeah.

Carey 33:00

So you take the triangle.

Jennifer 33:01

Yeah, I can do that.

Carey 33:02

Poke it right through there. Yeah. And then I will say this is weird. So for me, I found it easier to use my hand to bend it down. And put the hole over the other piece that you squish through it. Yeah, I'll do that and get it in place and pinch it with the same hand that I have the chicken. And then just reach over, grab the pliers, pinch it onto the next. There you go buddy. Have a good life.

Jennifer 33:32

Yeah. Now all this anxiety over, we're talking about it. And do you have to be, all this anxiety ever talking about is worse. Yeah. Yeah. What

Gina 33:44

I wanna be particular about you just gonna do it, putting it a certain way up, or is there a preference that you found? You're like, man, I wish I had put that wing band on the other way. So are your ears pierced?

Jennifer 33:57

The will they were once. When you, I know exactly. Okay. So if you had your earrings in right now, see I haven't worn 'em in a long time either. But if you put 'em in, you know how like the whole kind of attaches to the earring and then you get end up having to play with it to loosen it back up again. It's the same thing with the wing band. So on the breasts where I want the number up, so my wing bands are are have my name on 'em. They say Bryant Roost on 'em, and on the other side has the numbers. And so on the Orpington's and the cos, I have the point going underneath of their wing. And so the blunt end is where you would pick 'em up so you don't poke yourself and you have to flip it over to read the numbers. But on the breasts where I'm wanting to read the numbers quickly, because you know I'm moving those through for meat, I left them pointy side out, so the numbers are up. Does that make sense?

Gina 34:52

Yeah. But I think that's what I would want too, so I can read the numbers without. Trying to turn the bird upside down.

Carey 34:58

See, like for me, my, you don't have to turn it upside down. You can flip it. Yeah. You don't have to turn it.

Jennifer 35:02

Yeah.

Gina 35:03

So

Jennifer 35:03

just keep in mind that the point I put in will jab you.

Carey 35:08

Yeah. I put mine in to where, on my reds where you can like, tug it up under their wing. 'cause they don't, I even have red ones for them but, and the perfect age

Jennifer 35:20

to do it is two to three weeks.

Carey 35:22

Yeah.

Gina 35:24

Yeah that's why I brought it up to Keith last night. It was like, these birds, we've gotta get 'em wing banded before they get much older. We're kinda, do you

Jennifer 35:32

have one right there that needs to be done? We can do it live on the air right now

Carey 35:39

if we do that. This, we're gonna have to put this clip on YouTube.

Gina 35:43

No. The oldest ones I have in this room with me are five days old. Yeah. Yeah. That's a little bit harder. Yeah.

Carey 35:50

Yeah. They're like, they're

Gina 35:53

less, we could keep it splash related,

Carey 35:56

but it won't splash out. But if you do it when they're in that age range, or roughly around 50 grams, like it's more comfortable when you're holding it because it's not small enough to slide through your fingers.

Jennifer 36:14

Yeah,

Carey 36:14

but it's big enough. It is not too big where you can't hold the bird with one hand. I don't know. I like the two week brand. After you do a few of 'em, you'll be like, I should have been doing this years ago.

Gina 36:30

But yeah. Back to your original question, how we how I keep track of things. I am a spreadsheet nerd. Big time. I have a spreadsheet that I built. Years ago, and I just start a new one every year, make a copy of the old and transfer over the information. And that spreadsheet is where all of my information lives. So on Google Sheets every bird has a number. Every bird has notes, their hatch date, their parentage anything that's ever been done with that bird gets documented. That bird's location, what pen number they're in right now. Everything. And then I got pivot tables that I can run data analysis on and, how many birds did I have available for sale and how many birds of this breed I have. And, just summarizes all that stuff.

Carey 37:20

My inner computer is I wanna see this dagum spreadsheet. 'cause that's, man she's got chicken records with pivot tables in 'em. That's pretty awesome.

Jennifer 37:31

Yeah. I don't even know what that is. Pivot

Gina 37:34

table is rock.

Carey 37:37

I, one day I was, we're gonna, we're gonna

Jennifer 37:38

have to have lunch one day.

Carey 37:40

I was telling my wife, I was like, Hey, I created a spreadsheet this today. And she looked at me and I was like, she has if then statements in it and tables. Yeah.

Jennifer 37:51

And

Carey 37:51

she was like, and you didn't get me to do it for you. I said, no. Because normally, like she's really handy at Excel and I'll give her some weird crap that I want a sheet to do and, act like she doesn't have anything else to do with her time, but create a sheet for me and get her to do it for me. But yeah, I was pretty proud of myself. I did it myself.

Gina 38:14

Yeah. Nice. I

Carey 38:16

may actually grow up one day.

Gina 38:19

Yeah.

Jennifer 38:19

All right. We have gone down all the rabbit holes I think at this point, don't you? That we need to for today.

Carey 38:28

We've talked about Americana's, how to identify them. We've talked about their genes and we've talked about the difference in somebody trying to shaft you and somebody selling you an actual Americana and spelling it correctly and melons and

Gina 38:44

look at you. Gina. Gina, did we leave

Carey 38:46

anything out?

Gina 38:48

There's so much more to the Americana than what we talked about today. They're awesome birds. But yeah, the splash in particular, I think we pretty well covered it.

Jennifer 39:01

Yep. All right. You let us know how the wing banding goes. Okay. I will. It's fixing to happen. All right.

Carey 39:07

Tell Keith we wanted him to video it for us.

Jennifer 39:10

Okay. Yes, I promise not to spoil. Alright, thanks for being back again.

Carey 39:15

Yep.

Jennifer 39:18

All right. See you guys. Thank you.