We often get asked what breed are our olive eggers. Let us discuss this here.

Olive eggers are not a breed. They are crosses. Specially mated crosses to produce chickens that lay different shades of green eggs. This is not just for our olive eggers, it is for all olive eggers. That is because there is no breed in Australia that lays olive eggs. The only breed that lays olive eggs are the Silverudds (also called Silverudd Blue or Isbars), a Swedish breed of chicken that is becoming popular in the USA and Europe, but hasn’t reached Australia just yet. Therefore, here in Australia the only way to get chickens that lay green eggs is to make them by mating two different breeds of chickens.

So, how does that work? When we mate a blue egger (e.g. an Araucana or a Cream Legbar) with a brown or chocolate egger (e.g. a Marans or a Barnevelder), the resulting offspring will be olive eggers. If the brown egger is not very deep brown egger and is more of a cream egger, the resulting offspring are often called easter eggers as they will lay different shades of mint or cyan.

When a blue egger is mated with a chocolate egger, you get a first generation olive egger. What happens next? That’s where the fun begins! Mate a first generation olive egger with a chocolate egger again, and you’ll get a second generation olive egger: these have a 50% chance of laying a deeper green colour and a 50% chance of laying any other colour. Or, mate a first generation olive egger with a blue egger again, and you can get some amazing shades of greys and teals! And then, if you keep doing this or even mate two olive eggers, you can get various shades of different colours, pinks, mauves and anything with heavy blooms and even speckles, depending on what genes the parents carry.

Third generation and multi-generational olive eggers are so much fun and that’s how you can enrich and deepen the olive colour of your eggs and get some amazing shades of a rainbow palette! Of course all this takes time and effort, the rainbow dozens we offer are all years in the making!

What breeds do we use in our olive egger dozens?

Many. Our first generation olive eggers are typically crosses of Araucana or Cream Legbar with Marans or Barnevelders or Welsummers. We select hens with dark blue or dark chocolate egg colours and mate them with roosters that came from dark chocolate or dark blue eggs, respectively. These special matings give us offspring that lay dark olive eggs. However, we then produce second and multi-generational olive eggers which are back crosses and inter-crosses as well as crosses with some of our easter eggers (which have various breeds in them including our pink-laying Australorp, our speckled-laying Sussex etc), and these give us not only beautiful and varying egg colours, but also a great variety of amazing-looking birds!

So, when you purchase our olive egger dozens, you get first generation olive eggers (blue eggs), plus second and third as well as multi-generational ones. Not all of these – if hens – will lay olive eggs, and that is important to understand. That’s how chicken genetics work (see above). But they are made to produce dark olive eggs as well as other shades of olive colour, for those that do end up laying green eggs.

With love,
Agia Skepi Team