AmerAUcana, AmerIcana, Easter Egger... What Now?

Blue Chicken Eggs

Affordable Avian strives to be more than a laboratory service. With a wealth of knowledge and experience in animal husbandry represented in our team, we decided it could be beneficial to offer information to our followers that goes beyond genetic testing. Because let's face it- not everyone is as excited about DNA as we are! Another thing we're really passionate about is chickens. We're non-discriminate as well. If it clucks or crows, we love it- and chances are someone on our team has handled, bred, or showed them. With the recent skyrocketing of egg prices in the USA, the desire to keep chickens has hit an all time high. This has brought so much attention to so many wonderful breeds- some more popular than others, and some that are quite rare. With passion for chicken keeping on the rise, fresh chicken keepers are also learning about eggs. With this comes the discovery that eggs come in colors far beyond white and brown. So many shades of blue, green, even pink and purple-toned eggs are starting to pop up as breeders try their hand at selective breeding to emphasize the shades they desire. Blue eggs are a foundational color in chicken genetics, meaning- you don't have to mix color 'a' with color 'b' to create color 'c'. It's either a blue egg or it isn't. Two blue egg genes means you have a blue egg layer. A chicken keeper is going to fall into one of two categories when it comes to their chickens and colorful eggs:

1. I just want blue eggs and I don't care if the chicken that makes them is a pure specimen of a recognized breed. -OR- 2. I want blue eggs and I only want to raise a pure bred bird from an established and recognized breed. Once you've established which school of thought you subscribe to, you then choose your birds. In this part of the journey, we see a lot of confusion start to creep in. This confusion comes from chicken breed names that are unfortunately very close in spelling or pronunciation, the sharing of misinformation, and sadly- misrepresentation of a breed or a bird being of a certain breed because it looks like, or has a part of its genetics coming from a certain breed. So let's clear some information up for you as simply as we can. Some breeds that lay blue eggs are: Ameraucana (please note the spelling. There is no 'i' in there. Look for the 'au') Legbar Araucana These breeds above are REGISTERED chicken BREEDS. They are recognized in most chicken shows, and have a standard for breeding. In plain speak- there are organizations with literature and experts dedicated to these breeds to help determine if the birds shown meet the 'standard of perfection'. If you're breeding a pure line for show purposes, you understand how strict the guidelines are. Now, here's where things get unnecessarily complicated. An Easter Egger is NOT a breed of chicken. It's a category of chicken that produces any variety of fun colored eggs. An Easter Egger can look like pretty much any type of chicken out there. For all intents and purposes, Easter Egger is also a nice way to say 'barnyard mix' or 'mutt' that lays pretty and neat colored eggs. "We don't know what's in this blue egg layer" can also be an Easter Egger. There is no such thing as a "pure bred Easter Egger". It's just a catch all term for fun colored eggs. Again, if it lays a pretty non white or non brown egg, it can be classified under the category of Easter Egger. This means that PURE breeds like Ameraucana or Auracauna can be considered under the category of Easter Egger because they lay blue eggs. But most breeders won't call them that because they take great pride in their work within the parameters of the breed standard of excellence. Many breeders that participated in helping set the standard of excellence for these breeds might actually take great offense to this classification. Again, it's just a technicality. A Legbar can also fall under the Easter Egger category, just as an Ameraucana can; but an Easter Egger is not one of those breeds by default. Typically, a breeder of good reputation and experience would only refer to their Ameraucana as an Easter Egger if there were some doubt about the lineage being pure. Ie: Perhaps an oopsie happened in the coop with an outside rooster and the breeder can not guarantee the line is still pure. Just because the chicks can look like an Ameraucana doesn't make it so- so any responsible breeder wouldn't call them such if there's any doubt about purity. So we've established an Ameraucana is technically an Easter Egger but an Easter Egger is not an Ameraucana. Again- because Easter Egger is a category, not a breed. We're all still here? We follow? Wonderful. Let's complicate things a little more for you. Now, there's an unrecognized "breed" out there called "Americana". We put breed in quotes here because they're being sold as if they're a breed- but there is no known recognition. There is no standard for appearance, size, color, etc. They can look like anything, they can be any color, and there is no standard of perfection. What's so special about them? They lay blue eggs. That's it. It appears that Hoover Hatchery coined the term Americana and they sell chicks as a "breed" they developed- mentioning 8 different color varieties possible. (pro tip- many large scale hatcheries don't breed mutt or mix type birds for feather color, so they're all mixed in together quite a bit. You don't usually get to pick the color bird and one will look vastly different than the other- even if they came from the same pen.) No matter how many people, companies, or entities say this is a breed, it is NOT a recognized breed as of the date of this article. Furthermore, there is no difference between an AmerICANA and an Easter Egger other than they isolated the blue egg gene in Americana. This type should only lay blue eggs. Still an Easter Egger, and still not a recognized breed. It's oddly close to AmerAUcana, isn't it? Our opinion is that was done by design, and probably because the line utilized AmerAUcana genes as the baseline for the project. The cheeky replacement of the 'au' with an 'i' causes so much confusion. The names are not the same, are not interchangeable, and even if one looks like the other, it isn't! One of our very own team members is fanatical about Ameraucana. It's her favorite breed by far. She saw photos of what looked like incredible blue/black splash Ameraucana lines on sale from a very popular farm online. She ordered a bunch, and when they arrived, they should have been light gray with some yellow down, black tips on their beaks, and blue/gray colored feet. These birds had black, brown, solid yellow down. Some had Ameraucana-type face fluff on the cheeks, some were missing it altogether. When she reached out to the farm, the man in charge told her the chicks were Ameraucana "because they hatched from blue eggs". Needless to say, the confused but well-intentioned farmer received a lesson on the breed that afternoon, and from that moment forward, changed his advertising to say Easter Egger instead. How did that happen, you wonder? Well- it was simple. He knew the breed was popular, started off with some solid birds (that's where the internet photos came from) and at one point, he needed to expand the line. He bought eggs that were called AmerAUcana, and saw they were blue when they arrived. He hatched them, grew them up, and put them into his pens with his established Ameraucana. When our team member asked him why he didn't notice that the chickens in the pen were not all blue and black splash, or self blue, or black to MAKE the splash, the man said he was told these birds would produce that result. Why did these birds have large combs and wattles? He didn't know. He wasn't watching what was coming out of the eggs because he was selling chicks faster than he could hatch them. He simply didn't know any better. And you guessed it- he was mixing up the I-cana and the AU-canas when he bought the eggs. He was pretty apologetic and gracious about the mistake- but how many thousands of birds made it into the hands of new back yard chicken enthusiasts? We all know the curse of chicken math... you don't intend to breed them at first- but they're just so darn addictive... Next thing you know, Sally, the new chicken lover has become an "Ameraucana" breeder and the cycle of misinformation repeats itself. It's really possible that an honest mistake keeps being made, but it can only be a mistake until you know it's happening. If it continues, a mistake becomes malicious intent or just plain negligence. With the frequency this topic is coming up on forums and social media, we can only imagine it will get worse if more people aren't participating in stopping the issues. The TL:DR- -Ameraucana is technically an Easter Egger, but an Easter Egger is not always an Ameraucana. -Ameraucana and Americana are not the same. One is a recognized breed and the other is not. -Easter Egger is a nice way to catch all the colorful egg laying mixes under one category, but there is no "pure bred" Easter Egger because Easter Egger is not a breed. And finally, here's our favorite science nerd chick trick: If it's spelled with AU (AU is gold on the Periodic Table of the Elements) it's solid gold. (Meaning, valuable- because it's a pure breed) If it has an I, it's incomplete. (not pure) Please feel free to share this article with anyone you think can use it. And if all else fails and you want to know if your cute chicken (no matter the breed) carries a blue egg gene or two, then definitely take a look at our blue egg genetic test HERE!