Sexable eggs? and intro

Are there any breeds which are sexable in the egg? Perhaps shell color
or texture differences? A statistical genetics friend and I were
speculating that such a trait would be an enormous boon to
chicken-breeding. My interest is in the hobby-heritage breeding side,
but she speculated that perhaps the egg-people would prefer not to
waste incubator

If there isn't such a thing present in chickens now (and I suspect
there isn't) I wonder how it could be introduced/created...

And, hello, by the way. I've raised some egg-layers before when I was
playing at farm-wife in Kansas during a previous life :) but am now
living in the burbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, and playing with
hobby/egg hens. I got two Sumatras and a Phoenix from a very nice
fellow in Florida and I'm enjoying them very much. I was going to get
day-olds, but we are totally off the electrical grid and my husband did
not want to runa brooding lamp 24/7 :) so I will have to wait for one
of these to go broody before having babies (except he has also said No
Roos, which explains my fantasizing about sexable eggs, as killing
chicks is not high on my list of Fun Things).

I blog about the hens rather obsessively here:

http://www.colliething.com

sometimes I blog from the henhouse! The hens seems to like having me
type while visiting them - the noise intrigues them and they like it
that my attention is fixed elsewhere so they can study *me*, I think,
without feeling like they are being studied in return.

Hen-specific posts - with pics - here (reverse chronological order):

http://www.colliething.com/2006/05/quality-time-with-hens.html
http://www.colliething.com/2006/04/hens-checking-out-melon-rind.html
http://www.colliething.com/2006/04/putting-in-time-in-henhouse.html
http://www.colliething.com/2006/04/better-shot-of-phoenix.html
http://www.colliething.com/2006/04/live-from-henhouse.html
http://www.colliething.com/2006/04/i-shouldnt-try-to-edit-pics-in-sun.html
http://www.colliething.com/2006/04/my-new-peeps.html

I love how their tails are growing in and how they are becoming so much
more beautiful each day.

This weekend I am *way* overdue to make their outside enclosure - poor
things have been inside for weeks :-( (lots of space, but it's just not
the same...)

- Susan

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Relevant Pages

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