Ava’s Cream Legbars

24/04/2024

Lest We Forget. At Ava’s Cream Legbars, we take a moment today to remember the sacrifices made by those who served our country. We honor their courage, resilience, and the ANZAC spirit.

08/03/2024

EDIT: David Crowie is sold and picked up. Puddin’ is still available.

We have finalised our breeding team for this year and so have two roosters looking to find their new homes.
They are Avgen x Aussie and bred ourselves.

One is the father of our other two (Puddin’) and the other is the brother of our chosen boy (David Crowie).
Puddin’ is 3 years old and has fathered some beautiful babies but does not have a crest. He has very nice colour in his beak and legs, pearly white lobes and a straight, upright comb. He has a bit of chestnut on his shoulders, tail is moulting out and could do with a good wash. Could be a good match with some overcrested girls.

David Crowie is 12 months old and is a very nice type. All of the pluses of dad and more! Beautiful crest, straight comb (though slightly tilted to the side), great colours and minimal chestnut. Much cleaner look than dad.

Happy to transport otherwise pick up from Lowood.
Pricing is ONO
Puddin’ is 40 gold coins David Crowie is 80 gold coins plus transport if needed.
Please get in contact if you would like one of these boys.

10/01/2024

This year, we will be focusing on building up our flock with some beautiful birds after changing to a different rooster who is just gorgeous.
We hope to have lots of beautiful babies and will be choosing only the best to keep which means there may be chicks available but we will not be posting eggs this year, sorry!
We will not be taking egg orders until we are happy with the number and quality of our birds which won’t be until next year at the earliest after our girls grow out.
I know this is disappointing for some but in order for us to continue long term, we need to make sure we are improving the breed every season. Unfortunately last year, we did not keep enough for ourselves so we will be focusing on this this year.

24/11/2023

Following on from our experiment from our other lovely Cream Legbar breeder, unfortunately there was a lot of internal damage to the eggs, both from the eggspress safe carton and the breeders own packaging. As a result, only one was viable. I say viable as the other eggs could very well have been fertile prior to postage but the post handled them to harshly, resulting in 90% scramble and the other was an early blood ring.
In additional to this, the one lone egg that progressed, did not pip even though it appeared to have a good airsack. Upon opening, there was noticeable deformation to the chick and was probably deceased prior to lockdown but I always like to give them a chance,
As sad of a result as this is, it also shows us that no matter how perfect a breeder, our postal system is broken. What alternative do we have? How can we as breeders make a higher chance for our clients to hatch more chicks.
We will keep trying to find the best option possible but it seems more and more failures will happen to everyone getting posted eggs until it be changes.

In better news, we are over half way with our bulk chick order! After a full 13 male chicks hatching to the chooks barely laying a doz a week, it is making this a very slow process but thankfully the client is wonderful and understands the situation. Here are some of the beautiful girls headed to NSW in Dec.

26/10/2023

We are currently assisting another cream legbar breeder (pure Avgen) with how postage affect eggs.
The experiment is to see if wrapping eggs in plastic wrap prior to tissue affects how the air sac behaves from postage as well as the difference between eggspress and own packaging. Although this is only a very small sample (5 wrapped, 5 unwrapped in each type of packaging), it will be very interesting to see the results.

Both lots of eggs were sent at exactly same time, from the same post office by express post and took 4 days to go from the ACT to the Lockyer Valley in SEQLD (via Melbourne, thanks Auspost).

Unsurprisingly, the Eggspress eggs all arrived intact. One of the wrapped eggs was a little damp from what I can only guess is condensation (this has been marked for identification). All others perfect aside from a few calcium deposits.

The eggs in the breeders own packaging were either wrapped in cling wrap or not, then tissues, then layed in a bed of tissue and bubble wrap inside a hard plastic container. The container itself was then taped closed (not airtight) and wrapped in bubble wrap as well. Then it was placed into a cardboard tightly padded with wood shavings about an inch thick and taped shut. The own packaging did not protect the eggs as well as the Eggspress and as a result, 3 of the non-wrapped eggs were broken upon delivery. Surprisingly, all of the wrapped eggs survived the trip.

We have not rested these eggs to start incubating as soon as possible for the freshest eggs (which is what we usually do with posted eggs) and incubating with the dry incubation method (no water till lockdown) as our ambient humidity is sufficient this time of year.
Eggs have been placed in a sterilised Borotto 24 set at 37.7 degrees Celsius and will be candled at day 5.

Cannot wait to see what the results of this little experiment will be. Hopefully a couple of beautiful Avgen pullets 🤞🤞🤞🤞

09/10/2023

Love getting feedback like this from our lovely clients! Especially when they are return customers 🙂
Thank you so much for the kind words!

09/10/2023

Our last 2 doz posted eggs for a while have gone out today to the lovely Samantha at The Colourful Coop!
Time for full time hatching!

03/10/2023

Gosh it’s hard to show how beautiful these eggs are. Same 4 eggs, different lighting. They are a stunning blue, though not a bright sky blue, more like a powder baby blue.

30/09/2023

This is a fantastic resource of information from Aussie Chook Supplies.

Buying Fertile Eggs - Information & Blogs Incubating & Hatching Buying Fertile Eggs

28/09/2023

We are in for a rough storm! Everyone is safely battened down in their coops with surge protection on our incubators. Stay safe everyone in SEQLD and NENSW!

14/09/2023

Wow! We are completely sold out for posted egg orders for this year!
We have just had an amazing order that will be occupying a lot of our eggs so unfortunately we won’t have any available until Nov at the earliest and even then will be extremely limited until it becomes too hot to safely post.
We will be hatching full time between November and February and may have some eggs from March-April until they go off the lay/moult. These will also be extremely limited and first come first serve.
If you would like to go on our waitlist, please let us know so that you can be notified if we have any availability.
Thanks to everyone who supported our breeding program this year, we couldn’t do this without you!
Lots of little chick photos incoming over the next couple of weeks as well as getting our next 3-4 weeks of egg orders posted so very busy for us :)
Love always
The Ava’s Cream Legbars Family

12/09/2023

We are experiencing internet connection issues here folks to please bare with us while we get this sorted (Appyits a worldwide outage, Thanks Starlink) Our first major issue with them so can’t complain too much. Still a better service than our previous :)
We will get to any inquiries asap! Thanks for your patience.

12/09/2023

Hatch day today! We can wait to see how many little fluffers hatch from this batch! We will have some babies available from this batch but some have already been spoken for as 6 week olds so we will keep everyone posted on if any babies are available.

07/09/2023

When you receive your eggs

Our eggs have not been washed to protect the critical bloom that helps to protect them from external contamination. All of our eggs are dry brushed if needed to remove any obvious dirt (usually only if it has been raining here) so you may see the occasional spot of dirt or mud. Rest assured your bloom is intact and will keep the eggs safe from any residual mud.

We do not recommend washing or resting your eggs after post. This may be a controversial topic, and you do what you feel is best. We have found it makes very little difference to the development of hatching posted eggs and may actually make the eggs that little bit too old to develop. We have tested resting and not resting eggs and those eggs whos yolks were scrambled or airsack was completely in tatters did not develop, no matter what we did. If the airsack is detached, we found incubating for the first 7 days without a full 180 degree turn helped the best.
Once you receive your eggs, very gently unwrap each egg and inspect for damage. Use a high powered mini torch (like what you would use for candling) to check for hairline cracks or any damage that may occur during post.

Please ensure your incubator is working to manufacturer settings before your eggs arrive. There is nothing worse than going to set up your incubator after you have received your eggs only to find it doesn’t hold temperature or fluctuates excessively. You may need a secondary hydrometer or thermometer if you haven’t used it before or if it is a cheaper incubator as their readings can fluctuate quite significantly. Our incubators are Borotto and yellow lidded Janoel which we use as hatchers.

We have found that where we are in SEQLD, we rarely have our ambient humidity low enough to require water in our incubator. We incubate at 37.5 degrees and have hatched successfully in both borotto and cheapy yellow lidded incubators using dry hatch methods. This definitely depends on where you are and what your ambient humidity is but have found this to be pretty good at hatching a good mix of babies.

Best of luck and happy hatching!
The Ava’s Cream Legbar Family

06/09/2023

We have been trying to find ways to give our girls healthy treats while giving them a little protein boost as there hasn’t been a lot of grass for them to forage I lately to support their nutrition while coming back on the lay.
Along with starting to grow some of our own grains, but this will take a little while to grow and be big enough to harvest, I cook up a big batch of rolled oats, topped with scrambled eggs and sprinkled with dried mealworms. Everyone loves it and gives them a nice treat to help with them laying our beautiful eggs.

Obviously this isn’t everything they eat, we also supply Laucke Showbird Breeder pellets in a grandpa feeder as well as all our food scraps to help reduce food waste. You only get out what you put in so put in the best for the best result.

05/09/2023

Our first eggs of the season headed off today with many more to come. These lucky eggs are headed off to Tyalgum just over the boarder in NSW so will arrive before the weekend.
We can’t wait to see how these eggs hatch but if it’s anything like the eggs we hatch’s last week, their owner will be very happy.
We have another 19 eggs in lockdown today from 21 set so another 90% fertility batch.

01/09/2023

Happy first day of spring everyone!
Ava got her first cuddles with a little boy from our first hatch of the season.
We have had a successful hatch of 17 little babies from 22 that passed candling at 7 days. We decided to leave them after the candling to see how everyone did and considering I got about 6 coming from the fridge that were over 2 weeks old, this was a fantastic hatch.
The ratios are a bit off (just 5 girls to 12 boys) so we will be tweaking our temps to see if this helps us get any more girls from our next hatches. We don’t know if the change in temperature actually affects anything , but as long as we know it is within the suitable temps for hatching we will give it a go ;)
These little babies are so adorable and being able to tell exactly which ones are girls and boys is so fantastic. These boys have the very distinct white spot on their heads and the girls have the stunning chipmunk stripes and eyeliner.
Just beautiful little birds. These girls will be staying with us for a little while until we can identify if they will move to our grow out pen at 6-8 weeks so we may have some availability for off heat pullets then. Our next hatch is due on the 7th of Sept so hopefully a little more girls next time!

30/08/2023

Egg posting procedure

We will have limited eggs each week, only posting outside the eastern states on Monday each week with eggs collected Friday through Sunday. Eggs from Monday and Tuesday will be posted to Eastern states to ensure arrival before the weekend. We incubate eggs gathered Wednesday to Friday and that passes our rigours standards. We only sell and hatch eggs from our second year hens ensuring you get healthy chicks.

We will never send eggs that are deformed in anyway, excessively dirty, not an average sized and uniform egg, has been refrigerated, older than 4 days old, exposed to extreme temperatures (we collect 3 times a day to reduce the amount of time eggs are not climate controlled) or turned twice daily since being laid.

All orders are posted via express post (Auspost) in specialised genuine foam egg cartons from Eggspress. Every egg is padded with tissues in the bottom of the hole, double wrapped in more tissue for a snug fit to reduce movement, then more tissue on top.

We have had fantastic results in packaging this way but are not responsible for the rough handling of your package.
We do not label our eggs “FRAGILE” or similar. This is to try to reduce the chance of someone along the way testing our packaging (we have seen THAT courier video) and don’t want to risk your precious eggs.

We hold no responsibility for additional fees from WA bio security for eggs posted to WA. We haven’t encountered this personally, but have seen others who have been charged a fee for importing eggs into WA.

We have tried to answer as much as we can but if you have any questions, feel free to send us a message and we will try our best to help you out!

Happy hatching!
Nicola
Ava’s Cream Legbars

30/08/2023

We may be a little slow in responding to enquiries today. Ava is not feeling the greatest with a fever and may need her mummy more than normal for cuddles and snuggles in case she feels off.
Please feel free to send through your messages for anything you may need but I may not be able to get to them right away but rest assured, I will get to them as soon as I am able :)
Thanks so much for understanding!
Nicola
Ava’s Cream Legbars

28/08/2023

Are you wanting to add some of our stunning birds to your family but don’t want to worry about excess boys or incubation? Our live chicks may be just the answer! Boys are able to be told from girls upon hatch with the girls having distinctive markings.
Our babies are fed medicated feed to ensure they are protected from the nasties that can affect them so young.
Our chicks are hatching today so contact us to place your order. We will have limited available until we have hatched enough for our next season stunners as we select our next breeding stock.

Message us today to secure yours from the next hatch! Our pricing has not increased a lot since our previous season although a lot of our expenses have. We try to keep prices as stable as we can as we know everyone is feeling the pinch but we want to be able to share these stunning birds with as many families as possible.
Pricing below:

Girls are $45 for up to a week old,
1-3 weeks is $50,
3-5 weeks is $55
6-12 weeks is $60 and
12+ weeks is $80.
Boys are $5 up to 3 weeks and $10 from 3 weeks up.
Buy two girls and get a boy for free.
They will need heat until about 6-8 weeks, let us know if you are interested in our raising services (included in prices above).

28/08/2023

Thank you all for your patience and well wishes. Our daughter had a fabulous day and we all ate way too much food!
One of the advantages of chickens is that we have very little to no food waste. Most of the scraps from meals and leftovers that we aren’t going to eat, go to the chooks. Anything they can’t eat we pop in our compost to make the next soil that we can grow our veggies in and also feed to the chickens.

One of our girls over the weekend definitely pulled her weight. We got this whopper from an older hen, nearly 100g! We suspect this will be a double yolker and would never incubate or sell this egg due to the high likelihood of it not developing correctly.
We will enjoy this one in some brownies or cupcakes or maybe for breakfast one morning.

Remember, orders for this season open 1st of September, that’s this Friday! So if your haven’t got your name on our waitlist yet, please send your order through as soon as you can so you are in the first round of invoices sent out and therefore within the first orders packed the following week depending on when invoices are paid.

Love,
The Ava’s Cream Legbar Family

26/08/2023

Unfortunately we will take a little longer to reply than normal. Our baby girl, and our namesake, Ava, is having her big 4th birthday tomorrow.
Have a lovely weekend and we will be in touch as soon as possible on Monday.
Love,
The Ava’s Cream Legbar Family

19/08/2023

It’s very windy here in the Lockyer Valley as it usually is this time of year so the wind is making them look a bit scruffy but here are some of our gorgeous birds. They are far from perfect but we are very happy with how they are turning out.

Have one Pullet from the poor quality eggs we got last year who is laying cream eggs so will be pulling her out which is a shame as she is very pretty as they all are, we just have to find her now!

None of our Pullet eggs will be in our posted eggs to reduce the risk of lymphoid leucosis. All our sold eggs will be more than 60g from our beautiful hens in their second and third season laying beautiful blue eggs.
We look forward to sending a lot of these stunning birds babies and eggs onto their new families once orders open on the 1st of Sept.

Love,
The Ava’s Cream Legbars Family

19/08/2023

We got our newest delivery of beautiful sugarcane mulch for the pen today. We get 10 bales to top up the litter used for the flooring. We also have 3m3 of gravel underneath as our soil is heavy clay resulting in flooding and very muddy conditions with any amount of rain.

Our birds love having these to scratch around in and it keeps them occupied for ages. When the mulch breaks down from the year, we scoop it all out and add to our compost usually December/January when we don’t post eggs due to the weather as it can disrupt their laying.

We have a fully enclosed pen to keep them safe from predators and parasites as we were finding that the local pigeons were visiting and bringing lots of nasty bugs with them and eating all their feed. They get 2 hours of forage time supervised in the afternoon that they love scratching around for bugs and grass.

17/08/2023

Just had a chance to check our 2 doz eggs we set last week (with about 1/3-1/2 coming from the fridge as I didn’t want to waste space in the incubator) and we have 22 out of 24 eggs developing with both of the two that stopped developing being fertile as they had the “red ring of death” indicating fertile but an early death.

We are so incredibly proud of our rooster, “Puddin’” with the incredible results from his first season and some of our hens from last year producing some great sized eggs with all hens producing eggs greater than 60g. Our birds are selectively bred for type from Aussie and import birds.

This is fantastic results and will be opening up egg orders from the 1st of September. If you would like to place an order, please send us a message and we will put you on the waitlist. We will have limited eggs each week. Eggs will be 120 per doz plus post ($30 for 1doz, $45 for 2 doz) packed in genuine eggspress safe foam cartons in express post satchels.

Once orders are open, you will be sent an invoice and once that invoice is paid you will be placed in the queue. Orders will be on a first come, first served basis. No exceptions.

Unfortunately last season we had several occasions where eggs were allocated to people but never paid for so others missed out.
We want to be able to provide as many people as possible with the chance to hatch their own stunning birds so unfortunately these measures are in place. If you would like to schedule your eggs for post on a certain date, we can certainly accommodate as long as eggs are paid for.

More info will be coming about our policies and procedures and how we get these fragile eggs to you in the best possible condition.
Happy hatching!
Love,
The Ava’s Cream Legbars Family

09/08/2023

We are proud to announce that we have set our first eggs of the season. Fertility checking will occur at day 7 with another batch going in then. We will continue a rolling hatch every week until egg orders are affected.
We will announce fertility in a week 🙂

Man, it feels good to be back after having to make a hard cull on our flock due to receiving eggs from others that were not good enough.
We have some stunning birds this year that any enthusiasts will adore. They aren’t perfect, but some amazing types.
We can’t wait to see what the next season has in store for us.
Once we know fertility we can start taking orders for fertile eggs.

29/06/2022

Update for the coming season.
Unfortunately, due to unforeseen personal circumstances, we will not be supplying eggs this year. Anyone who has a current order with us will have their orders fulfilled as soon as possible but we will not be taking new orders.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
Hopefully we will be back up and running next year but we will have to see how our situation is.
Thank you to all who have supported us through our short breeding program and hope we can supply quality birds again soon.
Kind regards
The Ava’s Cream Legbars Family