Carotenoids... The key to yellow legs!

Listen up, Cynthia, this is especially for you!

So I was reading a book about wild birds yesterday. They were saying that many wild species kept captive experience a loss of yellow pigment due to their restricted food sources. Many wild birds actually lose their yellow coloring in captivity because they are not getting the foods high in carotenoids.

Now this jives with my observations this summer. One batch of Bantam Cornish was raised indoors. Their feet are a creamy yellow. The other batch were given to a friend to put under a broody hen. The hen free ranged her chicks. Those chicks come from the identical genetic stock as my chicks and are identical except for one thing... Their legs are a brilliant yellow. Almost greenly fluorescent. These legs glow!

Well the book chalks it up to the carotinoids in the natural environment. Carotinoods are found in many natural foods including bugs, leaves and especially caterpillars. Because caterpillars eat leaves the carotinoids are especially concentrated in them. My outdoor chicks have been eating a plethora of carotin packed 'pillars! We have an over abundance of caterpillars this year.

Next year my Cochin and Cornish babies will have special outdoor brooder/tractors where they can dine on grass and bugs to their hear's content!

Hee, hee, Sue, oh you make me wanna laugh, I like the child in you-ou!! Imagine, directing a post in my direction, silly girl (kidding) and thank you so much. This is well imagined to be true. You should see the colour of my two barred rock old gals' legs, they have been eating catarpillars this summer by the thousands that infested my black elderberry trees up by our place. Each day I would go and shake the beelinker out of the trees and hundreds upon hundreds of ichy green, big, catarpillars would fall to the ground. The buckeyes and the barred rocks always beelined it straight up to our area as soon as they got out. They have become a nuisance, as they spend the whole day up here now and go on my porch, and guess what, they poop everywhere , I am constantly picking up poop. There are no catarpillars up here any more. They ate them all up, but they still come. Nothing here for them, but I think they like the human comradery. Seriously. I do. If I go down to the barn they come right back down to the proper grazing places. As soon as I go back home, up they come . I will have to look though, I don't think I have seen a difference in the colour of the buckeye legs , I think they are still the same shade. I wonder if the colour from carotenoids will only affect when the youngsters are young. It may be a phoney colour, as when they stop eating foods with this, will the yellow lessen and not be so bright? Gotta wonder. That sounds so cool that the birds have almost florescent yellow, neat, neat, neat. Get pics, Sue, get picks, Sue, get picks SusySue!!

When my youngest Daughter was a baby girl, I used to make my own baby food, pureed for her, she was teeny tiny. In that food I always put in carrots. At one point her skin had turned kind of orangey looking and being that young and new mamma to her, I took her to the doctor. I was so scared. He smiled, I can remember that smile and told me it was the carrots I had been feeding her. I am smiling. He was kind and did not act badly to me, he just said to reduce the amount of carrot. Said it was good that she gets her vegetables, smiling. Anyways, yes, it is in carrots, big time!! Think that is where the word carrot comes from I would imagine .

Now Sue, we need to find out if there could ever be a difference in this colour that would LAST. When the birds have that yellow deep colour, if they do not get a chance to eat bugs, grasses and the so on, does that colour fade or is it lifelong. Oh by the way, that black dude is throwing some beautiful cockerels. I have a few blues that have yellow feet!!! Get that!! Yellow feet. Gonna keep a couple and that surely will help to get yellow leggers in my cochins. Yay!! Attributing that to your massive black dude you gave me and, well, stuff...beautiful and wonderful days, CynthiaM.

I made a similar observation this spring, though not scientific it begged the question. I noticed that way too many chicks developed off color legs, fed them regular recommended chick diet. One Hen went broody, I didnt know what to offer her to feed the chicks so I provided as many different grains and food choices I could think of. Mama hen made her own mix by scratching what she wanted into the water dish and directed them to eat that nasty concoction. The leg color on the chicks, all of them, is like you say brilliant. None of the other chicks displayed this trait.

You need both the right genes and the right diet to get those bright yellow legs. When one is missing, no yellow. And yes it will fade with time, if the diet is changed to one that doesn't include carotenoids. Also, prolific egg laying will fade the legs - the yellow colour, like calcium, is transferred to the egg.

So I take it then that if leg color is off, say willow or bluewhite, then feeding practices can temporarily correct this defect if caught early enough, or to say that the pigments in the feed can overpower the natural genetic produced pigments in some cases.

No, if you don't have the genes for yellow legs, food won't fix it. You need the right genes AND the right food.

It does not make sense to me then, conflict with my observations,as with some other genetic theories that work most of the time but real life proves them plastic on occasion.

I think I shall make a carrot mash for my yellow legged birds this winter. They should like that and it should help the yellow. It sure beats freezing pails of caterpillars!

In nature i think the carotinoids only deposit in the naturally yellow areas. This is probably the case with chickens. The same group of youngsters also includes some Ameraucana chicks. They have not developed yellow legs.

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Yep, feed will improve the yellow legs, but they do have to be decent yellow legs to begin with.
All the same feeds make the yolks of the eggs a darker orangy yellow too.

Feed your chooks shrimp heads, or the whole ones if you want, and check out what colour your egg yolks become!!

garden greens seem to make for nice yellow legs too I find...