Golden Comet

If you want lots of huge, brown eggs and are willing to buy chicks every few years to renovate your flock, the Golden Comet should be your top choice.  This variety is a hybrid between a White Rock female and a New Hampshire male and is one of the hybrid varieties in which the males are very easy to tell from the females as soon as they hatch.  As a result, if you order all female Golden Comet chicks, you're nearly guaranteed to receive all females (as opposed to many other chicken varieties where sexing is a chancy business and you'll often end up with a rooster amid your hens.)

 Scientists use the term "hybrid vigor" to explain the way an offspring of two different varieties (or even species) may be bigger or stronger than either parent.  For example, mules are often stronger and larger than both their horse or donkey parents.  Similarly, Golden Comets seem to show true hybrid vigor in the egg-laying department.  The internet notes that Golden Comet hens lay around 300 eggs per year, and I would add that while most chicken varieties slack off or stop laying completely in the winter, our girls lay straight through.  We even have some hens who are starting their fifth year of life and who are still laying (though at a lower rate than their younger friends.)

On the other hand, the one major disadvantage of Golden Comets also stems from their hybrid nature.  Gardeners among you are probably aware that there's no point in saving seeds from hybrid vegetables since the seeds will sprout into dozens of different kinds of plants.  Golden Comets are the same way --- you're not going to get Golden Comet chicks if you breed a Golden Comet hen with a Golden Comet rooster.  Instead, you just have to buy new chicks every time you want to expand your flock.

We've found our Golden Comets to be good foragers, adept at scratching in the dirt and very alert to the grubs I toss their way while weeding the garden.  They're friendly too, and lie down in a submissive crouch when I get too close, making them easy to catch if they end up somewhere they shouldn't be.  They enjoy scraps and quickly wolf down any compost we drop into their tractors.  All in all, unless you want to be completely self sufficient, Golden Comets are hard to beat as a backyard egg-layer.  Small surprise that they're the most commonly pictured breed in chicken-related articles and blogs.

When you put in your chick order this spring, don't forget to order our automatic chicken waterers to get your birds off to a healthy start.

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comment 1

What possible breeds do you get if you breed a Golden Comet hen with a Golden Comet rooster?

Comment by SideTrackStables — early Wednesday morning, June 2nd, 2010

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comment 2

You made me laugh, although I know it's a serious question. What you would get from crossing two Golden Comets would be a mutt. You can't disentangle the parents' genes and come up with a White Rock and a New Hampshire, although I wonder if you could breed an even better variety?

Comment by anna — late Thursday evening, June 3rd, 2010

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