Meet our 'gemstone' coloured egg breeding teams
If vibrant and amazing shades of coloured eggs is top of your list, the gemstone range is for you!
Our Gemstone Range is made up of four carefully developed coloured layer breeding teams – Opal, Petite Opal, Jade and Ruby.
While each team has its own unique characteristics and signature palette of egg colours, they all share the same goal: producing healthy, productive birds capable of laying some of the most beautiful naturally coloured eggs you’ll find.
The names of our breeding teams weren’t chosen by chance. They are inspired by our family’s history of prospecting for gemstones throughout Australia. Just as every gemstone is unique in its colour, pattern and character, each of our coloured layer breeding teams has been carefully developed to produce its own spectacular collection of egg colours.
Unlike pure breeds, coloured laying birds cannot be created with a simple cross. Developing consistent egg colour takes years of careful planning, selective breeding and meticulous record keeping. Every generation is carefully assessed, with only the very best birds retained to continue the breeding programme. It is an ongoing journey of refinement, with each generation building upon the one before it.
Our Gemstone Range represents more than eighteen years of dedicated breeding and development. The hens within these teams are mature, proven, multi-generational breeders that have been selectively retained for their egg colour, health, productivity, temperament and overall quality. These are established breeding lines—not pure breeds and not simple first-generation (F1) crosses—but carefully developed coloured laying teams that continue to evolve with every generation.
Today, our Gemstone Range consists of four unique breeding teams, each offering something a little different:
* Opal – our widest and most diverse collection of egg colours, from blues and greens through to olives, pinks and spectacular speckles.
* Petite Opal – charming bantam-sized birds producing an equally beautiful assortment of petite coloured eggs.
* Jade – rich olive greens, teals, spearmints and deep earthy brown tones.
* Ruby – beautiful shades ranging from soft pinks and rosy tans through to warm terracotta and rich reddish-brown eggs, with every generation bringing us closer to our goal of consistently producing vibrant pink layers.
Whether you’re dreaming of a basket overflowing with colour, adding beautiful birds to your backyard flock or selecting quality breeding stock, every Gemstone Range breeding team reflects the same commitment to bird welfare, thoughtful breeding, careful selection and continuous improvement that has guided our programme for more than eighteen years.
We are incredibly proud of what our Gemstone Range has become, but our work is never finished. Every breeding season presents another opportunity to refine our lines, improve egg colour, strengthen genetics and continue producing healthy, productive birds for future generations.
OPAL RANGE
Our Opal Range is one of the most popular breeding teams within our Gemstone Range and is renowned for producing the widest and most diverse collection of egg colours from a single breeding team.
Developed over more than eighteen years of careful selective breeding, these birds are unique to Chloe’s Poultry.
Every generation has been thoughtfully assessed and refined, with only the very best birds retained to continue developing the exceptional egg colours and quality this team is known for.
The result is a truly spectacular basket of naturally coloured eggs.
Our current Opal team produces shades of blue, green, olive, slate, pink and a variety of beautifully speckled eggs, with countless subtle tones and variations in between. Some of the most striking speckled eggs we produce come from this breeding team.
All of the birds within our Opal breeding team are full-sized (standard) hens, with only mature, proven breeders used in the programme.
Pullets are never included in our breeding teams, ensuring each generation is produced from hens that have demonstrated both outstanding egg colour and consistent performance.
From this team, you may purchase fertile hatching eggs, hatch-ready eggs, chicks and pen-ready pullets, depending on seasonal availability.
PETITE OPAL RANGE
Our Petite Opal Range has become a favourite amongst those who love bantams, combining beautiful little birds with an equally beautiful assortment of naturally coloured petite eggs.
This breeding team has been carefully developed over many years through the selective breeding of exceptional bantam hens chosen for their egg colour, quality, temperament and productivity.
Like all of our Gemstone Range breeding teams, each generation continues to build upon the last as we strive to further refine and improve the line.
Behind the scenes, our Petite Opal breeding programme is currently managed across three separate breeding teams.
Each is being selectively developed towards different egg colour goals, much like our standard-sized Opal, Jade and Ruby ranges.
As these bantam lines continue to be refined and established, they are currently combined to create our Petite Opal Range, resulting in a wonderfully diverse assortment of coloured eggs from one breeding programme.
The Petite Opal Range produces a delightful collection of blue, green, blue-green, light slate, creamy, pinkish tan and beautifully speckled eggs, creating a colourful basket in true bantam proportions.
Every hen within this breeding programme is unique in both feather colour and appearance, with their sweet, friendly and placid natures making them a wonderful choice for families, smaller backyards and anyone who appreciates the charm of bantam poultry.
From this team, you may purchase fertile hatching eggs, hatch-ready eggs, chicks and pen-ready pullets, depending on seasonal availability.
JADE RANGE
Our Jade Range has been carefully developed for those who love the rich, earthy tones of olive green, teal, spearmint and deep brown eggs.
Over more than eighteen years of selective breeding, this coloured layer breeding programme has been refined to produce birds capable of laying some of the darkest and most distinctive egg colours within our Gemstone Range.
Every generation is carefully assessed, allowing us to continually strengthen the qualities we are breeding towards. The rooster currently heading this breeding team is one of our own home-bred, backcrossed Wheaten-coloured Jade males, selected for the outstanding qualities he contributes to the next generation.
Approximately half of the female chicks hatched from this breeding team can be expected lay beautiful dark olive eggs, while the remaining birds will typically lay rich dark brown, teal or spearmint shades.
Once a pullet begins laying, her underlying shell colour will remain the same throughout her life. However, the natural bloom she applies to each egg may vary from day to day, creating subtle differences in the finished appearance.
The Jade Range offers one of the most striking collections of deep, earthy egg colours within our Gemstone Range, making it a favourite for anyone wanting to add rich greens and dark natural tones to their egg basket.
From this team, you may purchase fertile hatching eggs, hatch-ready eggs, chicks and pen-ready pullets, depending on seasonal availability.
RUBY RANGE
RUBY RANGE
Our Ruby Range represents one of the most exciting and rewarding breeding programmes within our Gemstone Range, developed in pursuit of one of poultry breeding’s most elusive goals—a consistently vibrant pink egg.
Unlike blue or green egg layers, there is no recognised breed of chicken that naturally lays a true pink egg. Nor can pink egg layers be reliably produced through a simple cross.
Developing and improving pink egg genetics is a long-term breeding programme requiring patience, careful selection and continual refinement over many generations. After more than eighteen years of selective breeding, we are incredibly proud of the progress this breeding team has made.
The flock is intentionally diverse in both appearance and genetics, resulting in beautifully varied chicks and an equally diverse range of egg colours.
While many pullets from this breeding team mature into beautiful pink egg layers, others will lay warm rosy tans, terracotta shades, rich reddish-browns and other naturally bloomed earthy tones.
One of the fascinating characteristics of this breeding programme is that some hens laying tan or light brown eggs in their first season will mature into exceptional pink layers as they grow older. This ongoing development is one of the many reasons breeding consistently vibrant pink egg layers remains such a rewarding challenge.
The rooster used within this breeding team is a home-bred, multi-generational birds selected from our very best pink laying hens.
As with any long-established breeding programme, genetics can occasionally reach back through previous generations, producing the occasional surprise in egg colour—a natural reminder of the complexity involved in developing coloured laying lines.
From this team, you may purchase fertile hatching eggs, hatch-ready eggs, chicks and pen-ready pullets, depending on seasonal availability.