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Amrox is a breed of chicken of American origin. Its progenitors were practically the same breeds from which the Plymouth Rocks originated: black Dominican chickens, black Javanese and Cochinchins. Amroks were bred at the end of the 1945th century. In Europe, amroks appeared in XNUMX as humanitarian aid to Germany. At that time, the German chicken stock was practically destroyed. The Amroks provided the population of Germany with meat and eggs. The result turned out to be somewhat paradoxical: these days, amroxes are very popular in Europe and little known from the USA.
Amrox on the right, Plymouthrock on the left. For clarity, chickens were taken.
Breed description
Amrox chickens belong to the meat and egg direction. Medium type chickens. The weight of an adult chicken is 2,5-3 kg, a rooster is 3-4 kg. The breed is universal, having signs of a good laying hen. Chickens of this breed have a very lively temperament, but at the same time they get along well with other chickens.
Rooster Standard
The head is medium in size with a large crest. The beak is yellow, short, the tip is slightly curved. The comb is red, erect, simple in shape. The comb should have 5-6 teeth. The middle ones are about the same size, the extreme ones are lower.
Behind, the lower part of the crest follows the line of the occiput, but does not fit close to the head.
Earrings and earlobes are red. Earrings of medium length, oval. The lobes are smooth, oblong. The eyes are red-brown, large.
The neck is of medium length, well feathered. The body is oblong, wide, slightly raised. The chest is deep, well muscled. The back and loin are wide. The neck, body and tail form a gently curved topline. The back is straight along the entire length of the line, in the region of the loins the top line passes into a vertically set tail. The abdomen is wide and well filled.
The wings are tightly pressed to the body, of medium length, well feathered, with wide flight feathers.
Shanks of medium length are covered with thick feathers. Hocks are yellow. May have a pink stripe. The fingers are yellow with light nails. The fingers are evenly spaced.
The tail is set at an angle of 45°. Moderately wide. The length is average. The steering feathers are covered with decorative braids.
chicken standard
The difference between chicken and cock articles is due only to gender. The chicken has a wider and deeper body, the neck is thinner. The tail feathers barely protrude above the plumage of the body. The beak is yellow with thin black stripes. Hocks are yellow. May be grayish.
Color features
Chickens of the Amrox breed can only have a cuckoo color. The feather has alternating white and black stripes. Moreover, even the down pillows of the feathers are also striped.
Color saturation is determined by the sex of the bird. The rooster has black and white stripes on the feather of the same width, the hen has black stripes twice as wide. Due to this, the chicken looks darker.
Photo of a rooster.
Photo of a chicken.
The size of the strips logically varies depending on the size of the pen. On small feathers the stripes are narrower, on large feathers they are wider.
Productive characteristics of chickens of the Amrox breed
Amrox has a very good egg production for a non-specialized breed of chickens: 220 eggs per year. Minimum egg weight 60g. An amrox laying hen produces 220 eggs in the first year. In the second year, the amrox egg production decreases to 200 eggs. The shell of the eggs is brown.
The Amrox chicken breed is early maturing, which makes it profitable for breeding for meat. In this, amrox differ from other meat breeds of chickens, which ripen quite late.
Exterior flaws
Exterior flaws in Amrox include:
- graceful skeleton;
- narrow/short body;
- narrow back;
- “skinny” belly of a chicken;
- thin long beak;
- small, deep-set eyes;
- any other eye color than red-brown;
- too short/long legs;
- too long claws;
- rough scales on the metatarsus;
- feathers without a black stripe at the end;
- entirely black flight feathers and braids;
- fluff without stripes;
- too thin stripes on feathers;
- the presence of any other color on the feathers, except for black and white;
- poor egg production;
- low viability.
Chickens with exterior defects are not allowed to breed.
Determination of the sex of chickens
The Amrox breed is autosex, meaning the sex of the chick can be determined immediately after hatching from the egg. All chicks hatch with black down on their backs and light spots on their belly. But the hens have a white spot on their heads, which is absent in cockerels. In addition, the chickens are a little darker. Determining the sex of the Amrokos takes place in the literal sense of the word by head and does not present any difficulty.
Dwarf amrox
The dwarf form of amrox, bred in Germany, retained the main characteristics of the large form. These chickens, although they are in the ranks of bentams, also have a meat and egg direction. The weight of the amrox dwarf chicken is 900-1000 g, the rooster weighs 1-1,2 kg. The productivity of the dwarf form is 140 eggs per year. The weight of the egg is 40 g. Exteriorly, it is a miniature copy of a large amrox. The color is also only cuckoo.
Advantages of the breed
Chickens of this breed are considered suitable for beginner poultry farmers because of their good adaptability, unpretentiousness and undemanding feed. Even Amrox chickens are in good health. Another advantage of the breed is the rapid feathering of the young. The feathered chick no longer needs additional heat from the brooder and the owner can save on electricity. With a small number of chickens, the savings may not be noticeable, but on an industrial scale, they are significant.
Chickens become sexually mature by 6 months. Mother hens are very good mothers. The chickens themselves have a high survival rate.
Maintenance and feeding
Being a versatile breed, the Amrox is much better adapted to being kept on the floor than in cages. For all the undemanding nature of the breed to the conditions of detention, it is still necessary to maintain cleanliness in the chicken coop in order to avoid infectious and parasitic diseases.
When kept on the floor, chickens are usually kept on deep litter. Here you need to remember that chickens love to dig holes in the ground. They will also dig up the bedding. Often it is very expensive to change deep bedding.
There are two options for keeping chickens on the floor:
- Tear up the litter daily so that litter does not accumulate on top, and periodically add insecticidal preparations to it to destroy skin parasites in chickens;
- Leave the floor without bedding, but organize perches for chickens.
The second option is more in line with the natural needs of the bird.
To make the chickens feel comfortable, it is enough to make perches 40-50 cm high for them. In this case, the chickens will “escape from predators” at night, and will not hurt themselves when they jump off the pole in the morning.
amrox diet
It cannot be said about Amroks that they are very whimsical in food. But this breed requires a variety of feed. The amrox diet must include grains, vegetables, grass, and animal protein. In the presence of good quality compound feed, grain and animal protein can be replaced with combined feed.
The rest of the diet gets succulent feed. Chickens of this breed can and should be given potatoes, other root crops, various greens, wheat bran. From 2 months, corn is introduced into the diet of chickens. With a well-composed diet, delicious tender meat is obtained from amrox.
Feedback from Amrox owners
Conclusion
Amrox chickens are well suited for private farmsteads. For industrial enterprises, they have too low egg production and too long a growth period. Therefore, today chickens of this breed are bred only by private traders and part of the livestock is stored in nurseries as a gene pool for breeding new breeds. But if a novice owner of a private farmstead needs a chicken “for experiments”, then his choice is amrox. On chickens of this breed, you can learn how to keep adults and incubate eggs.