A friend of mine, Ike, has a great breeding plan for his lavender Ameraucanas, but, and this is the hilarious part, somewhere along the line, he lost track of it, and starting breeding lavenders with white beaks. He thinks what happened, and his guess is as good as yours and mine, is that he got blinded by the colour of the bird and the legs of the bird and never noticed the beaks. So this spring he hatched 100 lavender chicks. An incredible amount but when you have a 1502 you can do that in a heart beat, if you store them waiting for incubation properly, and now they are 6 weeks old and eating like beavers, but they all have white beaks. Beautiful looking but with the beak wrong, a loss. So I recommended selling them at his auction house like he typically does, but and here's the rub, they are so pretty otherwise, he's worried someone will get them for a song. And that's why its important to write down a checklist of what to look for so you can write off each feature and know you are still on plan.
Since I haven't been breeding Ameraucanas very long, I tend not to rely on memory, but I review the standard and my "reference" pictures quite often. This Spring though has been a brutal hatching season, and out of the 20 black Ameraucanas I hatched, two or about 10%, I think, are what I'm looking for...that's not counting all the eggs that did not work because my boys weren't plucked enough and so the eggs were infertile. Obviously that was not, at the time, in the plan.