thanks for ur post when will one should do aiLet's see. I used to (last year) collect from 20-48 roos and inseminate 100-250 hens, 2x a week. Thank goodness for the 3 ladies who helped.
I worked with big birds, and the thing I'm gonna have a hard time converting to my backyard flock is how to do it without help. My DH loves me, but I'm fairly sure that might be pushing his tolerance for my love of animals. The hens I can invert and inseminate myself (at least I'm fairly sure I can lol), but stroking the roos and catching the 'gold' with only my two hands will be interesting to say the very, very least.
On the spoon concept. We caught the roo gold in plastic cups, and then used glass pipettes rigged up to plastic syringes. The cups were nice because we mixed in extender because each roo had to cover 5-7 hens. Totally not necessary in most backyard cases, I think.
Also we starting getting the roos used to being stroked at about 24 weeks. And only the hens that were laying we actually inseminated. When you invert the hens (one who is laying and one who isn't) you can see the difference. Which I noticed in the video she didnt do quite the same way. Instead of inserting just into the cloaca, we inserted right into the oviduct. To do so flip the hen over in one smooth motion, and then apply pressure with one finger on either side of the cloaca. This should cause the inside of the cloaca to be exposed. One the birds left side there should be a small hole. BINGO youve found the oviduct.
You can see the anatomy here.
The other thing we did was we kept the roos away from their ladies (assuming theyre in with hens at the time) the day before collection day. Frustrates them a little but it helps increase the amount of gold you can collect. So typically we would pen them Sunday, collect Monday and Tuesday mornings (unless the roo gave us enough gold to cover all of their hens on Monday).
If there are any questions I can answer please let me know. I didnt know if you wanted a step-by-step description. If you do just let me know /img/smilies/smile.png
ETA: So this morning I was thinking about this post, and remembered that I forgot to mention something. The reason we waited until 24 wks was because I was working with a breeding flock of meat birds. Therefore the start to their egg production is much later than most purely laying breeds. So as to when to try for the first time, I'm not quite sure. My plan is wait until I get my first few eggs, and then I'll go ahead to accustom the roo's to being handled in that capacity. /img/smilies/smile.png
