A Bielefelder Thread !

[faysel]

i am in love with this less heard breed of chickens with astonishing Crelle Cuckoo feathering..you are welcOme to shOw sOme Breeding parents pictures if any one got, also the info abOut this v rare breed ie egg laying, body weight, different colors and standards..hope you like the thread and will respond generously

 

[heatherbeast]

So... many... posts...

Just wanted to drop in to introduce myself and Oppenheimer, who was a free chick from Murray McMurray last year. He's currently about 9 months old. Photo-dump!!

 

[Clayton 1974]

My Bielefelders are now 5 months old, very pleased in how they have filled out.

 

[Tervuren]

Nettie’s most speckled egg yet! Not sure this photo picks it up well, but I was pleasantly surprised to see it! Also Nettie has been a consummate nursemaid to my Cream Legbar who is slowly recovering from crop issues. She really lives up to the breed’s temperament!

 

[Jobele]

I know a lot of you have asked how the Bielefelder's compare to the other breeds. This is what I can say about them compared to the other breeds that I raise as well:

Biel's are very large birds with beautiful crele coloring and are GREAT foragers. Mine eat no more than any of the other breeds and do forage for a lot of their food. They will tend to eat the scratch that I throw out in the afternoons....but ALL of my chickens do....because it is CANDY to them!

I do find that the larger a bird is going to be when he is mature......the more he will consume as a chick and that is the way it should be! Once the Biel's are grown and filled out....they don't eat anymore than anybody else.

Mine can move very fast and can fly up to high perches.....I don't find them lazy at all for their size and I truly don't think they are calm just because of their size......I think that the genetics come into play there. Now, if people start to cross them with other breeds....you may start to see aggression coming from the genetics of other breeds...who knows. But the Biel is a sweetheart!

I own English Orpingtons (which are piglets on food....LOL).

My Sussex (all colors) are very big eaters as they are growing out....but cut back once they reach maturity and love to free range in the pastures and find extra treats.

My Sulmtalers are GREAT foragers and eat very little feed! I'm amazed at how easy they are to keep fat and healthy with such little feed.

The Isbars are another breed that eats very little....prefers to find their food through foraging.

As far as aggression.......the Biel's are SO GENTLE and CALM! No bullies in my flock.

I will say this......I don't like aggression in ANY breed! If it shows aggression it is going to camp freezer.

I can honestly say that here in Texas the Biel does very well! It can tolerate our excessive heat (110 degrees) in the summer and our low temps of (28 degrees) in the winter. They don't need to be babied or coddled! They aren't finicky eaters either....they eat whatever they are given.

They started laying at 7-8 months and their first eggs were BIG. Some of the other breeds have pullet eggs that are too small to incubate. The Biel's eggs are BIG from the git go! As they mature....they get bigger. I put them next to one of my duck eggs and it was almost the same size! They are a pretty terra cotta color as well. I have 6 hens and I get 5-6 eggs every single day from them! They are amazing!

The biggest thing I like about Biel's is their auto sexing the minute they are born! It is such a pleasure to be able to know right away what you have!

Hope this helps everybody.......
I for one......TRULY love them and will keep them on my farm!!!! My incubator is full right now with quite a few of them!

 

[Bine]

Maybe it helps when we define what we mean when we say heritage or hybrid or design or engineered or traditional breeding when it comes to our chickens and other livestock/pets.
I am from Europe and I discoverd that Americans often think that a tradition is something my grandpa invented when I talk about something that is done since the late 1500.
So it always makes a discussion easier when we define what it means.
First I think, we should always have in mind that breeding as we do it today with show clubs on the one hand and chicken laboratories on the other hand is a very new sport.
For most of the time people had no clue how and why certain traits and qualities multiplied in a flock/herd.
Look up the story of Jacob and Laban in the bible and stand in awe before Jacob's solution to put pilled rods into the water and in even greater awe that it really worked.
Or look to the middle ages: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) - one of the first people in Norther Europe to write about human sexuality and reproduction - firmly believed that the health and sex of a child is depending on the emotions of the mother so that unhappy wifes have misfigured girls and happy wifes have strong, healthy baby boys.... a theory that didn't sound right to the ( male) scientists of that time, most of them thought that only the poition of the pregnant woman while sleeping determinated the sex of the baby. ... funny, isn't it?
But til Karl Ernst von Bear discoverd the ovum in 1827, most people believed that females are only a kind of breeding box for the offspring. O/c ordanary people and farmers always knew that somehow the female transfert her trait to the offspring but couldn't tell how it worked. People like Mendel and Camerarius were laughed at for even trying to figure out how the transmission works.
And even after Louis Pasteur wrote his famous "Omne vivum e vivo" in 1864 still most people believed in Archigenesis and the transfer of traits and qualities by looking at or thinking of something.

So traditional breeding often looked like that: A farmers wife likes a black hen in her mixed flock b/c that hen lays more eggs than all others, her rooster is black too, but most chicks are white or brown, But she really likes the black hen and everytime she has to catch a hen for dinner she picks a white or a brown one. So her black hen can breed longer, has more offsprings and
even if the color isn't dominant, slowly, slowly the farmer has more eggs and more black hens....and maybe she thinks that is so b/c she painted the breeding box black.....

Most of the so called heritage breeds were created by the members of the first breeders clubs that were formed in the late 1800's or early 1900's here under the influence of the Prussian civil laws.
They took for the region typical chickens, compared them with chickens from other origins, looked for qualities that in there minds were good and wrote down standards.
and they improved many breeds by mixing all kinds of exotic breed into our land races.
Than, after WWII, the breeders clubs lost importants for the chicken production; the new factroy farms needed more than some nice birds and agrar corporations like avia gene began the mass production of hybrids. They mix and matchen not 10 or 20 birds like the old school breeder they have thousends of birds to breed with an every year they bring a new "product line" on the marked. You can't buy a Cochin there but you can order 15 000 Nqb232 summer edition that lay 320 eggs each a year .... only a year....
So the breeders clubs worked on other goals like really fluffy or long feathers, social skills, combs.... a nice voice....So a breed that layed 150 eggs per year and hat some fluffy feathers on the butt in 1920, still lays 150 eggs today but has a big fluffy butt and looks from afar more like a fluff ball than a chicken.
Breeders like Mr. Roth tried to find a new way. He wanted a chicken that does well in our wet backyards, is easy to handle and produces good eggs and meat... to do that while everyone else tells you that the time for backyard chickens is over and noone needs dual purpose chickens anymore is really big, I think, and I hope that breeds like the Bielefelder have a future and maybe you mark the begin of the end for factory farming with your birds.
And I think the best you can do as a breeder to honour the farmers wife, the prussian club member and people like Mr. Roth is to take the birds they have given to you and be creative. You like the champion birds from here, well, try to breed to this standard.... you don't like the fluffy stuff, than create a Bielefelder with less fluff or create a Bielefelder that does better in the hot weather.
Austrailia gave us the Australorps maybe you can bring the Amerfelder or Bielarizonas.

 

[TSP]

This is my Bielefelder cockerel, my kids named him Cogburn. He’s just a little under 10 pounds at about six months. I’m wondering how big he’s actually going to get, as he is much larger than his brother who is only a month younger. I have him and his brother in with nine pullets. These were hatched out at my house, half on November 8th and half on December 11th. We got our first pullet egg this morning, but most of the pullets have combs that are getting bigger and red right now. We had 6 other cockerels at hatch. One died unexpectedly a month or so ago of unknown causes, just found dead in the coop one morning. The others went to friends who keep mutt flocks and liked the size and coloration of these guys. By fall, I should have reports from several of them as to what you get when you cross a Biel with (insert breed here), but mostly they’ll be large, dual purpose backyard birds. I have a couple of Easter Egger hens left over from last year and I don’t intend on hatching out any of those crosses, but do wonder what would result from that genetic roll of the dice.

 

[SBFChickenGirl]

Hey guys! I'm new to Bielefelders! Going to try and work my way through this thread.

 

[LittleDinosaur]

These little chonkers are 46 days old. Second generation hatched on my farm
I'm excited to see them grow.

 

[Faraday40]

Just hatched some Bieles for a friend. I moved these into the brooder (so far):

2 males

4 females

(I think) 4 females. The stripes are so dark and look so different from the 2 boys. Although there's a small bit of head-spot on 2, I still think female for these four.