Amers d’Anvers

[lilmillefleur]

Fireball is beautiful! Look at all that neck floof, he’s like a lion! Hopefully he helps the gene pool a bit.
Love following your thread , keep it up! I especially love your show/fair posts. I’m so jealous, I’ve never been to a good chicken show and COVID and the avian flu aren’t helping me out here

 

[Amer]

Fireball is beautiful! Look at all that neck floof, he’s like a lion! Hopefully he helps the gene pool a bit.
Love following your thread , keep it up! I especially love your show/fair posts. I’m so jealous, I’ve never been to a good chicken show and COVID and the avian flu aren’t helping me out here

That’s too bad.
Yes, I love d’Anvers because of the awesome bull-neck trait!

 

[Amer]

Pullorum/Typhoid blood tested the flock and started evaluating my young bantam Buckeyes. The age of testing and evaluation is 4 months. Unfortunately we couldn’t test before all my February/January hatched matured.
So I created a new rule of thumb when it comes to chickens. “If it can breed, it can bleed!” 4 months is sexual maturity for chickens (some of my pullets are already laying.)
This isn’t just good for blood testing, but also evaluation and butchering. Any younger and those birds will still have growing to do and you can’t make any culls except for the most obvious flaws. I wasn’t sure about my favorite one, Wide Bukin, for quite awhile. He had nearly perfect coloring but awful type. Far too narrow. Some just take longer to fill out, and now he’s wide enough to live up to his name. Admittedly, he’s more like 41/2 months.
My d’Anvers are still very small because of the late start, though.

 

[Amer]

I got to judge a fair for the first time! One unique experience was judging boys that came from my own hatching eggs that I sold. NVM that they seemed better than the ones I’ve hatched. The champion of Open Show that I chose was a Modern Game bantam and reserve was a Rhode Island Red.

Also, here’s my favorite boy, Wide Bukin. He’s so hard to photograph. He just wants to walk away, I need a proper cage to contain him other than his brooder which isn’t ideal for that sort of thing.

Yup. D’Anvers thread. For sure.

 

[Amer]

To be fair they didn’t have any d’Anvers at the fair.

 

[Amer]

Bad news. The rats killed my whole hatch of 17 d’Anvers chicks in one night and the four or five ones outside that we hatched earlier.
I thought they would be safe. This project is really going down the drain. My Buckeyes never have any issues.

 

[Sapphire Sebright]

Bad news. The rats killed my whole hatch of 17 d’Anvers chicks in one night and the four or five ones outside that we hatched earlier.
I thought they would be safe. This project is really going down the drain. My Buckeyes never have any issues.

Oh no, that's awful! I'm so sorry!

 

[kurby22]

Bad news. The rats killed my whole hatch of 17 d’Anvers chicks in one night and the four or five ones outside that we hatched earlier.
I thought they would be safe. This project is really going down the drain. My Buckeyes never have any issues.

Oh no!! That’s terrible!! I’m curious how you know it was the rats? I have some rats in my bantam run and I don’t like it, but I thought they’d just go for the food or eggs! I can’t seem to get rid of them and I wasn’t too worried—but now I am!

 

[Amer]

Oh no!! That’s terrible!! I’m curious how you know it was the rats? I have some rats in my bantam run and I don’t like it, but I thought they’d just go for the food or eggs! I can’t seem to get rid of them and I wasn’t too worried—but now I am!

If you go in the coop at night they are in there. And I don’t think the chicks would eat each other.

 

[Amer]

My coop is completely secure against other predators, but the rats like to chew holes in the wood.