Araucana thread anyone?

[ndoles]

I am just starting with true araucanas, and have one roo, and 2 hens. My roo is a tailed, double tufted wild-type BBR. One pullet is a blue double tufted, rumpless, with a little red coming through. The other is a wild-type BBR..double tufted tailed.
What can I hope for when breeding these 3?

 

[cashdl]

What I have is five breeding pens that are up and running. 1 is perfect color wise, it has a blue tufted roo - no color leakage- over 3 cleanfaced hens. The roo and hens have beautiful body type and color. The problem is that the hens lay when they feel like it and that isn't very often. So for that pen I have a blue pullet that will be 5 months and laying soon. When she starts laying I will put her in that pen. She is the only blue chick I have except for a tufted one I am giving to someone. My goal for that pen is to get some younger hens in there. Mine are all a couple of years old.

My ginger pen, I put together kinda as an after thought. I love the color and shape of the roo even though he is clean faced. I have a bbr wild type hen with a columbian gene, and a silver duckwing hen. One hen is tufted and one is not. My goal for this pen is to take out the silver duckwing hen and put in two more bbr wild type hens with tufts.

My splash pen is actually a dominant white roo who has a blue hen, a bbr hen, and had a splash hen who recently died. I got alot of barred, splash, and cuckoo chicks out of that pen. I am also getting really pretty patchwork colored chicks both pullets and roos. I believe it is the dominant white interacting with the bbr. This pen will be totally revamped over this year. The blue hen will go to the blue pen and the bbr hen - not sure what to do with her she is my project hen. She lays a tan pink egg. Once I determine if her pullets lay a green egg or a tan egg, I will decide her fate. If they lay a green egg she will stay with that roo because of the neat colors I am getting. If they lay a tan egg, she goes in the table egg pen. The roo is a pet so he may just get to guard the table egg hens. What roo wouldn't want 50 hens to himself.

My White pen is actually a really nice white roo over barred hens. I am just starting to set eggs from them. The hens have a better confirmation than the roo. He has magnificant tufts. I will most likely get white chicks but would love some barred to sneak in. All thru the muddy winter the roo and hens stayed clean. It was the strangest thing. They would roll in the mud one day and the next be clean as a whistle. Of course they always have fresh bedding to clean off in.

My birchen pen is what I am most excited about right now. I have my avatar roo in with a black hen and a silver duckwing hen. I have gotten my very first brown red chick out of this pen. It is a tufted pullet. I definately am going to start a brown red breeding pen. I love this pullets color. I have also gotten birchen both tufted and cleanfaced, and black tufted and cleanfaced from this pen. My goal for this pen is to add 2 or 3 hens. I want a birchen hen or two and a golden duckwing hen.

I have a really beautiful big bbr roo that is clean faced and I want to add a couple of tufted bbr hens to his pen. Right now he is chilling with some other boys and a duck.

I also want to get a silver duckwing pen going and a golden duckwing pen.

I have a double tufted black pullet and a clean faced roo that I will pair together for now. I have a georgous roo chick that has big white cotton balls on his cheeks. If he turns out to have not red or gold leakage he may start another black pen, because I have have two cleanfaced pullets waiting for a man.

My problem is last year I only kept 5 hens for myself and sold all the other roos and hens that were born last year. This year I want to be able to keep more for next years breeding program. Who to keep is a constant struggle. I fall in love with them all.

Lanae

 

[cashdl]

Ndoles,

you will have alot of tails to weed thru. You will of course get the bbr wild type and you will get blue breasted red also. you will have 50% dead in shell due to the tufting gene. Of what survives I would keep the tufted rumpless and the cleanfaced rumpless for next years breeding. You may get blues but they will be leaky blues with other colors showing thru.

Congrats on your starters. Start hatching and enjoy those cute babies.


Lanae

 

[ndoles]

Thanks,Lanae!
I am so anxious for them to start laying.. hope to get a clean-faced blue pullet soon to add to the mix. I would love to have a blue roo, too. For some reason, I simply love the blues!

 

[smoothmule]

Ndoles, repeat what Lanae said. Not a bad start, just cull hard or you'll be back where you started.

Lanae, Love your plans. I said I'd leave Degas out a while but he didn't seem as interested in free ranging and had been out all spring before I put him back in the main coop. So, he's got Luvdove and Squirrely Shirley, my only tailed hens. Luvy has small double tufts, he has good sized double tufts. Shirley is a Slinky look-alike with a tail and clean faced. I will be setting this pens eggs separate from all the others and banding them. They're my "under construction" pen and I won't be selling any of their eggs to hatch. I really want to evaluate what I'd decided to do with them and see if my theory about crossing tails to the ones with too short a back for better chicks. There's a great chance for tufts here so there may be some tufted/partial tailed's I can use later too. They have food and water but I need to get a nest box for them.


They're all settled in, hopefully for good for a while. I've been playing musical chickens for a couple of weeks now. I moved my 2 BBR/Columbian chicks out with the older chicks today. I was surprised that they didn't seem so small out with the bigger kids. They settled in fast and dug into the feed. I also put a couple of my frizzled Serama pullets out with them and they're still so tiny and older than most of the ones in the pen with them.

PS: anyone want a trio of mille fleur D'Uccles?

 

[Quirky]

Alrighty, my turn. It'll be short, since I have three birds

If I am linebreeding, do I have to breed Gomez to his daughters? I can't start with his granddaughters unless I get more birds.

I may break down and buy a copy of the SOP. Do all of you have copies, and if so do you think it's worth the $59? I don't really have a long-term goal because I don't fully understand what I can do with what I've got. I read "Ongoing Selection of Breeding Stock" last night and that confirmed some of what I already thought and gave me some new info. to consider. Any thoughts from y'all are always welcome.

There's a breeder in VT and a woman in RI who I'd love to visit so I can see in person what it is I'm supposed to be looking for.

 

[syble]

SOP is a good investment, i have one. you may want to learn about additional breeds, or there might be small details you want to check

 

[cashdl]

I have a copy of the SOP. I love it especially for the feather colors and patterns. Even though there are only 3 araucana illustrations, the colors carry over to other breeds. There is alot of info on chickens in general. Definately worth the effort.

Lanae

 

[cmsdvm]

Here is an email some might find interesting. I have no personal knowledge of this gentleman and this certainly does not constitute an endorsement, I just wanted to let BYCers know about it.


One could easily argue that the Araucana is the hardest poultry breed to work with, whether breeding for utility or show. It has two traits (Rumplessness and Tufts) which don't seem to play nicely together and collectively seem to make the breed very vulnerable to inbreeding depression. Adding salt to the wound is the fact that breeding tricks (shortcuts) taken by prior breeders to artificially boost fertility and incidence of show birds has had the cumulative effect of compounding the inbreeding depression plaguing the breed. When I started working with Araucanas about a decade ago, I averaged 5% hatch-rate and hatched about 1000 chicks for each decent quality show bird. While many have liked the idea of breeding the Standard bred Araucana, most have found it too frustrating to stick with.
When I started with the breed, in addition to poor hatch-rates, my flock suffered from being undersized and lacking proper dual purpose fleshing. It lacked vigour and the majority of young chicks developed pasty bottoms. Over the past decade, I have made pasty bottoms a rare occurrence and all birds used in the breeding pens are now over standard weight and have proper dual purpose meaty carcasses. Fertility over the past 2 seasons has hovered around 85-90% but there is still room for improvement. For instance, I'm still cleaning dirty rumps from time to time. While consistency of body type quality has been painfully slow to improve, useful meaty offspring definitely outnumber the scrawny ones now.

I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel with this breeding project and feel it is on the brink of something special. Much of the heavy lifting has been done with much of the inbreeding depression removed. It's a very useful utility Araucana line ready for show quality refinement. However, the genepool is not yet out of the woods and still needs careful breeding attention.

It is with sadness that I'm going to discontinue developing it as I concentrate my Araucana efforts on my BBR Wheaten flock. I'm looking for someone willing to take the project over. The person needs to have some experience breeding standardized heritage breeds and a deep desire to utilize the breed for meat and eggs. The breeder needs to be ready to take on the most challenging breeding project they will ever endure and be ready to discard conventional Araucana breeding wisdom, because it is, for the most part, wrong. Conventional exhibition breeding wisdom is also inadequate for the Araucana. The rewards for the effort will be the creation of an Araucana line that has the potential of establishing a new standard for the breed. This line could easily become the Araucana line that all others will be compared against.

I'm going to leave the current breeding flock intact (~ 18 adults) while I look for the right breeder. If nothing happens, I'll disband the flock through the local poultry swaps later in the season.

Thanks,
Wayne

--
Organically Grown * Heritage Conservation
http://www.omegabluefarms.webs.com/

 

[cashdl]

I have looked at their website before. Their birds are a little meatier it seems. The seem to be shaped a little different. I wouldn't mind having them if they lived closer to me.

Lanae