B.Y.C. Dorking Club!

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Hey, y'all,

Last September, I got 25 Dorkings from Sand Hill. After sending the extra boys off to the freezer, I had eleven pullets and my one roo. In May, one pullet died. In July, another died. Yesterday, I went out to find my roo dead. No apparent cause of death on any of them. No blood, no injuries, no abnormal behavior beforehand...no clue what happened.

My question is: is this a lot of dead birds for no apparent reason? they just turned a year old the third week o f September. they don't free range so they didn't get into anything poisonous. We use no chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, or poisons. Is three birds out of 12 a high percentage?? It's certainly more than I expected in the first year!

Any ideas/ suggestions?
 
Quote:
without the benefit of a necropsy there's no clue telling why something dies without warning... personally i like to know the why's, so i check out any animals that die (whether culled or natural causes) to see if anything unusual pops up. and i'd say 1/4th of the birds dying would make me wonder for sure.

when you're culling birds, it's a good time to just open up a healthy bird or 2, and look around to see what you can see. (photos can help a poor memory too
wink.png
)

then if someone dies, you have a comparison to go by, to see if the answer is obvious in the newly dead bird... it could be internal laying (with hens), cancers (ovarian is more common in chickens than most other species), impaction, or who knows what.

sorry to hear you lost the birds though. i'll cross fingers the rest do ok... do you have any roos in backup? I've only got a trio right now, both hens laying good for me now, and 2 chicks hatched out 2 weeks ago. I've also go 9 eggs (and counting) scheduled to go in the 'bator when my cochin eggs get here tomorrow.
ya.gif
 
Quote:
This year, I started weighing young birds. After 2 weighs, you can get a pretty good idea of who is gaining weight the best. I used that as a major culling factor. Another thing you can do is cull by weight in general. At 8 weeks you could cull the bottom 50%. Then at 12 or 16 you could weigh again and cull the bottom half again, this time for rate of gain. If you want to keep your culls as meat birds, you certainly can if you have the system and space. For me, one of the reasons I culled is to make more space.

A lot of people cull for comb type, # of points, etc at very early ages. With Dorkings, you can also cull for 5 toes at the incubator. Since you can also sex them, you can even decide if you want to raise more pullets than cockerels or vice versa. With a good eye, you can probably count points on combs as young as a couple days, maybe birth. Any obvious DQs like webbed feet, crossed beak, etc. will get culled basically as soon as you find them.

One big part of conformation is size. In my opinion they go hand in hand. A very small bird is not a very good one, even if it has the right tail angle, etc. And frankly, size can be gotten back, but so can type.

A lot of people say that you have to build the barn before you can paint it, speaking about the color in parti-colored birds. That's all fine as long as they keep making paint...My point is that paint and genes are not the same thing. If you sell or cull a bird that is the only carrier of a certain needed color gene in your flock, no matter how much hatching you do, you won't get that gene back. You culled the only bird that had it. The only way may be to cross-breed or color cross, which could very possibly put you back several generations more than if you would have used a slightly inferior-typed bird with excellent color. Basically, you have to very careful to build your barn, but keep all the paint you need in another shed until you can use it correctly. There are no paint stores for chicken colors.
 
Too funny!
smile.png


Well, after reading some of the more experienced posts, I "killed two birds with one stone" two days ago and split the roosters from the layer flock. I'm starting to hear rumors that we are in for a ferociously cold winter this year, and experienced our first real snow/wind storm yesterday. +25°F here on the Peninsula, 25 mph winds with gusts to 50 mph (100+ mph winds elsewhere in the state, brrr!). In Jan/Feb we're usually in the -25 to -45°F range, without the windchill. The girls are already being affected by the shorter days (and daylight savings time is lost on critters up here, even with supplemental light) and with the cold, they're going to be stressed enough without having to run from the young bachelors. It's weird, but there seems to be MORE fighting in the layer pen today now that the roosters have been removed. What's up with that??

My final head count for the year (and overwintering) is 3 SG males, 5 SG females, 2 red SC females and 1 red SC male. Hopefully this will be enough for a good head start next year on a good sized flock. They're from about 4-5 different sources, so a good mix of genetics at the moment.
 
Quote:
This year, I started weighing young birds. After 2 weighs, you can get a pretty good idea of who is gaining weight the best. I used that as a major culling factor. Another thing you can do is cull by weight in general. At 8 weeks you could cull the bottom 50%. Then at 12 or 16 you could weigh again and cull the bottom half again, this time for rate of gain. If you want to keep your culls as meat birds, you certainly can if you have the system and space. For me, one of the reasons I culled is to make more space.

A lot of people cull for comb type, # of points, etc at very early ages. With Dorkings, you can also cull for 5 toes at the incubator. Since you can also sex them, you can even decide if you want to raise more pullets than cockerels or vice versa. With a good eye, you can probably count points on combs as young as a couple days, maybe birth. Any obvious DQs like webbed feet, crossed beak, etc. will get culled basically as soon as you find them.

One big part of conformation is size. In my opinion they go hand in hand. A very small bird is not a very good one, even if it has the right tail angle, etc. And frankly, size can be gotten back, but so can type.

A lot of people say that you have to build the barn before you can paint it, speaking about the color in parti-colored birds. That's all fine as long as they keep making paint...My point is that paint and genes are not the same thing. If you sell or cull a bird that is the only carrier of a certain needed color gene in your flock, no matter how much hatching you do, you won't get that gene back. You culled the only bird that had it. The only way may be to cross-breed or color cross, which could very possibly put you back several generations more than if you would have used a slightly inferior-typed bird with excellent color. Basically, you have to very careful to build your barn, but keep all the paint you need in another shed until you can use it correctly. There are no paint stores for chicken colors.

ok thanks rudy. that does give me an idea where to start... and actually the trio i got, while i thought they weren't great quality, have improved just in the last 3 weeks, putting on more size. the roo is bigger than ever (need to buy that scale
hmm.png
) and fairly blocky IMO... are there other breeds with coorect conformation so i could get an idea what i'm looking for by just 'looking'? one hen, i like her feet better than the other, but the other is larger and less tapered toward the tail. but with a group of 3, i'm not culling LOL.

oh and for comb, both hens have a bit of a 'kink' in the middle of the comb, and only in the last week or so have they started growing a bit and starting to lean over (not much but a teeny bit) wondering if that kink in the comb is a defect or just the way it works to 'encourage' the flopped comb. kinda ----~--- if you get the picture? my oegb hen (same color btw) also has the same kink in hers. funny thing is, she's got a very similar body shape too, but WAY smaller than these girls. (bad quality oegb? LOL maybe i need to add her to the bantam dorking group, except she doesn't have 5 toes)

and as for 'painting the barn' what kind of color traits would you cull for? (silver grey) i see pictures all over the place but have no idea what is 'right or wrong'. tho i think my guy's nice. but he's mine. so i might be prejudiced. LOL

got a vid i did of him and the girls (and the bantams) but it was more for the "can dogs and chickens get along" question, with an example of a down stay on my 2 boys (standard poodles) that stuck even when Funky (bantam sultan with bad attitude) decided to go after 'the big guy'.
click here
 
Anybody think there will be Dorkings at the Ohio National? We're goingand sure hope there will be some birds.

I wonder if any of the Amish folks down there have Dorkings. Might be a chance there are some that have been raising them for a long time since they are such a great utility bird. There are lots of Amish folks in Ohio. I'm not expecting to see them at the Ohio National but they do have farm auctions down there.

Since they are so secluded from modernization there could be some good fresh blood on those old diversified self sufficient farms. Anybody from Ohio ever go to the Amish farm auctions to check it out?

What's your take on it?
 

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