B.Y.C. Dorking Club!

[ki4got]

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I've had similar quitters in the incubator. of my first 21 eggs, I got 2 hatched, but attributed that to shipping. then so far of the first 12 of my own eggs, again i got 2. better percentage, but still... then of the next dozen, so far i have 4 still going. 1 is in the hatcher now, the other 3 go in on the 30th.

all start out strong, with near 100% fertility, then quit right around the 14 day mark. even the shipped eggs i started with. These birds are also all mmcm stock, a generation or 2 removed.

I'm wondering if this is a common thing? at this rate i'm going to have to incubate a thousand eggs to get 200 birds

how are sand hill's birds? anyone had any comparisons? what about other colors? I'm starting to think maybe mixing colors might be a good thing if only to improve the lines. then color can be selected for once again. thoughts on this?

 

[Bluedwarf]

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Hey everyone, I asked Bluedwarf, to join us here and post photos. He is excited about getting his first Dorking and I was happy to find someone in England who has Dorkings.

Welcome, Ian!

I think that he bought his SGD at a Poultry Club of Great Britain show.

Kim

Thanks Kim. Yes, I did buy them from the show.

 

[greenhorn]

Quote:
Hey everyone, I asked Bluedwarf, to join us here and post photos. He is excited about getting his first Dorking and I was happy to find someone in England who has Dorkings.

Welcome, Ian!

I think that he bought his SGD at a Poultry Club of Great Britain show.

Kim

Thanks Kim. Yes, I did buy them from the show.

Awesome, we need some members from the UK. Maybe we could figure out a way to get some dorkings from across the pond.

 

[F-One]

Karen,
Maybe I should not have used the term quitters. I received all of my birds as chicks. At first all were doing well but at various stages of development past chickhood, they quit. For instance the last one I lost, a pullet, had reached adult size. She was as large as rest but she never grew a comb. The others grew the large floppy combs while her comb was small and underdeveloped. She then lost weight and died. She was seperated from the others and did eat but she continued to waste.
All the Dorking chickens I have lost got to a certain point and grew no further.

 

[Mrs MIA]

I had that happen too... out of about a dozen MMH chicks last year, I think I only have 5 left. They seemed to do just fine, then one by one withered and died, despite all my efforts. I've had similar experiences with one of the heritage turkey breeds, and the only thing that seems to get them through it is hard-boiled egg yolks, daily, for the first few weeks. I'm going to test my theory (hopefully) in the Spring... if my birds all survive the crazy winter we're experiencing...

 

[ki4got]

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oh ok... well i still can't understand my losses in the eggs... i have been setting an equal number of bantam eggs, and am getting about 90% hatch from them vs 10-15% on the dorkings.

 

[F-One]

Karen,

I really hope I am wrong about this but there seems to be a pattern. I and others have had the same problems with Silver Grays. They develop to a certain point and stop. You have seen this in incubaton, I and others have seen this growing them out. Heck the same problems were talked about 100 years ago. In my case I can not rule out enviromental factors but on the other hand a vaiable breed of fowl should not be this hard.

There is no way this breed has survived durring nearly all of recorded Western History being so fragile. Something happened to this breed or this type of fowl in the 19th Century and it is up to us backyarders and small breeders to persevere and try to make these fowl viable once again.

I am curious to find out if the same problems exist in the other varietys.

 

[Yellow House Farm]

It is, indeed, rather interesting to read of these difficulties. I never had any difficulty with MMCM stock. I have, however, never tried to hatch from them. I've never had anything of a wasting illness with the whites. I wouldn't relate any current issues back to reported 19th century woes. Those about which I've read were never substantiated with any real details: certain feritility issues, certain difficulties with wet climates. I had one difficulty with fertility, which reminds one to retain a few extra males. As for the wet climate issue, they come from England, and our property is far from dry. I think a lot of what I've read about problems from the 19th century to be signs of management issues.

Once these snags are solved, the strength of preservation efforts will be in solid, diversified breeding strategies, programs that set up multiple families. So that lines don't become too tight. It's why I tend to think that multiple, diverse, and sizable flocks of a few Standard varieties are more valuable than flocks of multiple patterns that lack uniformity and are too genetically thin to be maintained for any length of time or culled in the manner needed to ensure improvement.

 

[Yellow House Farm]

"Some have claimed to have improved or somewhat stabilized lobe color in the past simply by setting only tinted eggs and not those that are near white. I can't speak to how well that works but it does tie in to the idea of lobe and shell color being linked."

Well, Dave, I'd never seen this reference before. I wonder if it's true. Our birds lay a cream white egg, ergo ligt tinted, and I'd say a fair portion have the look of a lobe brushed with white, though I would not think of it as enamel, or Ancona, white. A judge handling one of our pullets this summer said that he wouldn't disqualify her for the little white that she had. Again, it's not really a solid white but rather a bit like watercolor streaks overshadowing a fundamentally red or pink-red, lobe. Some of our females have fully red lobes, and some of them lay a slightly darker shelled egg. Could there be a correlation?

Edited to fix my atrocious type-O's

 

[DaveK]

Hi Joe, I've remembered that idea and like you wonder if it's true. I don't know. I always describe the Dorking earlobe as basically red or pinkish with someone having drawn a nearly dry brush of white paint across it. Our various families all laid some form of tinted egg with the variation headed towards lighter rather than darker. I want what Craig calls a big old horse of a hen on the ground. I might notice ear lobes but they are far from a major priority. Dave