B.Y.C. Dorking Club!

[dorkings]

We had a very cold winter last year and our SG Dorkings did just fine, and they will follow us anywhere for treats. I love watching them help me work the garden, just not sure what I'm going to do when I plant it.

I agree you do have to watch out for frostbite.

 

[LilyD]

I can join now because as of today I have hatched out 5 Silver Gray Dorkings. I set 24 eggs and only 5 hatched two died shortly after hatching leaving me with three left. Hoping that they will do okay. Not sure what caused them to die. Both were on their backs in the brooder but had been acting healthy before that. So sad.


Girl maybe?



I am thinking one boy and two girls but not sure.



Girl?


Any thoughts would be appreciated. Hoping that they make it through their second night not sure what's going on but the first two were unexpected. I might have to order chicks rather than hatching eggs this is just too sad.

 

[ronott1]

I have great hopes for you having 2 girls, but based on the very few I have hatched and purchased from McMurray, I am afraid the two with the lighter tops to the head are boys.

I hope I am wrong though. the full dark one really looks like a girl

Congratulations on the hatch. I hatched 3 Cream legbars yesterday and I can now say I have 2 girls and one boy. There is no question with these LOL they are auto sexing.

Ron

I can join now because as of today I have hatched out 5 Silver Gray Dorkings. I set 24 eggs and only 5 hatched two died shortly after hatching leaving me with three left. Hoping that they will do okay. Not sure what caused them to die. Both were on their backs in the brooder but had been acting healthy before that. So sad.


Girl maybe?



I am thinking one boy and two girls but not sure.



Girl?


Any thoughts would be appreciated. Hoping that they make it through their second night not sure what's going on but the first two were unexpected. I might have to order chicks rather than hatching eggs this is just too sad.

 

[poultrypalacewhidbey]

top picture looks like a pullet, second picture the one in the bottom looks like a pullet and the one in the middle could be either, top one is definitely a cockerel. bottom one not sure. i find that the darkness and length of the eye bar is more accurate than the top of head color. just my guess You should know for sure in a couple of weeks. once the breast feathers start coming in there is no getting them mixed up.
i am not sure what would have caused them to die like that, I have not had that happen before with my birds. might have something to do with the eggs being shipped. I am wondering what other peoples experiences have been with shipped eggs. My dorking eggs dont seem to be hatching that well after shipping. I have good hatch rates and have extremely low losses in the brooder when i hatch them myself so i guess they just dont do well when jostled around a lot by usps when in transit. for now i have decided to not ship any more dorking eggs, but i would like to figure out if this is a common problem or if my birds eggs are more fragile than normal.

 

[poultrypalacewhidbey]

to Aeropennchick : i have had frostbite problems on some of my cockerels and cocks that have larger combs, but never with the hens or pullets. Otherwise they are a very hardy bird and dont seem to mind temperatures down into the single digits. I even run a bunch of old dorking hens with my free range geese that sleep in a pen at night and they have dealt fine with the sometimes wet conditions and not that much protection from the wind. I tried to put an old cock out in the same pen however and he did very poorly. seemed to be a combination of fighting with the geese (not a good choice to pick a fight with something that weighs 30 pounds) and higher humidity in the pen, he got ragged and run down looking after only a week and i have kept all the males in pens with other dry birds since then. I have heard that the rose comb dorkings have less frostbite issue but i have never raised them so i dont have any firsthand experience (might ask yellow house farm they have rose comb whites i think).

 

[ki4got]

Quote:

top picture looks like a pullet, second picture the one in the bottom looks like a pullet and the one in the middle could be either, top one is definitely a cockerel. bottom one not sure. i find that the darkness and length of the eye bar is more accurate than the top of head color. just my guess You should know for sure in a couple of weeks. once the breast feathers start coming in there is no getting them mixed up. i am not sure what would have caused them to die like that, I have not had that happen before with my birds. might have something to do with the eggs being shipped. I am wondering what other peoples experiences have been with shipped eggs. My dorking eggs dont seem to be hatching that well after shipping. I have good hatch rates and have extremely low losses in the brooder when i hatch them myself so i guess they just dont do well when jostled around a lot by usps when in transit. for now i have decided to not ship any more dorking eggs, but i would like to figure out if this is a common problem or if my birds eggs are more fragile than normal.

the only chicks i've ever lost early like that were ones that had hatching difficulties. self-hatched ones always seem to be tough. and i hatch a lot of shipped eggs. the majority of the time problems come up in development, but not after hatching. i'm at about 30% hatch of shipped eggs, and have only lost 2 chicks from shipped eggs, both of whom had problems hatching out on their own (shrink wrapped).

 

[LilyD]

To Ron: The two cream color ones are actually brahmas I put in with the eggs I purchased to make sure my incubator was working okay. They were the first two to hatch. The dorkings took longer and hatched on their own but the last two were almost a full day after the first three so maybe that was the problem.

poultrypalacewhidbey: Not sure why they didn't do better you sent me 24 eggs and only one looked a little strange so I didn't put it in. The rest went in and 19 grew all the way to hatching. I agree with others boy these eggs are so easy to candle compared to my brown ones. Out of the 19 that stayed though only 5 hatched and out of the 5 the first three are still doing fine but the last two to hatch were doing fine in the incubator and then died when I put them in the brooder after they had dried off. Maybe the shock of moving them? Not sure.

To ki4got: These were both self hatchers but their membranes were starting to dry out when they finally got out because they took a bit. I struggled with the idea of helping them or not because I didn't want to hurt any others that might be pipped that I didn't know about. But they seemed to do okay. There was one that even in the incubator kept flipping upside down on his back but he had stopped doing that and was walking around and dried off before I moved him to the brooder. The other walked around fine and showed no signs of this at all. It just was totally weird. Now I am checking on the rest of the babies every two minutes and I don't want to leave them for work because I am afraid something might happen while I am gone.

Can't wait to see them grow up and see how they look as they grow. Two of them definitely have darker much more defined features on the head and back right down to white lines on the back. The last one is a lot lighter and the colors run together a bit on the head and back which made me think boy. I suppose one boy and two girls is a good start to begin with and we can work from there if they look good as they grow. I am crossing my fingers.

 

[poultrypalacewhidbey]

to LilyD: I am sorry you did not get a better hatch rate. I find it quite odd how many hatch issues seem to be happening with the shipped eggs given how well they hatch when not shipped. I am getting a batch of dorking eggs in the mail this week so it will be interesting to see how they do in my incubator.
I totally agree on the candling. Much easier than the brown shelled eggs such as my turkeys. Are the brahmas lights? I raise bantam buffs so I often have little feather footed chicks running around in the incubator when the dorkings hatch. the bantams are precocious little buggers that always seem to hatch early. the ones from my earliest hatch are already trying to crow and the dorkings hatched at the same time are nowhere near crowing yet.

Below is a very light coloured chick that hatched out yesterday. It will be interesting to see what it looks like when it has its first true feathers.


the above picture is one of my main breeder cocks from my line. he is currently two years old. this is a decent picture that I think shows his profile shape fairly accurately. normally holds the wing higher. He does have a few broken tail feathers and some missing feathers in his back (hence the fluff sticking out by his tail). He actually got beat up by an older hen that i tried to put in his pen, the hen promptly got thrown out into the free range flock with the geese. the hen was four years old but still laying and I had hoped to get a couple of chicks out of her as she had a few good qualities that she had passed along in previous matings, but i guess she decided for herself that it was time to retire her from breeding (she'll probably get retired to the freezer whenever she stops laying). depending on what I get this year and how the cockerels from last year fill out this cock may get retired from the breeding flock after this season. I will probably keep him around next year as a spare.

 

[LilyD]

The light colored chick looks just like the little male that I hatched out. I love the coloring on your breeder roo. He is just what I am looking for to get things started. The brahmas in my picture are in fact LF light brahmas. That is the other breed I do. I threw in a couple eggs just on a whim and they hatched out just fine. The air cells did look a little bit fragmented so I wasn't totally surprised but was hoping they would hatch okay anyway. Those are the risks we take I guess.

 

[LilyD]

Everyone was hale and hearty when I got home from work and actually seemed glad to see me lol. No fear in those babies at all. They aren't flighty at all just want to hang out. It's so cool.