Barnevelder breeders lets work together and improve the breed

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Piet said:
I wish you all the best with the improvement on egg color. You have your own interpretation as to what a Barnevelder was back then and what it should be today, but I applaud you anyway for supporting the Barnevelder all the way down in New Zealand. I mentioned before that the production of those eggs were JUST as important. The darkest eggs in late season can be from your poorest layers. Fading eggs happen from your very best layers, the paintbooth cannot keep up. When the hen takes a break in the winter and then starts again, bang here is the nice brown egg again.
Here is an article that you may have seen before, but read it again.
This is right from the horses mouth, and no British, changed, from far away or "blown up" literature to confuse with!
We do not know how dark those "very dark eggs" were. The Dutch local fowl laid white eggs and that is all we were used to seeing back then, so anything brown was very rare.
They weighed eggs, but did not grade eggs for shades of darkness. However, they did observe what poor and excellent laying capabilities did to egg color over time.
http://www.aviculture-europe.nl/nummers/13E01A03.pdf
Click to expand...
Thanks Piet for that link, yes I have read that, along with many other historical accounts not only of the Barnevelder but of other breeds.
Interestingly, that article mentions the Shanghai as one of the predecessors of the Barnevelder, something that I have seen in many other old texts and to my eye at least strongly suggested in the old pics I have seen of the phenotype of the primitive looking Shanghai and then later, 1920’s typed Barnevelder. Maybe this is a polite way that you might agree to a suggested edit to your clubs history page?

I also agree that egg size and number is important. Since I single mate I can monitor and measure this also. Pic below is that of my breeding hens last year,


she is the same female that layed the egg far right (in her pullet year) below:


her eggs plateaued at 73 gms first season, and never really moved above 83gms as a second yr hen. She layed well in her first year (6 eggs per week) but buttoned off in her 2nd yr. However, I don't want to see any 'improvements' there either as from a welfare standpoint, I think she beat herself up too much doing that (she looks far older than a 2 year old hen now). I don't wish this for the breed
frankly I'd much rather prefer the (now hen) in the same above pic (2nd from left), which plateaued at 62-64 gm eggs in her pullet yr and as a hen 72-73gms.
I also know and have seen that egg number and egg weight are negatively correlated, as is egg size and depth of colour - agree in part with the finite amount of 'paint' argument. But have not seen evidence that the best layers drop off in egg colour, as the season progresses faster than those that are more modest layers, these 2 traits in my experience and observations are independent of one another if I compare within peer groups.
One thing that I have seen with the strong layers that maintain egg colour better is that they will strip their colour out of their legs more than those in the other category.
So there is a series of push pull situations which makes this a interesting and worthwhile challenge
 
poultch said:
Interestingly, that article mentions the Shanghai as one of the predecessors of the Barnevelder, something that I have seen in many other old texts and to my eye at least strongly suggested in the old pics I have seen of the phenotype of the primitive looking Shanghai and then later, 1920’s typed Barnevelder. Maybe this is a polite way that you might agree to a suggested edit to your clubs history page?
Click to expand...
No need to edit anything without a concrete answer. Again it is an assumption. We know for sure that the Langshan was the most infuential and those other breeds (were not real breeds yet then either) we are not 100% sure if they were used in the making. The Langshan for sure. We like to build on facts and do not just interpreted dried ink from 150 yrs ago as the truth., You interpret again from the oldest writings, where in the same page they talked about a chicken laying three eggs in one day..
The history on the club page is written by the club in Holland again right from the horses mouth. It was also published in the KLN magazine. You may direct your own interpretation from your old texts to the writer himself. His name is listed below the Article, PM me for his email.

You have nice eggs, can we see the birds that lay them also?
 
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That was a good article Piet. I appreciate the experience and research both you and Chris have brought to this Barnevelder Thread. I like the information and the polite way you disagree with each other when you do. I noticed in the article the writer said that spots on eggs should be selected against and also the spherical eggs. I can see the argument for the spherical eggs if you are setting in an incubator, though I can usually right an egg by about day 5 by looking at the air cell. But why the predjudice against speckles and spotted eggs, I find them to be my favorite and the kids that I sell eggs to choose them when given a choice.

Andy
 
Piet said:
No need to edit anything without a concrete answer. Again it is an assumption. We know for sure that the Langshan was the most infuential and those other breeds (were not real breeds yet then either) we are not 100% sure if they were used in the making. The Langshan for sure. We like to build on facts and do not just interpreted dried ink from 150 yrs ago as the truth., You interpret again from the oldest writings, where in the same page they talked about a chicken laying three eggs in one day..
The history on the club page is written by the club in Holland again right from the horses mouth. It was also published in the KLN magazine. You may direct your own interpretation from your old texts to the writer himself. His name is listed below the Article, PM me for his email.

You have nice eggs, can we see the birds that lay them also?
Click to expand...

Piet, I 100% agree with you,~artists and writers have their own creative interpretations back then as it is still now, this is where you can use a bit of science to cut through the what a geneticist might refer to as 'noise', genetics doesn't lie. This is what I like to use as a concrete base to launch thought from. Breeding chickens (and doing it well) is the field of applied genetics.

I have pm;d you a link to pics of my birds, and I freely admit that they are not marked as yours, but I can guarantee you that hens that have laid these eggs were either themselves or mothers of progeny that have won best of breed, and won big classes (up to 19 in one pullet class alone)

I think we have to agree that we are both Barnevelder enthusiasts, but the approach is different.
 
mountainvieworchards said:
......
. I noticed in the article the writer said that spots on eggs should be selected against and also the spherical eggs. I can see the argument for the spherical eggs if you are setting in an incubator, though I can usually right an egg by about day 5 by looking at the air cell. But why the predjudice against speckles and spotted eggs, I find them to be my favorite and the kids that I sell eggs to choose them when given a choice.

Andy
Click to expand...
As you can see from my pics, some of my hens will lay the rounded eggs, one thing in that article is nonsense (likend to the 3 eggs in one day reference from Piet) is that these eggs still have air sacks in the blunt end.
But I have found this trait (rounded eggs) to be heritable.. mothers passing it on to her dtrs.
However I remember reading a paper regarding the speckling (It was one of the few things online papers from a commercial breeding company) but it suggested that speckling was highly repeatable, but lowly heritable
.. (For Recap) h^2 0.09 for speckling
 
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poultch said:
As you can see from my pics, some of my hens will lay the rounded eggs, one thing in that article is nonsense (likend to the 3 eggs in one day reference from Piet) is that these eggs still have air sacks.
But I have found this trait to be heritable.. mothers passing it on to her dtrs.
However I remember reading a paper regarding the speckling (It was one of the few things online papers from a commercial breeding company) but it suggested that speckling was highly repeatable, but lowly heritable
.. (For Recap) h^2 0.09 for speckling
Click to expand...

What does that mean that it is repeatable as compared to heritable and what does h^2 0.09 mean?
 
repeatable just means that, how well that the trait is repeated over a given period or into the next measurement period
ie a hen that lays a speckled egg at one point of her laying cycle , will highly likely lay a speckled egg at aother point, or in a subsequent year, so in other words if you measure this trait in month one or 2 it will give a very good chance of repeating this trait at another measurement point (so not a great deal of benefit of more than one measurement)
however, as has been discussed egg colour itself is not repeatable through a given season (as we all agree it fades), but is rightly pointed out is repeatable from one season to the next
heritability just refers to how likely it will be passed down from one generation to the next. 1 being a clone and 0 nothing.
0.09 is relatively low, (I think it was this figure cant remember exactly) so with higher heritablities the more response you can get from selection (what you see is what you get)
 
h² means heritability
Poultch mean the difficulties to get speckles on dark eggs - well the ink jets of dark egger are working better.
big_smile.png

http://www.hyline.com/UserDocs/Page..._Incidence_of_Speckles_in_Brown_Egg_Lines.pdf
 
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