Bob Blosl's Heritage Large Fowl Thread

[mahoney]

I think if they are a real Heritage bird they should lay lots of eggs, and the excess roosters should be good for meat.Lets face it, these are the birds that fed are ancestors.The bird that fits the standard and looks great but only lays twenty or thirty eggs a year and none are fertile,what good are these birds to a homestead.
I really enjoy this website it's a great source of info.

 

[punky rooster]

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the birds you speak of are hatchery type production birds that lay alot of eggs and thats it
we well most of us are trying to save the rare, historic standard bred birds not help make them scarse by bying hatchery birds

 

[fowlman01]

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Chickens that fit the Standard generally are good producers if that was what they were bred for in the beginning. When I judge I don't go just by how the bird looks. I run my hands over the body and check the depth and width of the bird. The leg placement. (legs too close together show a decreased space for vital organs). I make sure the breast is straight and fleshed out properly etc. There are some strains of show birds that do not lay as well as others, because that individual breeder did not care about that part of the bird, but any meat bird that is not really good for meat will never do well in a show. The body will be narrow and tall and basically look wrong......to most anyone. Any chicken that does not lay well is pretty much headed for a dead end. They have to produce eggs to continue that line.

I will not say that there are not show birds that don't produce well because there are some, but I don't think that is so in most cases. An example would be Cornish. Some breeders AI them and to me that is a very bad thing to do. Every chicken should be able to mate and reproduce on their own. The solution to the Cornish problem is to use males with longer legs.....there is always a natural solution. The fellow I show with (Bob Jones) raises hundreds of Cornish each year and has never artificially inseminated his birds, so it can be done. His birds lay well and he has had several national champions and best of shows, so they are superior show birds as well.

Walt

 

[Chris09]

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OK,
20 to 30 eggs a year? You must have got your hands on some poor production hens.

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Think about it for a minute

If this was/ is remotely true, where does the Standard bred poultry come form?

I have Standard bred R.I. Red in Single and Rose comb and I have no problem with egg production, fertility or putting meat on the bone with them like I said I think you got you hand on some bad birds.
What breed/s did/ do you have that are Standard bred with low egg production, no fertility and no meat? Do you have pictures of them?

Chris

 

[punky rooster]

Quote:
OK,
20 to 30 eggs a year? You must have got your hands on some poor production hens.

Quote:
Think about it for a minute

If this was/ is remotely true, where does the Standard bred poultry come form?

I have Standard bred R.I. Red in Single and Rose comb and I have no problem with egg production, fertility or putting meat on the bone with them like I said I think you got you hand on some bad birds.
What breed/s did/ do you have that are Standard bred with low egg production, no fertility and no meat? Do you have pictures of them?

Chris

yes which breed

 

[Robert Blosl]

Last night I was reading this thread and it was on page 199. I went to bed got up ten hours later. Went out to change the water in the duck pens and give the chickens fresh water and feed. My hands are totally num. Came into the house and got warmed up and got on the lap top and you guys are at page 203. Just think a few months ago we started this great tread and I had to use a very spooky word in my chicken vocabulary HERITAGE. I used it to get your attention and it worked. I had an idea it might open up a can a worms but did we help some of you 1% understand the difference between so so chickens and Standard Breed Chickens.

That was all I wanted to do mostly on barred rocks. There are 5,000 so so barred rocks alive today. The color pattern that I try to find for my members of the Plymouth Rock Fanciers Club was the STANDARD BREED Barred Plymouth Rocks. Did it work yes? I have four new members of this board raising Standard Barred Rocks and ready to ship out about twenty orders of eggs to beginners this spring. This is a great improvement from the only three or four barred rock breeders I had to contact four months ago. Many of these breeders do not ship eggs or chicks so this made me happy. Then we located Yard full of Rocks a passionate Rock breeder who I choose to take on a Color pattern that is about gone and that’s the Columbian Plymouth Rock Large Fowl. We located a wonderful breeder out of Canada and got a trio brought in to the Ohio National and was given to this future excellent breeder from Georgia. It is my wish and hope that he will repopulate this line with others who will breed these birds not to what they think they should look like but by the STANDARD of PERFECTION.
It won’t do us a bit of good if we put them together by their personalities.

Today when I was going from pen to pen I looked at my future breeders for this spring. Each breed I looked at and was I pleased at their type. I first looked at two breeding pens of Buff Brahmas then I looked at my White Rock Cockerel then my two slick skinning tight feathered almost black Rhode Island Red Cockerels then I stop at the other White Rock Trio with the old man and his two females which will be used in April. All of them have the type I have in my head. This look is the look from my Black and White Standard of Perfection from 1964. Each breed has its own look and you must train your eye to switch from one breed type to the other. Then I go to another room and look at my Dark Cornish bantams which I don’t have much experience with but I must use the old pictures that Schilling painted as my guide till I learn what to look for.
My point as we reach our 200th page on this tread is don’t forget the most important point and that is if you want to be a breeder you must have a Standard of Perfection and you must fix the type in your mind’s eye. If you ask me my opinion of your bird’s pictures when you send them to me my choice of words is what I know from what I read and memorized from this book.
Heritage, Heirloom does not mean anything to me. These old breeds are just old breeds that where brought over by the old timers in the early part of the chicken hobby. They came over from England by boats in the 1850s and looked liked many of today’s commercial mail order chickens. However, founders of these breeds had an idea how to make them better in shape and color. They sat down in committees at conventions and over time came up with words to describe what they felt the ideal bird should look like in color and type. Some birds had to be made from Scratch such as Barred Plymouth Rocks and Rhode Island Reds. but by the 1920s they got some pretty nice birds to look at. Thousands of them where being breed by the 1930s, The Rhode Island Red Club in the late 1920s had 5,000 members and shipped out 45,000 magazines called the Rhode Island Red Journal. They shipped out almost as many Plymouth Rock Monthly’s, Leghorn Words and Wyandotte Heralds’. This was the glory days of Poultry many families’s kept from starving to death during the depression with poultry like these rare breeds.
These chickens many where dual purpose breeds which produced about 180 eggs per pullet year, lots of meat to sell and some sold them as breeding stock for a good price and some got good money if they won at the major shows like Madison Square Garden and the Chicago Coliseum .
So what did these people our Grand Parents call these chickens. Rocks, Reds, Orpingtons, and Cornish. They did not have any catchy words like Heritage. They where the breeders of these breeds and not all of them breed them to the standard just as we don’t do this today. But breeders who breed to the standard today are trying to preserve the genes that these birds still have running through their bodies.
If we lose these rare genes we will then loose the breed. Don’t get caught up on this high egg production kick or fad. This is the mail order chickens department. Most of our old breeds from yesterdays are dual purpose birds and some will go broody, some will lay a few eggs and some will lay a lot of eggs.
In summary: Just try to preserve the breed for type and color. A classic example is the New Hampshire’s they have lost so much of their color and type in just ten years. We had to bring in some great birds from Germany to get us back on track to what we had 20 years ago. We almost lost this old classic breed that once had over 50,000 birds living on our lands in the glory days. Get an old breed you like and then just try to breed it to what the old times did using the Standard of Perfection. If you need help with breeding color which if you will ask and we will find the experts that can share their secrets with you. Don’t get to many breeds as you cannot focus your time and money to any level with the breed and most of all share your stock with others so we will have more of them in the hands of those who want to be part of breeding the old style Standard Breed Poultry.
Fighting over what breed is Heritage or is not is not productive. We need to learn how to breed the breed. Or you are nothing but a chicken collator.
We need breeders bad. Nuf Said.
Got to go out and water the rest of the chickens. My hands are back to normal.
Push the old breeds so others will have them decades from now. Bob

Make money I have lost between $1,000.per year for 20 years. Had to get rid of the large fowl . This year I might loose $200.

 

[Chickielady]

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Agreed the term has become just like "Free Range" and alot of other lableing schemes to raise the price of a product.

Maybe to some. Not to all. I do not want to be lumped into that category ..... Money making scheme? I dunno, but I haven't really seen anyone get rich selling "heritage" chickens or eggs. Seems to me the money makers would be the new imported ones, like Greenfire Farms has, rather than the old breeds. I dunno .... just seems that way to me.

I whole heartedly agree !

 

[punky rooster]

great post

 

[halo]

Bob, you made a million good points in that post, but one that I want to bring up again, as I feel it is very important, is the picture of the bird in the SOP. There was a lot of time and effort in putting together the SOP, and there is a reason it is the Standard by which our birds should be judged. I have a picture of the Plymouth Rocks from the SOP scanned and in my computer, and when I feel myself questioning something in a bird of mine, I go back and study that picture, and then again read what the Standard says about Plymouth Rocks. Each of us should have that SOP picture of our favorite birds memorized. It is SO important to breed to that.

As far as the lavender craze, it has always been a color, i.e. self blue, but I guess using the term "lavender" is much more sexy than self blue. Im staying far away from that color, as it is being mixed with true blues, and what a genetic nightmare that will be.

 

[saladin]

I'm in general agreement with what others have said. I utilize my Standard every single day. The only book I read more is my Bible.

I do have a plea to make as well.

Please do not limit the breeds to which we speak to mere dual-purpose breeds. When doing so you totally disregard the Games (both the Bankivoids and Orientals). True you can use Games for meat and eggs, but that was not their primary purpose.

Games have gone into the makup of many of the composite breeds that y'all like to call heirloom and heritage. Please don't eliminate them from the conversation.

Also, there are breeds of Oriental Games that lay 40 or less eggs per year. To change that would be to alter the breed. Plus, these are Standard bred!

It is not always about how many eggs they lay or how quickly they lay-on meat.