Breeding Delawares to the Standard of Perfection

[newmanmichael]

This will by my first year "picking" birds to breed. I'm going to take it slowly.

At first, I'll leave all the females with the "father" male, then I'll cull the ones I don't want to breed into my laying coop, leaving just the "nicest" in to breed with him. Meanwhile, I'll pick the nicest new male to put with the two original mothers & IF I can set up a decent cockerel colony, then I can keep a few extra "new" males to evaluate later.

By nicest I was kinda thinking to breed the females based on three things ... 1) First to reach POL; 2) Best type (as far as I can tell; 3) Biggest.

For the males, I was hoping to keep at least two to work with ... 1) Best type; 2) Biggest.

I need a sustainable, dual-purpose, high-performance flock, so by selecting partially based on precociousness & size (very simple things to evaluate) I should make progress towards simple goals of economy. But that doesn't necessarily help the breed move closer to the SOP for type.

Picking out the "Best Type" breeders will be my challenge. I've got a lot to learn in evaluating a bird, and will have to come up with some point system or something to evaluate them ... weighing the importance of each attribute ...

Is this with Kathy's line of birds? I don't quite have a breeding program lined out for them yet for myself. I know they are still project birds (and beautiful ones at that) and I'm still not quite sure what I have in them yet but I am certainly excited to be working with them. I plan to keep a pure line of her birds but also make some crosses to my current line of Delawares. My Delawares aren't the best but I do like how fast they feather out and their egg laying ability. The size and frame on Kathy's line though is amazing!!

Generally type, from my understanding will give you better results for laying/meat. A long bird with a deeper chest and wider body will have more room all the organs needed for good egg producion and a bigger frame for meat. (there are always exceptions to this though, I have a nice heavy/big "exhibition" bird that lays the smallest egg, it's so ridiculous it's not even funny). Something I recently read was not to necessarily pick the fastest maturing/dominant male out of your cockerels. Very often the comb and wattles develop early but their body stops growing, so you end up with a bird with a nice looking head but he's not fully grown out and his hatch mates out grow him in the long run. (paraphrased from Breeding for Success by Grant Brereton gbpoultry.com and I recommend his books as I have gotten some great pieces of information from them).

Another great read is Call of the Hen and can be found here for free: https://archive.org/details/cu31924003144031 I downloaded the PDF version (on the left) and printed it out so I can read it with no computer. It discusses looking at the head, evaluating the body with your hands to make determinations about laying ability and I blieve it goes over trap nesting which is really the only 100% way to know for sure how many eggs each bird is laying. And there is an old plymouth rock book https://ia700404.us.archive.org/0/items/cu31924003096397/cu31924003096397.pdf with some wonderful pieces of information in it too.

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

Is this with Kathy's line of birds? ......

Yes, it's Kathy's line. Zanna (here in Oregon) was kind enough to share a trio with me. We can work together a bit ... And of course we'll be trying to do the very best with what we've got.

Thanks for the links!

 

[desertmarcy]

We have a general laying flock and we put lights with a small solar panel on those but my breeding birds are in hoop houses and are moved all over the farm and it would be a mess/expensive trying to get lights on them so I generally don't do it out of laziness... haha...

I find it interesting that our seasons are similar. How much rainfall do you get between January and May? We usually get 4-6 inches each month although this past April we got a surprising 24 inches and most of that was in one day! (not sure if you saw all the flooding that happened in Pensacola on national news)

I guess I was thinking more along the lines of warm winters, hot summers LOL. We are desert and I heard the National Weather Service downgraded Tucson from 14 inches of rain a year to 12!
It has been drier and the predictions are for more of the same. We have a bi-modal rainy season, about 1/2 coming in winter Dec-Jan and the other half in summer July-early Sept. The rest of the year, we are lucky to see any precipitation! But the rains can be extremely spotty. Our property got practically no rain this past winter.

 

[caychris]

I guess I was thinking more along the lines of warm winters, hot summers LOL. We are desert and I heard the National Weather Service downgraded Tucson from 14 inches of rain a year to 12!
It has been drier and the predictions are for more of the same. We have a bi-modal rainy season, about 1/2 coming in winter Dec-Jan and the other half in summer July-early Sept. The rest of the year, we are lucky to see any precipitation! But the rains can be extremely spotty. Our property got practically no rain this past winter.

And arent Delawares supposed to be a Cold hardy bird. Why are we all trying to raise them in the blistering heat

 

[newmanmichael]

Yes, it's Kathy's line. Zanna (here in Oregon) was kind enough to share a trio with me. We can work together a bit ... And of course we'll be trying to do the very best with what we've got.

Thanks for the links!

I thought so! I was happy to be able to get some Finnfur in VA this past May! I have 13 young birds growing out, around 12 weeks old now - had 21 but a dang skunk got 8 of them in two nights and around a dozen chicks around 3 weeks old. I can't wait to see these grow out!

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

I thought so!  I was happy to be able to get some Finnfur in VA this past May!  I have 13 young birds growing out, around 12 weeks old now - had 21 but a dang skunk got 8 of them in two nights  and around a dozen chicks around 3 weeks old.  I can't wait to see these grow out! 

Oh man! It has got to be super frustrating to lose chicks like that. I've been very lucky with the little ones I've been able to hatch. I'm sure it's just a matter of time & numbers.

I have about 40 of Kathy's F5s ages about 3 months to two weeks, and the ones hatching today are going to be questionable on the female side. Not quite as many as I'd hoped ... probably as many as I can handle considering I'm going to be SLOW about culling.

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

This is why I wanted to do something fairly large so I could get quite a bit of data in one go. I have this crazy idea of creating an new line and thus was trying to determine some data about the silver sports in the first cross and if  crossing the F1 males back to the NH yields a better ability to paint the birds or would yield more workable stock since they are supposed to hold to the delaware pattern. The lack of data on how this breed actually came about makes me want to try from scratch. And like you since he was breeding for a purpose other than an APA SOP recognition it may be very easy to make "modern" breeding mistakes because the building blocks are not what we might expect. 

I had hoped for a few more chicks this first season so I'd have more to choose from. But no matter how you squeeze & shake, you only get the one egg a day maximum per hen. And I waited a while to start hatching, fearing the pullet eggs ... and I waited for broody hens from the laying flock to be my incubators. And I think I could have handled the eggs better before incubation. And one of my hens was injured & wearing a saddle and being aloof so I think her eggs might have been infertile. And I took a couple weeks off starting new clutches because the hens started hiding their eggs and it took a while for me to catch on to where they were stashed.

Meh ... 40 chicks from two hens in about three months feels like a satisfying, if small, accomplishment for me.

I'm sure sorting through these birds will be overwhelming enough this first time. More birds probably wouldn't help.

 

[capayvalleychick]

I was told to be patient, but I'm wondering about the wings on these Delawares. I've hatched a large number and none of them have normal looking wings. The age range in these photos are 14-18 weeks. Most (pink leg bands) are 18 weeks. In addition to the wings, they all still have too much color. It's like their sire stamped his mark on them. I'm not sure how I'm ever going to get standard colored males if they all have too much barring. But, I'm more concerned with the wings. @fowlman01 and @gjensen will you take a look?

P11-18 weeks


B21 wing- 15 weeks


Yellow tag wing- 15 weeks


P11 right wing


Pink wing- 18 weeks


White- 14 weeks


P16- 18 weeks


Wing


Another wing


P6- 18 weeks


P6- left side


P9-18 weeks

 

[gjensen]

Kim, some does look excessive. Still, I see a lot of feathers on the ground. Are they molting into their adult feathers? If they are that far into it, I would let them finish molting into their adult feathers and then decide.

Do you have any males without too much black? Balancing the black will be a challenge. That build the barn before you paint it works a lot better with birds that have good color, or are white. This is a difficult color, and the color/pattern is not fixed yet.

I am fighting excessive black in my birds.

 

[capayvalleychick]

Kim, some does look excessive. Still, I see a lot of feathers on the ground. Are they molting into their adult feathers? If they are that far into it, I would let them finish molting into their adult feathers and then decide.

Do you have any males without too much black? Balancing the black will be a challenge. That build the barn before you paint it works a lot better with birds that have good color, or are white. This is a difficult color, and the color/pattern is not fixed yet.

I am fighting excessive black in my birds.

There are feathers everywhere, they've only been in that pen for 2 weeks, so they are molting, but their wings have all been that way since they first feathered at about a month of age. It's difficult to tell if they have their adult feathers. They're not like SG Dorkings, where there is an abrupt transition from scruffy looking weird colored to wow he looks like a Dorking.

They all have too much barring, most of them have identical barring on their upper back (cape?) The only one with slightly less black is #6 (pictured) and he still has too much.

Too much black in your Catalanas or NH?