Breeding silkied Cochin bantams to the Standard

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I've gotten my first silkied Cochin eggs of the year!! Athena laid her first egg yesterday, and I was able to confirm this today when she laid her second! That means it's not much longer until I can start hatching, right??


I did some last minute touch ups on my currently unoccupied coop today, so I'll be moving the Blue pullets, Boba, Gus, Myrtle, and Zinni out there pretty soon. Just trying to time it right with the weather so that maybe they'll be less antsy wanting to free-range because of the snow and hopefully then be a bit kinder to one another (edit, because they don't currently all live together so will be integrating together in that coop, I mean!). Then when it's closing in on time to really start hatching, I'll put some fence up to split that coop between Gus's group and the Blue group. Exciting!

 

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8 month update for the kiddos! The sun was shining, so it was terribly difficult to get good pictures of everyone because it either makes their color distort or washes out their features, and of course the boys were about as cooperative as they ever are. So I did what I could with what I was working with.

Blue boys, Levi:

Wyatt:

Zeke:

Dean, the Black cockerel:

The Blue girls. Continuing her tradition of being difficult to take pictures of, here's Athena:

Miss Inara, who squatted for me while I was out there so might start laying soon!

Ottilie, who also didn't want to pose

The Black girls, lovely Boba who posed nicely while she gave me her long list of complaints about the service in this new coop

And Trixie, who is 10 months old and still back in the mixed flock. Wicked little witch, she is! She wanted to fight my hands the whole time I was trying to get her picture!

Just an extra picture for laughs, here. Gus is just absolutely fascinated by the camera lens. Every time I take pictures in the pen with him, he looks real close at it and freezes like this.

 

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He outwardly doesn't look much different than he did a month ago, a few blotches of white and some white sort-of mossiness on his chest. He's not one of my silkieds, but here was his last 'monthly' picture:

And an attempt at getting a few better shots of his chest:

The look of "Why are you doing this to me?"

He also has this really interesting-looking feather in his tail that came in in the past month:

But yeah, I don't think he's going to fully change colors or anything. It's almost like he's just decided to be mottled after being not-mottled to start with.

 

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On your mark, get set... First test batch of eggs is in the incubator!

 

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Butts are trimmed! That went fairly smoothly, no one was happy about it but for the most part they didn't struggle against me much. And then I got to Gus. Total drama queen! After some flapping and dramatic squawking, I finally got him to sit still for a trim. Poor guy! For the record, I trimmed above the vent for the girls and below the vent for Gus. I didn't want to leave them bare-bootied as we're still getting some cold, so I just trimmed enough so that there's less fluff in the way for breeding while still covering their bottoms when walking around normally.

After I finished, I was getting ready to leave the pen when I noticed Gus hackle up at Boba, who squatted without issue, but then Gussy just turned and walked away without breeding her. So now I'm concerned maybe it's less of a butt fluff problem and more of a libido problem. He's not terribly old, will be 3 years old in April, but I struggled last year to get him to father any chicks as well. I really want to get some solid offspring out of Gus, not only because he's a good looking guy but also out of sentimentality as he and his girls were my first step toward building up stock for breeding after years of thinking the variety was dying out... But if he's not going to do the job, I guess I don't have much of a choice but to switch him out for one of the younger and more virile males.

 

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Tough couple days here. My beautiful, wicked Myrtle has passed away. I don't at the moment have the cash to spare for a necropsy, but she didn't have any alarming symptoms or anything so I'm not overly concerned with finding out the exact cause. Nothing respiratory at all. She'd gone into a second molt, a very rough molt, and just stopped eating. I tube fed her for a couple weeks, but it just wasn't enough, I guess. From my experience in the past with other birds, there must be some sort of connection between molting and metabolism that some birds just don't handle well. I was already pretty sure if she'd pulled through that I wasn't going to breed her this year anyway as a result of this, but still, she was such a gorgeous lady as Cochins go so I looked forward to what her genetics would bring to the project, and of course I hurt at the loss of one of my beloved birds regardless.

In lighter news, of course I've taken a peek at batch 2 in the incubator already, and I saw embryoS! Plural!! And the one egg I know for a fact came from Boba has one of those embryos, so that's one potential keeper! I also witnessed Gus breeding one of the pullets successfully, so hopefully that means he's starting to get some spring fever and I'll see more fertility from here on out.

Slight edit for clarity​

 

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That's just what I did, and you know what, she's Blue! I can't believe it! I feel like I've been April fooled by my chickens!

Which... is pretty close to the truth, actually--that baby had a 50-50 shot of being Blue from that pairing, and it hatched just after midnight, so on April fool's day! What a set of pranksters!


Anyway, no super great pictures yet, but I did just move them to the brooder and got this shot of them figuring out where the heat is.

 

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Okay, batch 5 is in, for better or for worse.

 

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No change in the eggs, but I almost forgot the weekly pictures for the already hatched babies, so I got those real quick to post!

The three-week-olds; it's early to be too confident in this, but it looks like a pullet and a cockerel out of these two. Too bad the suspected pullet (first picture) is the non-keeper of the two. Thinking the cockerel will go in the listing with the non-keeper chicks when I put them up for sale, as I don't at all like how his comb looks already... and I'm sure I'll have plenty more cockerels to choose from anyway.

The two-week-olds, in the same order as the last time I posted them; first two are non-keepers and last two are potential keepers:

And the one-week-olds, all potential keepers except for the second picture:

And it occurred to me that I haven't done a monthly photo shoot for last year's birds since I think February, so I've got to try to remember to do that soon! Athena brooding might complicate things a bit, at least for her picture, but the rest shouldn't be a problem once the weather clears up.

Slight edit for clarity​

 

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Went up thinking I'd see if that baby was dry enough to move out to the brooder before the others hatched and, well, the next one was hatching. Here's the second baby! Thank goodness she decided to develop a more patterned beak so I can tell her from the first baby!

(Also sorry for the terrible picture--getting a clear shot where neither of them was moving turned out to be impossible! )