Breeding silkied Cochin bantams to the Standard

[pipdzipdnreadytogo]

Two more out, for a total of four so far out of the 9 eggs! I believe these two are both Blues. One hadn't fluffed yet so I left that little one in the incubator and moved the more fluffy three out to the brooder with the older babies.

 

[pipdzipdnreadytogo]

Woke up to an incubator full of babies!! 9 out of 9 hatched! Looks like in total I have the one Splash, I think two Blacks, and 6 Blues from this last hatch. The peeps are in the brooder and the plug is pulled on the incubator for the year! Here are the five that hatched overnight plus the one that hatched yesterday that I left in the incubator to fluff more:

Very excited to see how two of the Blues feather! They are quite light compared to the other Blues of the brood! I'll get pictures of them once they've all fluffed and gotten to their feet.

 

[pipdzipdnreadytogo]

With the hatching done for the year, here's some more data!

I didn't include the hatch percentage because, well, after some iffyness to start, it pretty much hit 100% and stayed there. Hatch percent for me was the number of chicks hatched compared to the number of eggs that developed, so clears were not included in that number, only eggs that at least started to develop.

Batches 1-7 were set in March and April and hatched primarily in April, just one chick hatched on March 31st.
Batches 8-14 were set in May and early June and hatched primarily in June. Batch 8 hatched late May and batch 14 hatched early July.
Batches 15-17 were set in July and hatched in July.
Note that there are different numbers of eggs in each batch, so eggs that didn't develop in smaller batches had a much larger impact on the percentage for those batches.

Batch 4 is the one that I skewed by picking Boba's eggs over Zinnia's eggs because Zinni's weren't hatching. Batch 5 was right after a cold snap. Batch 7 was Athena's eggs, so I think part of that may have been her inexperience, but part could have also been that some of those eggs were Zinnia's eggs; all of the Boba eggs that I knew would hatch (batch 6) were in the incubator so that I could band them to tell them from the rest of the babies she would raise. As far as I am aware, not a single egg from Zinnia even developed this year.

Batches 10, 13, and 17 were from the Blue coop, so fertility was great from them across the board! So much so that I didn't have to set many batches from them, I got tons of chicks with each batch!
Batches 8, 11, 12, 14, and 15 were corner coop eggs, so they did pretty well as well, starting strong and going up until dropping off when we started getting hot for the summer.
Batches 6 and 9 were Gus's group without eggs from the Blue girls, and batch 9 was my last attempt at getting Zinnia eggs to hatch so that's likely why the fertility percentage is so low. Batch 16 is also from Gus's group after he passed on. I wish I had gone for older eggs to set, but of course at the time I was thinking in terms of what was best under normal circumstances and not about that he likely hadn't been breeding the girls for a bit.
The remaining batches (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7) were the mixed group batches that were some Gus x Boba and likely Gus x Blue girls but could have also been Gus x Zinnia; these were the batches that I started setting just to get an idea of fertility as soon as possible.
The graphs when I split them up by coop were not interesting at all, for the record. Mostly just straight lines with the occasional slight change. Also, because some of the Gus group chicks were mixed with the Gus x Blue girls batches and I didn't record anywhere how many were in each batch and how many clears were from which hens, I can't really accurately make a graph to show how fertility trended in that group proper.

As to be expected, fertility trended upward as it warmed up and stayed warm, even including batch 16 despite the circumstances. I do wonder if I had continued setting eggs if it would have started to go downward with the heat, but I didn't want chicks hatching that late in the year. I guess the useful bit of this for my purposes is that I should probably wait until mid to late March to start setting next year.

A total of 70 chicks hatched. 7 of those were the Gus x Blue girls chicks, 20 Gus x Boba chicks, 20 corner coop chicks, and 23 Blue coop chicks. My lowered goal for the year was 60 chicks not including the Gus x Blue girls babies, so I just passed that threshold with this last batch. I'll have to rework my brooder setup and maybe be a bit pickier about things like middle toe feathering for early culls to make sure that the brooders and growout pens don't get too overloaded next year.

I think that's about all I wanted to post about that data... But if I do think of anything else, I'll go ahead and edit it into this post to keep things together.

 

[3KillerBs]

Do you think that Zinnia's fertility issues are inherent to her or that she's not mating properly?

 

[pipdzipdnreadytogo]

I have some suspicions, I just am not sure how, I don't know, feasible the first is? I kind of wonder if maybe there was an inbreeding depression with that first group I got of them. That was Gus, Zinni, Myrtle, and Dandelion. Not only was fertility iffy in the eggs they hatched from (I believe I received 15 and only those four developed), but when I'd tried to hatch out of them alone their fertility had been spotty at best. I only managed to hatch two chicks out of Gus over Zinni and Myrtle last year and both were small, weak, and unthrifty chicks compared to the chicks raised in the same brooder that I'd hatched from shipped eggs. That next to the many I've hatched out of Gus over Boba and the Blue girls this year that have all been perfectly healthy and strong is rather suspicious to me, almost like it wasn't necessarily Gus or Zinnia alone but the combination of them together. Each of those original four also had little issues, like Dandelion and her long fight with recurring prolapses, or Zinni and her strange and sudden blindness. But part of the lack of fertility could have been me trying to hatch too early in the year last year as well, as my above data attests to, and I don't honestly know for a fact what inbreeding depression looks like in chickens, so I really don't know if that's even remotely similar to all this.

The other suspicion is that, exactly as you put it, she was not breeding properly. On at least one occasion I can recall witnessing Gus try to breed her and her just laying on her side under him instead of properly squatting for him. Even when she did squat, it seemed like he always had a hard time properly mating her. I don't know if it was her not cooperating or what. That was one of the reasons I trimmed their butt fluff this year, though. So that's also a very likely possibility, it just doesn't explain the weak chicks before getting new blood in the group.

Regardless, with her having gone partially blind I consider her a cull and will not be trying to hatch from her next year. Whatever caused it seems to have passed, as it has not progressed any further in quite some time now. Her right eye I believe is mostly blind, not completely as she does react to some motion on that side, and her left eye just has a little tint of fogginess to it, but she can see through that eye well enough to get around and find the food and water. Based on that I think she'll do okay in the mixed flock, at least as long as I'm careful with integrating her over there. I don't want her in a small flock with a rooster at minimum, I feel like she would not handle that kind of attention well. The mixed flock has three roosters in it, but she'd be among 40-ish other hens as well.

 

[SourRoses]

It does sound like inbreeding depression from what I've read. Low fertility is the consistent sign, the health problems vary depending on what gene mutations were present.
I know we're in different climates, but I haven't had any issues hatching in winter.

We did have a roo with low fertility from potential inbreeding, it was so frustrating setting bator after bator of eggs and only hatching two from him. Thankfully the breeder let it be known they were experiencing low fertility as well, so I had put the male over another line of hens.
The sole heir to the throne was looking really nice for a while, but just recently came down with a terrible case of red leakage just as he's nearing maturity. Argh. But there's nothing to do except proceed using him with the best hens. Thankfully they're more of a side project.

 

[pipdzipdnreadytogo]

Yeah, here I've noticed that a cold snap in the spring can cause fertility to drop a little bit. See batch 5 in the above chart!

It was definitely frustrating dealing with infertility, and I really thought I was going to have to give up on keeping Gus's blood in my line! His first babies hatching for the year with many more on the way was such a happy moment for me.

That really stinks about color leakage, though. Tough to work with, but if you don't have any other options, you've got to do what you've got to do. I'm scattered lately so I apologize if you've said, but what are you breeding?

 

[SourRoses]

Yeah, here I've noticed that a cold snap in the spring can cause fertility to drop a little bit. See batch 5 in the above chart!

It was definitely frustrating dealing with infertility, and I really thought I was going to have to give up on keeping Gus's blood in my line! His first babies hatching for the year with many more on the way was such a happy moment for me.

That really stinks about color leakage, though. Tough to work with, but if you don't have any other options, you've got to do what you've got to do. I'm scattered lately so I apologize if you've said, but what are you breeding?

Wow you're so organized!

Well, my main project is exactly what everyone says not to do, I'm taking 5 different breeds and making 1. Hopefully.

On the side, more or less, keeping the pure Ameraucana and Genetic Hackle.
With the Ams the goal is to work on the Mottled project started by others. The blacks are separate to have something to keep improving them with. The leaky cockerel is my last mottled split, from the Isabel hens, so I'm hoping that will be enough genetic variation to improve his fertility with some black hens.
Then there's the Smurf project. In a month or two the White Faced Black Spanish will be old enough to cross with the Blue ear Mosaics to hopefully make full blue faced birds. Once the trait is set enough, they'll tie in to my main project. The crazy ambitious one.

Lately I've been asking myself if I should drop the mottled Ams / Genetic Hackle. But I can't really decide. I like those birdies. But I love my imaginary chicken breed the most, lol.
We have about the same amount of roosters
I'm glad to hear you had success with Gus this year, good boy!

 

[pipdzipdnreadytogo]

Haha, I don't know if I'd call it organized! I just like playing with data, so I record a lot of random things like that.

I think that many frown upon such projects with a goal of making your own breed because in most cases either the proposed new breed is very similar to something that already exists and likely needs that attention much more, or it's something that would take an insane amount of time and dedication to produce. And when most are trying to make their own breeds, I've noticed, they don't seem to understand the capacity at which you need to hatch in order to actually make good, solid steps toward that goal. The F1 generation with the initial crosses probably doesn't take too many individuals to start, depending on the genes you're wanting to work with, but after that there is so much hatching and culling that needs to be done in order to really progress. The same can be said for breeding an already standardized breed with the hopes of improving it. Hatching a dozen chicks per year and calling them good enough will literally get you nowhere in chicken breeding. And that's generally what happens, the project stalls because not enough chicks are being hatched to get the desired results, and thus it is abandoned after a year or two.

In other words, if you have the dedication to stick with it, to see it through slow progression to the end, or the ability to actually hatch many, many chicks to cull down to what you need, then I see nothing wrong with those types of projects. Each and every breed we now know as part of the standard started with someone deciding to take on one such project. Best of luck with yours!

 

[pipdzipdnreadytogo]

Okay, peep time! These are the babies of the last batch of the year!

In total, this batch had two Black babies:

One little Splash baby:

And 6 Blue babies:

Among those Blues, we have two more birchen (ER) based Blues:

And these two absolutely stunning light Blues who I am beyond excited to see feather out

And one more picture because it is too cute, the two light Blues and the Splash baby saying 'the end'