BYC Café

[Shadrach]

@Shadrach , the mousie sure had fun, did it?
On a side note about the senior roosters allowing the cockerels to have a few of the roosters non-favorite hens/pullets, would you care to sit down with Fabio and explain this to him? He goes after Captain each and every time he sees Captain go after a pullet.

Bring him over and I'll put him straight.
What happens here is the senior roosters chase away the cockerels (this is an important distinction) until the cockerels become roosters, give or take a couple of months.
About 14 months old seems to be the acceptance age here. The senior roosters will still try to prevent the junior from mating with the seniors favorites in particular, but once the senior rooster stops responding to non favorite and junior hens escort calls the junior roosters get the opportunity to try and mate with those hens he responds to.
For a period of time many of the hens will shout the house down and try to escape the cockerel and to a lesser degree, a junior rooster. I believe the senior rooster views it as it is preferable to have his son, or a relative mate with his hens than a rooster from another flock. These studies deal in part with such behaviour.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170329103326.htm
https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/28/3/760/3057961
It's partly a logistics problem. It is not possible for a senior rooster to attend to every escort call in a large flock of say twenty females in a free range setting. The behavior under confined conditions is different. It is one of the reasons chicken keepers here, and in many other places, including the US prefer to keep a 3:1 (average) ratio. The rooster can manage the protection of three, or four hens. He can't manage twenty.

 

[Shadrach]

Firstly my apologies to those who may find my lack of people skills unfriendly, or offensive. I don’t deal with people particularly well. I live with chickens and other animals. Apart from the Internet I communicate with humans very little and those I do communicate with face to face come from a different culture and have different norms. My current record is speaking 5 words to a human in one week.

@ronott1

there are differences in flock types. Here most breeds have had the broody gene bred out. It had to do with a focus on production when the battery hybrids came out starting in the 1950s.

I have not had a broody at my place in 5 years or so

There may be truth to this....but when I had other breeds they did go boody.

Just my own experience though. Nothing can be proven from that lol!

The above two statements are contradictory.

Like I said, our personal experience is anecdotal. There are actual university papers that show the declining rate of broodiness and that is based on more data than we perceive with our experiences

I’ve read a couple of papers regarding broodiness in particular breeds under a particular collection of circumstances. It’s the set of circumstances under which such studies are carried out that needs to be born in mind. If my memory serves me the hens used in the studies I read were battery hens. The studies gave no indication of the provenance of these hens, or what changes were noted should the keeping arrangements of these hens change. This is particularly important when further generations are studied under different circumstances.

If, for example, you conducted a study on the social and breeding behaviour of 50 inmates in a prison and then compared this to a study of those inmates once at liberty, the study would come to rather different conclusions because the behaviour changes with circumstance.

It’s a problem when applying hard science controls to behaviour in any species. The results of the experiment will only tell you what happened at that time under those conditions. You can and people to make inferences from such studies and sometimes such inferences are reasonably accurate, other times not so much.

You stated that most hens have had the broody gene bred out. I have yet to come across any study that has even identified the broody gene let alone one that has monitored this gene over years and in various alternative keeping arrangements. I think most scientists would acknowledge that there are a variety of factors that determine whether, or not a hen will show broody behaviour. As these circumstances change, so does the behviour.

There must be hundreds of posts here on BYC dealing with broody hens. The majority of these hens are hatchery and breeder stock of the most common breeds found in the US. This alone suggests that broodiness has not been bred out of most hens. You state that you have had other breeds (you don’t state how many or which breeds) that did go broody so your own experience is that possibly a particular breed you have kept is less prone to going broody in your keeping circumstances than others.

So, yes, it is nonsense to state the the broody gene has been bred out of most hens. Nonsense, being defined as something that does not make sense. In this case it doesn’t make sense because there is overwhelming evidence that the statement is not valid.

When it comes to behavioural science anecdotal evidence is often all one has. It’s a problem behavioural science is slowly coming to terms with. People such as myself and say centrarchid on this forum (I’m in contact with a few others) have been attempting to study chicken behaviour over many years. If say ten of us see a similar pasterns of behaviour under a particular set of circumstances then it is reasonable to suggest that such behaviour may be general to most chickens under similar circumstances. It’s the small variations in circumstance and the length of time the observations were made over that dictate the validity of the study and the conclusions drawn from it. It’s why I keep records of lineage of the flocks here and the circumstances under which I observed the behaviour. Should someone else wish to spend eight years observing chickens under as near as possible the same circumstances then eventually if the observations are similar a theory can be constructed and tested and that will become the new science.

Returning to the original point regarding hatch rates.

This is why most breeders use incubators!

Maybe most breeders you know of use incubators but that isn't the case here.
Science has in general concentrated on hatch rates as in the number of live chicks produced from a clutch. Even so, there are studies (I can’t find the relevant studies atm, I’ve got studies spread over 7 hard drives) that suggest that given proper nest conditions a broody hen will hatch more chicks than an incubator. Part of the problem with incubators (this doesn’t include the often harmful interference from humans attempting to candle eggs, or incorrectly manage the incubator) can be understood from this study.

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-635X2016000600001

What chicken keepers here believe is a chick hatched and reared under a broody hen in a suitable nest site will be healthier and have better life chances than an incubator hatched chick reared by humans.

There is already and this will intensify as artificial wombs develop debate regarding similar issues when it comes to humans. It is generally thought that children born to and reared by parents (preferably two, it doesn’t seem to matter what gender) are healthier and more likely to integrate into a social structure successfully than those born and reared under other circumstances.

My observations and the observations of others who have studied this to some extent tend to confirm this. While chicken keepers use hard based boxes that do not receive adequate amounts of daylight as nest sites, the incubator may well produce more chicks. It’s not that the hens natural incubation is below par, it’s the ignorance of the breeders regarding what is and what isn’t a suitable nest site that produces low hatch rates and brooding problems. Some of the anecdotal evidence that one can read on this forum that may help to support this view is from people who didn’t even know their hen was sitting, or had made a nest that was inaccessible and sat and hatched there.

Using words like nonsense and etc. is a bit inflammatory. It is similar to saying that I am full of nonsense since I posted it And I thought we were friends....

not serious of course but it is amazing how passionate we are over birds.

I'll let others who read this decide if my use of the word nonsense was unfriendly or inappropriate. It was not meant to be offensive. I have a great deal of trouble egg shell treading.

 

[Shadrach]

Good morning Cafe.
Coffee is made.
I'm pleased to announce I got a full nights sleep without the mouse crashing around my bedroom.
Mixed weather here, warm but fast moving cloud cover. It may even rain.

 

[N F C]

Morning Cafe folks

Thanks for the coffee Shad, at the rate I'm drinking it, another pot will be needed shortly.

 

[Mtn Margie]

Morning! I am dog sitting so I must be heading out here in a bit. I had catsup when I was a kid and then somehow morphed into an "adult" using ketchup on my food and basically I need to ketchup on most all of my various responsibilities atm...., sigh.
Have a wonderful day you All!

 

[007Sean]

Good morning Cafe

Thanks for the coffee, Shad

 

[igorsMistress]

Morning! I am dog sitting so I must be heading out here in a bit. I had catsup when I was a kid and then somehow morphed into an "adult" using ketchup on my food and basically I need to ketchup on most all of my various responsibilities atm...., sigh.
Have a wonderful day you All!

Hi Margie Have a great day!

 

[igorsMistress]

Good morning cafe. I made a fresh pot @N F C

@Shadrach thanks for the studies, I'll be checking those out.

I hope to keep 2 cockerels from my current group of 5 boys and I love reading about how your tribes work. Particularly how the boys interact with each other and go about managing their hens.

 

[N F C]

Morning! I am dog sitting so I must be heading out here in a bit. I had catsup when I was a kid and then somehow morphed into an "adult" using ketchup on my food and basically I need to ketchup on most all of my various responsibilities atm...., sigh.
Have a wonderful day you All!

Hi Margie, nice to see you!

 

[DobieLover]

Bring him over and I'll put him straight.
What happens here is the senior roosters chase away the cockerels (this is an important distinction) until the cockerels become roosters, give or take a couple of months.
About 14 months old seems to be the acceptance age here. The senior roosters will still try to prevent the junior from mating with the seniors favorites in particular, but once the senior rooster stops responding to non favorite and junior hens escort calls the junior roosters get the opportunity to try and mate with those hens he responds to.
For a period of time many of the hens will shout the house down and try to escape the cockerel and to a lesser degree, a junior rooster. I believe the senior rooster views it as it is preferable to have his son, or a relative mate with his hens than a rooster from another flock. These studies deal in part with such behaviour.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170329103326.htm
https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/28/3/760/3057961
It's partly a logistics problem. It is not possible for a senior rooster to attend to every escort call in a large flock of say twenty females in a free range setting. The behavior under confined conditions is different. It is one of the reasons chicken keepers here, and in many other places, including the US prefer to keep a 3:1 (average) ratio. The rooster can manage the protection of three, or four hens. He can't manage twenty.

Thank you for a more detailed explanation. I think you have justified me keeping Fabio's nice son.
Or maybe it's avoidance on my part. I continue to struggle with the idea of processing the two cockerels Barb hatched. I don't like the dark one at all. He's a chip off the old block and I'm not dealing with a Fabio Jr. in the flock.
Captain is still non-aggressive with me. He's jumpy with me because he gets tuned up so much by Fabio and a few hens he doesn't know what to expect when I am near him. But he was fine with getting handled the other night for weigh-in and inspection. He didn't struggle at all. The little dark cockerel literally kicks his legs, flares his hackles and screams bloody murder when I handle him... just like his father did at that age. (He needs to be removed from the nest boxes nightly).