Cream Legbars

[sol2go]

It would be helpful, and timely, to hear how others are maintaining large groups of cockerels/cocks/roosters =)
Do you mix ages and varieties? Do you keep more than one group?
Do you keep them far far away from pullets/hens?
What makes your pen more calm or more raucous?

Thanks for sharing your experience!

 

[philipchickymad]

My legbars have arrived and I'm excited to get pretty eggs mine are 15wks old when should they start laying

 

[enola]

My experience with large groups of cockerels has taught me that separating cockerels from pullets before they are starting to breed works best. Done this way you can house them side by side with pullets in pens.

My breeding roosters are kept out of sight of the hens when kept in groups.

 

[enola]

Chickenpicking, what antibiotic did you use after the tetracycline?

My eggs are fertile. They develop right up to lockdown and then die before pipping.

When I cross my roosters with other breeds they hatch with no problem. So the problem may be my hens. They all came from the same place.......

 

[chicken pickin]

Chickenpicking, what antibiotic did you use after the tetracycline?

My eggs are fertile. They develop right up to lockdown and then die before pipping.

When I cross my roosters with other breeds they hatch with no problem. So the problem may be my hens. They all came from the same place.......

It wasn't I that commented on the tetracycline I believe it was @lonnyandrinda .

What I have going on with my hatches is just the same as your describing. Im thinking it could just be my 2 hens that are the problem since I have only even hatched CL eggs from them. I wont know for sure though until my younger CL pullets mature and I try to hatch from them but that wont be until next spring. Feels like such a long time to wait but Im willing to wait it out and try some more.

On a happy note my chick I assisted this morn seems to be doing ok. The bleeding stopped and the chick fluffed up and seems more lively, hes a cockerel not a pullet like a first thought. Im happy for the male though because if I decided to keep on with a second CL pen like I had planned then I would like a male from this group of hatching to pair up with some of the pullets I already have.

 

[dretd]

Originally Posted by ChicKat

What?? You dared to call a rooster a rooster??? How DARE you??

I could go on an on linguistics (I studied a foreign language for my 2nd college degree), but coming back to the use of the word rooster, cock, cockerel. None of them are absolute terms. Rooster is the most common term used in the USA today. It is not however used at poultry shows. The shows have categories for cockerels (male chickens under a year of age) and cocks (male chickens over a year old. If you talk to the APA show community (which I am guessing is NOT what the Heritage Chicken community identify them self as) they use the word cockerel and cock to indicate the category that their bird would be placed in. If they have a 12 month and one day old male chicken it is no longer a cockerel and to call it such would be incorrect and a no-no. However when you talk to big breeders they use the word cockerel with more liberty to refer to any male chicken that is either being bred to older females or who is in his first year of breeding even though they often grow out these birds for a year and a half to 3 years before they use them in the breeding pen.

Etymologically: "Cock", on the other hand, has no clear provenance. Only the French, our erstwhile linguo-twins, have a similar word (coq), while pretty much every other European tongue uses some version of that old Germanic hana or the Latin gallus. But the OED speculates that it started out as an echoic word. Cocks go “cock-a-doodle doo,” after all, and tend to cluck incessantly.
I went back to the original thread and indeed, they are trying to use proper APA terms, but the picky bossy-boots that slammed poor enola were called to task for being overly picky by Soeckled Hen, who is a wonderful ambassador for chickens.

My take is males over a year of age: Cock is for show people, rooster is for laymen and other normal people who like to use Mirriam-Webster and not APA as their dictionary, roo is slang for usually young roosters and cockerel is proper terminology for males under a year-------->>>

but whatever you choose, do not advertise your young males you want to get rid of as cockerels on Craigslist because no one will know what you are talking about and you will get no hits

; using the descriptor cock will get you spammed with lots of pictures of nekkid Russian women in your inbox for over a month

; and roo or rooster will get you hits a month or more after you pull down the ad with folks that want to buy them

.

I recently was talking with a fellow that raises many types of chickens but is concentrating on Ko Shamos and he referred to his young adult males as Stags. So there's another one for us to banter about!

 

[enola]

You are right Speckled hen stepped up to the plate for me. Fred did also. He also offered to answer any PMs if I had more questions. A true gentleman and ambassador for Heritage Rocks. I would love to have one of his (male) chickens.

And I promise if I ever become inclined to show my chickens, I will do my very best to choke out the word "cock". Of course if I only show "cockerels" then I still won't have to use the dreaded word.

 

[dretd]

I don't know about anyone else but I am getting so tired of horrible hatch rates from my CL. Last batch set 10 eggs all developed till the end and only one hatched. And today is day23 of another batch of 10 eggs, only one pipped and she was upside down and pipped for somewhere between 24 and 36 hours so I just helped her. But her abdomen looks odd and shes bleeding from it. I don't know if I caused it or if it would have happened anyway. I also candled the other eggs and no movement. This is how it has been most of my CL hatches since I started hatching them in Feb.

I am very frustrated. Maybe its my incubator but other breeds I hatch seem to do fine so Im not sure. Between the really bad hatches and some of my CL with bad attitudes Im starting to wonder if I want 2 pens of CL now, not sure if its worth it

I have had marginal hatch rates, too. At first I put it off to shipped eggs. Eggs from my own layer flock I hatched side by side hatched great in the same incubator. Last hatch I got 11/19 hatched of the Cream Legbars set. A few were infertile, a few early quitters and 5 that I eggtopsied that DIS very late--they had begun to absorb the egg sac then died. Not sure why, didn't culture them. I did incise the skin over the skull (calvarium) to see if there was an obvious hernia. There has been speculation in Swedish Flower Hens that late DIS might be due to skull problems from two copies of the cresting gene. In a normal chick, there is a small fontanelle (gap between the two halves of the skull cap or calvarium) that runs down he midline and in these DIS chicks I did find the brain tissue was not protected/the overlying bone was thinner or absent than expected. It could be that the dead chicks had already decomposed several days before necropsy as they sat in the incubator, or perhaps they did not get the extra 2 days of bone growth to make the calvarium thicker. That was really the only thing I saw that was not as expected.

I also had a 50% hatch rate under my broody. So for whatever reason, I am only getting about a 50% hatch rate from my unrelated hens (roos are from 1 breeder, 2-lines, 2 hens are from another breeder--2 lines, one hen is from a 3rd breeder). If I figure out if there is a temp or biological issue, I will for sure post my results. in the mean time, know that you are not alone in your results!

 

[ChicKat]

My legbars have arrived and I'm excited to get pretty eggs mine are 15wks old when should they start laying

Top o' the morning (Or is it afternoon?) I did some work in Ireland for Intel....such a BEAUTIFUL Country-- but I digress.... I usually expect my CL pullets to lay their first egg at about 24 weeks -- so hopefully you will be getting some little blue eggs in about 8-9 weeks.... Hopefully you will have 14-hours of light for them to enjoy. Early eggs are small -- but they will get larger with time. You will be so happy! You need to let us know when the eggs occur!!

 

[ChicKat]

I went back to the original thread and indeed, they are trying to use proper APA terms, but the picky bossy-boots that slammed poor enola were called to task for being overly picky by Soeckled Hen, who is a wonderful ambassador for chickens.

My take is males over a year of age: Cock is for show people, rooster is for laymen and other normal people who like to use Mirriam-Webster and not APA as their dictionary, roo is slang for usually young roosters and cockerel is proper terminology for males under a year-------->>>

but whatever you choose, do not advertise your young males you want to get rid of as cockerels on Craigslist because no one will know what you are talking about and you will get no hits

; using the descriptor cock will get you spammed with lots of pictures of nekkid Russian women in your inbox for over a month

; and roo or rooster will get you hits a month or more after you pull down the ad with folks that want to buy them

.

I recently was talking with a fellow that raises many types of chickens but is concentrating on Ko Shamos and he referred to his young adult males as Stags. So there's another one for us to banter about!

No hits, or nekkid pictures -- (surprised it was only a month)-- and otherwise -- callers, callers, callers for roosters and roos. LOL