Delawares from kathyinmo

[LeslieDJoyce]

The meatiness of the cockerels and the big eggs says really great things about the utility of your sub-line of Kathy's birds.

It will be even better when you can start selecting for faster maturing.

 

[Mr King]

What do you guys mean with F4, F5, F2, Etc.?

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

The F numbers are hybrid breeding terminology. When you cross two different things, in this case a New Hampshire chicken with a Barred Plymouth Rock chicken, you have a F1 hybrid (in this case we keep the ones that look a certain way to breed together).

In this project, each subsequent generation gets a higher F #.

Kathy sent out boxes of F4 chicks. I ended up with a trio of those when they were 8 or so months old, let them mate, and hatched out F5 chicks. If I were to breed that original trio together again the resulting chicks are still F5. But breed the F5s together and the chicks are F6.

Finnfur asked a few weeks ago, "what do you call chicks that have one F4 parent and one F5 parent?", and I don't know the real answer, but I'm going to call them F6.

 

[Mr King]

The F numbers are hybrid breeding terminology. When you cross two different things, in this case a New Hampshire chicken with a Barred Plymouth Rock chicken, you have a F1 hybrid (in this case we keep the ones that look a certain way to breed together).

In this project, each subsequent generation gets a higher F #.

Kathy sent out boxes of F4 chicks. I ended up with a trio of those when they were 8 or so months old, let them mate, and hatched out F5 chicks. If I were to breed that original trio together again the resulting chicks are still F5. But breed the F5s together and the chicks are F6.

Finnfur asked a few weeks ago, "what do you call chicks that have one F4 parent and one F5 parent?", and I don't know the real answer, but I'm going to call them F6.

Ok so a highest the number means more purebred? Right? You had your f4's cross them, got f5 then cross between f5 ( brother sister) got f6 . correct?

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

I don't know how well the word "purebred" works for chickens, though I've seen it used. The criteria for various breeds is based on appearance, not pedigree.

But in this project we are trying to achieve progressively more uniformity of the line through each "season" of careful breeding, with the ideal of every bird meeting the Standard (physical description) for the Delaware.

That appearance had been lost through the years, maybe because it is more a utility breed than a show breed? and was replaced with the meat balloon Cornish Cross and hybrid laying specialty birds? and hatchery-bred Delawares for casual keepers/collectors have probably been crossed with various other breeds like Leghorns (worst case would be crossing) or selected for speed and productivity and feather color more than type (better case, but still not great as the type IS the breed) to get them to pop out properly-colored chicks at the maximum rate.

Unless some secret flock of Delawares from the original line had been preserved somewhere that it was carefully bred to maintain type ... which I've read in at least one place but the claim hasn't been substantiated ... so we're trying to start over. The results are promising.

Meanwhile, other breeders are working hard to improve other lines of Delaware ("hatchery" lines) to get their appearance back up to the Standard, and I think at least some of those birds look pretty good. There is at least one breeder working to breed the Delaware into an acceptable pastured Heritage meat bird, with good results in that regard ... however it seems those are being bred with less emphasis on type.

Any way they are being bred, there aren't a lot of people working with the breed. Yet.

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

Technically, when starting from scratch with a New Hampshire parent and a Barred Plymouth Rock parent, and if you select your breeders from the F2s properly, you get what looks like a recognizable Delaware at the F3 stage. Subsequent generations are needed for improvements and stability. Kathy felt the line was ready to send to interested breeders at the F4 stage, and it seems that was very good timing.

 

[Mr King]

Technically, when starting from scratch with a New Hampshire parent and a Barred Plymouth Rock parent, and if you select your breeders from the F2s properly, you get what looks like a recognizable Delaware at the F3 stage. Subsequent generations are needed for improvements and stability. Kathy felt the line was ready to send to interested breeders at the F4 stage, and it seems that was very good timing.

Good answer thank you.!

 

[caychris]

Technically, when starting from scratch with a New Hampshire parent and a Barred Plymouth Rock parent, and if you select your breeders from the F2s properly, you get what looks like a recognizable Delaware at the F3 stage. Subsequent generations are needed for improvements and stability. Kathy felt the line was ready to send to interested breeders at the F4 stage, and it seems that was very good timing.

I look at it as more a generation away from the original cross breeding where you are using more selective(restricted) genetic material that is not "new" to the line,

Kathy sent out F4s Kims birds I have are F5's

What would you consider a breeding between F4 and F5. vs a pairing of F5's I think at this point we should have a common nomenclature for at least this line of Delawares.

For my purposes I intend to label my lines (because I will have more than one) with a prefix
I can keep moving with the K(Kathy F5s into F6) but I also want to try mixing some of the other Delaware lines to see what happens. So my crossed birds would all start as (KP)F1's (Kathy xPrivet) or JK (JulesxKathy) JP(JulesxPrivet) We are currently setting some Delaware eggs that have uncertain parentage (Kathy or Jules Roo over Kathy or uncertain hatchery stock)

My hatchery birds are from Privet hatchery's line of Dels.

Since all these are "Delaware lines already" Im hoping that by spreading the genetics out a bit like this I can get some comparison data that might be helpful in selecting some birds down the line.

 

[LeslieDJoyce]

For purposes of building enthusiasm for the Delaware breed, I'm encouraging people to get Delawares, any Delawares, and breed them with the Standard in mind. However, for the sake of this line, I hope more breeders commit to working to keep the line "clean" as they work to improve it and see where it goes.

I keep reading that if you cross in different lines, or even different breeds as the hatcheries likely do, then you lose stability in the way the chicks turn out. In other words you lose predictability in the result, and uniformity in the line -- you have "mutts" instead of Delawares (if by "Delaware" mean a bird that was bred from Delaware parents and is able to produce Delaware offspring, and those 3 generations of Delawares conform to the Standard for the breed). The goal is increasing stability, uniformity, and predictability ... to a point where they all look the same, and ideally that "same" would be something close to the actual Standard for the breed. I've read that takes years and years of careful inbreeding and culling to reach predictability, stability, uniformity, and quality.

All this is made slightly more complicated for Delawares where part of the standard is the utility of the breed. Delawares should be good meat birds (good-sized, tasty, meaty, not too slow to mature and even older birds should be tender and delicious) and the females should be good layers (large eggs, eggs through the winter).

What seems to be happening with the hatchery crosses (of any breed, not just Delawares) is we do get one generation of properly colored birds (ish) but with poor type, and those birds will produce less-nice-looking and more-random chicks when bred to each other. Therefore, getting stability into hatchery-bred Delawares might not be possible ... I hope it is! ... yet even if it is the type would likely not be correct for a Delaware even if the feather colors remain somewhat correct. That was the roadblock people hit (lines of Delawares that are frustratingly resistant to improvements in type, so people quickly lose enthusiasm) with the breed that has encouraged a couple of breeders to start over as Kathy did.

What makes Kathy's birds so good, I think, is that she started with really great parent stock. She made some very-well informed choices about where to source those birds, from very well preserved lines. With the hope that she'd end up with similar results to the original creator of the breed.

Hmmmm. I'm rambling.

I keep reading that "inbreeding" of chickens is less of a concern than I had thought. There is a lot of stuff going on in chicken genetics -- all from the original source material -- so if breeding isn't handled properly just about anything could result. Randomness. Instability. Birds that quickly move away from the Standard for their breed. The way I've had it explained to me, it would take about 16 years before I'll need to worry about bringing in "fresh" blood to this line ... to prevent the line from collapsing due to lack of genetic diversity. That's practically a whole "career" of breeding, especially starting at my age, so I'm not going to worry about that. Instead, I'm going to worry about keeping other breeds/lines out of my flock. And hope there are other breeders doing the same.

I don't know how many people Kathy sent boxes of F4s to, but I would hope there are still more than a handful of us working on this line without crossing other things into it. We could undo her amazing work if we aren't careful. That said, it is still a somewhat unproven line, and problems might pop up that mean the project hits an early dead end. And if we could get more people devoted to keeping this line "clean," then we'd have more sources for "fresh" blood that is potentially more predictable when we need it.

Unfortunately, sharing this line around is difficult as we need to raise the chicks to maturity (and beyond!) to make good breeding choices, there is a limit to the number of chicks we can raise, even fewer that turn out breedworthy, and many of us aren't able to ship chicks as we aren't health-certified to do so legally, and shipping adult birds is spendy and awkward. I think we'll have little geographical pockets of "Kathy's line" breeders, at least for a while. And that's a shame, but it is what it is.

So, I really hope that people who do get "Kathy's Line" birds can keep them "pure."

That said, if I had unlimited facilities and money and labor I'd be curious to cross in some of the hatchery birds, completely on the side, to see if certain improvements could be made without losing what is already so great about this line or making Mutt Soup out of it. Because I'm curious! And not always patient ...

... and also a little bit

As it is, here we can really only hope do a "good job" with one line of one breed, so that's our personal limit. We are only willing to hatch as many chicks as we can raise to maturity to use, either as table birds or as layers, so that's another limiting factor for us. We really need to get our act together when it comes to processing birds.

 

[1zooman12]

Some clarifications from a retired geneticist if you can stand it. Filial: from the Latin, filius "of the son". In genetics this is a way of designating a series of subsequent generations each directly derived from the previous one. The parental or first generation is designated as the parental generation, p1. So the sequence is (parental) p1; their immediate offspring are the first filial generation, f1; the generation derived from this generation is the second filial generation, f2; then subsequently, f3,f4,f5, etc. It is important to keep in mind that this is an exercise known as line breeding since there is no introduction of breeders from outside the sequence. It is the most intensive form of inbreeding. One of its goals is to eliminate specimens who evidence genetic defects as the breeding progresses. In this way many genetic defects can be eliminated from the line. And despite many generations of this intensive inbreeding when two unrated lines of intensively inbred individuals are crossed, inbreeding has been ceased and the F series stops. In fact a new p generation has been created. Depending upon the type of breeding program one is managing, this new p generation can be designated as either a new p1 or indeed a p2 since it is a reflection of a previous pedigree. Remember also that a pedigree per se does not indicate purebredness. All a pedigree is, is a record of an ancestry, even one of no particular breed. Got that?
Neal, the Zooman