Fluffy Butt Acres: Stories of our flock

[ILoveDaffy]

15 days left to go! Can you tell I'm so excited I can hardly wait?

 

[Ponypoor]

The partridge colored ones sort of are. The roos will pop that rusty red epaulets between 3 and 6 weeks. Barring in silkied feathers would be difficult to see. I suppose it could be done with some cuckoo bantams. Using large fowl barred/cuckoo birds could also be done. But the challenge of bringing the size back down and getting the silkied feathers back in would add to the generations a bit. Silkies are popular enough to find homes for the "culls" to make the breeding program easier.

Go for it.

Hahaha, are you enabling me

Not so easy to get rid of silkie Roos. No one wants them too small for eating. Even harder to get rid of silkie Roos. I am dreading if Holly or Jolly are Roos

 

[Ponypoor]

15 days left to go! Can you tell I'm so excited I can hardly wait?

Remember now, I am living vicariously through you. I will need my chick fix at least twice daily

Speaking of…. Did I miss an update from Jenn today?

 

[Ponypoor]

Define "sunny", Google.
View attachment 4067696View attachment 4067697
Yah, mostly cloudy.

Here we call that cloudy with sunny breaks…..

 

[Sylvester017]

I don't know how I could have forgotten this. In my very first flock, 10 years ago, I had 2 Australorps. I named them LaVerne and Shirley, but LaVerne turned out to be Verne. We lost most of our first flock to a bald eagle attack. We didn't have them very long. The river has fish again, so the eagles are not bothering anyone's chickens anymore, but we all had a rough year around here.

I've been in love with the Australorps from the beginning. They have such sweet soulful eyes and great personalities. Here are two of my 3 current 8 year olds with a couple flock mates.

I bought that little coop 8 years ago to raise these 3 australorps in a climate controlled garage room. I've kept it ever since, although we've never used it since then. We call it the restaurant at the end of the universe. We used to make it a feeding station, but it leaks now so we don't do that anymore.

View attachment 4067251

That little house is so cute & a nice idea as a feeding station. Will re-roofing fix it from leaks?

I dislike deterioration...cracks, peeling, rotting, collapsing, rusting. In 2015 I erected a 10'x10' popup canopy over the chicken raised sandbox to keep the sand dry during rain & shaded from summer sun. I buried the canopy legs in the soil to keep it from para-sailing away in our heavy Santa Ana Winds.

2015 ~ yard remodel ~ buried canopy legs

4'x4' sandbox under 10x10 canopy

The new block wall & no trees planted yet & waiting to erect 2 more canopies ~ 2016.

The canopy covers tear & get replaced a couple times a year by clipping new tarps (actual custom replacement canopy covers are too expensive & tarps are much cheaper & last just as well). We put up more buried frame popups & planted trees. Recycled dog houses are for the chickens to snooze in.

After 10 years buried in the ground our very 1st canopy frame over the sandbox has finally rusted & collapsed! We may not live in snow country but our Santa Ana Winds are vicious to deal with. One year some of a neighbor's roof tiles blew into our yard from 2 streets away! During one windy episode we witnessed someone's popup canopy frame & cover (not ours) blow across 4 lanes of freeway traffic.

Our old collapsed frame ready for the junk reclamation truck.

DH buried a new frame over the sandbox while in the wind & rain before the sandbox got filled w/water.

2 Silkies & a Dominique exploring under the new sandbox canopy. This has always been a popular site for our chickens to hang out ~ especially now that the Pomegranate trees are full grown.

 

[Sylvester017]

It's saying the same thing but it's getting into more than just barring.

Barring is on the Z chromosome. Hens ( works for all birds) are ZW while Roos are ZZ. The one spot vs 2 spots the post talks about. Becase a hen only has 1 Z chromosome, she can only ever have 1 copy of the barring gene. A roo has 2 Z chromosomes so CAN have 2 copies. Barring is a dominant trait so ALWAYS shows.

Sex link breeding frequently (but not exclusively) takes advantage of this by breeding a barred female with a not barred (that wild type mentioned in the linked post) male. Results: female gives barring to male offspring but cannot give barring to female offspring because MUST give W gene for offspring to be female. Male gives not barred to both on Z gene. Thus a sex-link (sexable at hatch) like @Ponypoor Shirley is the result, but could come from a roo like @Desertvalleychickens Ijak who is clearly double barred (ZZ with barring on both genes). It's used with 2 separate breeds to create the first step in an auto-sexing line, but the subsequent breeding never gets completed for new auto-sexing breeds.

A roo like Ijak will give barring to ALL his offspring, so isn't usable for sex link breeding. Auto-sexing comes in when the barring and the black breasted/salmon breasted (BBR) have been combined (purposfully) over enough generations for both the barring and the BBR to happen with EVERY hatch. Your cream legbars and the other _____bars are perfect examples of that.

If someone were truly interested in doing so, taking....say the Cuckoo Marans (not French): barred, chocolate eggs and the Salmon Faverolle: bearded/muffed, 5 toes, BBR....they could create an auto-sexing new breed of dark brown, 5 toed, bearded/muffed, barred birds (likely dubbed Cuckoo Faverolles). It would take about 7 generations to get the auto-sexing fixed into the project, but lots more to get the body type consistent due to the need to breed back in some of the other traits.

Isabel gets into similar things by combining BBR with lavender rather than with barring, but barring can get mixed in also, making for a more complicated breeding program being as 1, lavender is NOT on the Z chromosome, but rather a different area and 2, HIDES when only 1 copy is present. This does mean that ALL lavender birds (Hattie, Piglet, Laverne) have 2 copies of the lavender gene in order to show lavender at all. In breeding for the color, lots of birds carry but don't show the trait. This creates the need for either genetic testing (pricy) or lots of test hatches to see if a bird carries the trait (breeding a black roo to lavender hens or a lavender roo to black hens, the black birds being suspected of hidden lavender) keeping careful records and marking EVERY bird to keep track of that is a full time job.

This info alone is why I never had a desire to do breeding projects. It takes several generations, several pens, record-keeping, etc, to "perfect" a breed at which time I'd be dead by then. I love so many breeds I couldn't concentrate on just one type anyway .

 

[rural mouse]

This info alone is why I never had a desire to do breeding projects. It takes several generations, several pens, record-keeping, etc, to "perfect" a breed at which time I'd be dead by then. I love so many breeds I couldn't concentrate on just one type anyway .

I would love to see results of some of these breeding programs, too. However, I couldn't do them myself. The only one I could do is sort of new landrace type thing....and bring in fresh blood from time to time...

 

[notabitail]

Here we call that cloudy with sunny breaks…..

It got cloudy. And we got a few sprinkles. I thought it was bird poop at first.

 

[Sylvester017]

Hi everyone.
........
Turkey is still a wild tiny terror who does not want me to hold her or touch her. She is all for flying on top of my head to sit though.

At least Turkey trusts you enough to fly to you. If you were a terrifying hawk she wouldn't go near you!

 

[notabitail]

It's raining now. Bye bye dust.