International Black Copper Marans Thread - Breeding to the SOP

[Red Banks]

I

In my experience i think the straw colored hackels and halos go hand and hand with mossiness, to much color. It's a balance, everyone has their preferences. I personally will absolutely not breed from mossy birds. I guess if you have nothing else than you do what you gotta do, but if you keep breeding from them then you'll constantly get over colored birds. But to each his own.

For me it is not a particular trait/fault that will prevent me from using a bird, it is the overall bird. What it has to offer, what I need in my program, will it help me get where I want to be. I hated to lose the cockerel last week. He wasn't my favorite but he had a lot that is lacking in my birds. He had an incredibly orange eye and rich copper. He had more back length and an okay tail as opposed to the horrible tails and short backs in a lot of my birds. Kfelton0002 asked for opinions, I gave her mine. It helps to see things from a lot of different points of view. The more info.... the better the decision. She has put the hen with a balanced correct colored cockerel.

 

[Magnolia Hill]

Ib

For me it is not a particular trait/fault that will prevent me from using a bird, it is the overall bird. What it has to offer, what I need in my program, will it help me get where I want to be. I hated to lose the cockerel last week. He wasn't my favorite but he had a lot that is lacking in my birds. He had an incredibly orange eye and rich copper. He had more back length and an okay tail as opposed to the horrible tails and short backs in a lot of my birds. Kfelton0002 asked for opinions, I gave her mine. It helps to see things from a lot of different points of view. The more info.... the better the decision. She has put the hen with a balanced correct colored cockerel.

I was just speaking from my experience, you gotta use what you got. Every situation is different. I've just had such a horrible experience with mossy birds i choose not to breed from them.

 

[Red Banks]

Ib

I was just speaking from my experience, you gotta use what you got. Every situation is different. I've just had such a horrible experience with mossy birds i choose not to breed from them.

I am like everyone else here.... just trying to figure things out. I agree.

 

[Red Banks]

Thanks, everyone. To address some of what a few people said/mentioned...

Her sire was an over-colored roo who had good type but an overlarge comb and a little shafting on his front. Her mother is a decent type with only a tiny bit of mossiness on the tips of primaries, and very little feathering on shanks or toes.

Even if I could breed her back to her sire (I lost him last winter to a possum), I wouldn't because it would mean breeding too much color to too much color. The boy I have all of my girls with now has better coloring, if not lacking just a little bit. I was hoping that might correct the mossiness but wasn't sure if it would actually help.

Tbh I'm a bit disheartened with breeding right now. I've been having HORRIBLE hatch rates since I got my new incubator (like 15% at most), and my Splash Copper pullet that took me so long to get and whom I raised for a year and a half now, it turns out I can't even use her to start my blues. She's always been mean, but I was hoping my nicely mannered rooster would tame down her chicks...turns out not to be the case, as I currently have a brooder full of 5 week old blues who prefer to eat my fingers and a brooder of week olds who are already starting to show the same behavior. :/ I'd heard meaness could carry through generations but I didn't think it would carry through like it does in her progeny's case.

So I've been doing a lot of thonking about what I want to do about all that.

Don't be disheartened. I know.... it is frustrating. You are on the right track breeding a rooster with better coloring to an overcolored hen. It should help. It will give you a chance to get some birds that are colored correctly. That is how you get where you want to be. I can't help you with the mean bird. I have not experienced a mean Marans.
I had the incubator blues yesterday. What kind of incubator do you have?

 

[Tiegrsi]

https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/p...r-incubator-with-automatic-egg-turner-1029002

This one is my new one. I can't afford big fancy cabinets. I have 2 extra thermometers and a hydrometer to check the accuracy because I read that their internal ones can be wrong (it was about 2 degrees off) and that even though they have a fan, there can be hot and cold areas.

The main reason I wanted it was because my old one is a still air with NO turner that I bought second hand and is literally held together with duct tape. It has a tendency to change temperature without human interference and the temperature dial itself is just a knob with absolutely no markings on it. :/ I have to turn the eggs by hand several times a day and check the temp constantly. I do dry hatch so I don't worry about that so much.

Last year when I used the old bator my hatch rates were about 65-75%, despite the fact that I candled practically every 3 days lol, and had a crappy 'bator. I was expecting with the new one with a turner, a fan, and more ways to keep track of temps and moisture, that I'd have even better rates. I sterilized it (bleach/water), rinsed it (water), air dried it inside my house (away from outside bird dander), and ran it for several days to correct temps before using it.

Out of 82 eggs I have set in it so far this year, I had 7 clears, 16 healthy hatches between days 20-22, 2 stuck chicks on day 22 that had yolk sac infections (and died), 2 stuck chicks that needed help but lived, 1 chick hatched on day 25 that needed help but is doing ok (she is 4 days old now). 3 chicks "drowned" between internal pip and hatch. That's 19 live chicks out of 82 eggs. My fertilization is about 98%. Even the clears were all fertilized except 1. The rest have been a mix of quitters, mostly between days 15 and hatch. I do not wash my eggs, but I don't set visibly dirty eggs, either. My birds don't have dirty nests, they are pine shavings and changed regularly. My birds are all healthy, as far as I can tell.

So, last night I set what's possibly my last hatch for the year. We'll see how it goes. I set them in my old bator.

Out of the rest, there's been a mix of

 

[Red Banks]

https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/p...r-incubator-with-automatic-egg-turner-1029002

This one is my new one. I can't afford big fancy cabinets. I have 2 extra thermometers and a hydrometer to check the accuracy because I read that their internal ones can be wrong (it was about 2 degrees off) and that even though they have a fan, there can be hot and cold areas.

The main reason I wanted it was because my old one is a still air with NO turner that I bought second hand and is literally held together with duct tape. It has a tendency to change temperature without human interference and the temperature dial itself is just a knob with absolutely no markings on it. :/ I have to turn the eggs by hand several times a day and check the temp constantly. I do dry hatch so I don't worry about that so much.

Last year when I used the old bator my hatch rates were about 65-75%, despite the fact that I candled practically every 3 days lol, and had a crappy 'bator. I was expecting with the new one with a turner, a fan, and more ways to keep track of temps and moisture, that I'd have even better rates. I sterilized it (bleach/water), rinsed it (water), air dried it inside my house (away from outside bird dander), and ran it for several days to correct temps before using it.

Out of 82 eggs I have set in it so far this year, I had 7 clears, 16 healthy hatches between days 20-22, 2 stuck chicks on day 22 that had yolk sac infections (and died), 2 stuck chicks that needed help but lived, 1 chick hatched on day 25 that needed help but is doing ok (she is 4 days old now). 3 chicks "drowned" between internal pip and hatch. That's 19 live chicks out of 82 eggs. My fertilization is about 98%. Even the clears were all fertilized except 1. The rest have been a mix of quitters, mostly between days 15 and hatch. I do not wash my eggs, but I don't set visibly dirty eggs, either. My birds don't have dirty nests, they are pine shavings and changed regularly. My birds are all healthy, as far as I can tell.

So, last night I set what's possibly my last hatch for the year. We'll see how it goes. I set them in my old bator.

Out of the rest, there's been a mix of

How do you help stuck chicks?

 

[Tiegrsi]

How do you help stuck chicks?

I usually peel the shell off and use warm water on a paper towel (or 5) to gently wipe off any gunk stuck to them. They are generally stuck because the inner membrane started to dry out and got caught in their feathers as it dried, gluing them in place. It's usually just a small spot somewhere, but I did have one who had the membrane all down his back. I don't help them unless they have pipped internally AND externally and started unzipping. I'll notice the zip stopped somewhere along the line and I usually let them go for 24 hours or more before I try to intervene. One time I THOUGHT a chick was stuck and I tried to jump in after just a few hours of no progress...turned out that it just hadn't absorbed all of it's yolk yet - "helping" that one out was not a good idea, unfortunately. It DID live, but it needed a lot more care than the average chick.

 

[Red Banks]

I usually peel the shell off and use warm water on a paper towel (or 5) to gently wipe off any gunk stuck to them. They are generally stuck because the inner membrane started to dry out and got caught in their feathers as it dried, gluing them in place. It's usually just a small spot somewhere, but I did have one who had the membrane all down his back. I don't help them unless they have pipped internally AND externally and started unzipping. I'll notice the zip stopped somewhere along the line and I usually let them go for 24 hours or more before I try to intervene. One time I THOUGHT a chick was stuck and I tried to jump in after just a few hours of no progress...turned out that it just hadn't absorbed all of it's yolk yet - "helping" that one out was not a good idea, unfortunately. It DID live, but it needed a lot more care than the average chick.

Thank you.... this is helpful. I have never helped one.

 

[Tiegrsi]

Thank you.... this is helpful. I have never helped one.

You just have to be very gentle and very careful. If you "help" them too early on, it could be a situation like the first time I helped when the baby just wasnt ready to hatch. Also, many people don't help because "the strongest survive" and the chicks that can't hatch on their own are generally weaker overall than their hatchmates - not always, but generally. If you plan to breed what you hatch, you shouldn't breed any that need help out unless you know it was a user error that caused the problem (i.e. you forgot to add water and the humidity dropped, drying the membrane out, or you added too much water and got the other kind of sticky chick).

 

[Magnolia Hill]

I am like everyone else here.... just trying to figure things out. I agree.

What I'm going to do since i got a abundance of mossy pullets, I'm going to put them with my most overmelanized cockerel and see how many generations, if any it takes to breed to mossiness out. Cause I'm not really sure if mossiness is caused by being overcolored or if it's parasitic like the white in the wings.