Keeping Multiple Roosters

[chickengeorgeto]

While the three week rule is a good one, if you want or need to make absolutely sure that your hens are "clean," then you need to let the hen lay out (a whole clutch of eggs) without the benefit of male companionship and then let her go through a normal broody period before introducing her to the rooster of your choice.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

... I was thinking of building a mini cage within the run where I would house a rooster until I needed him. Is this a good or bad idea?...

Build each rooster an individual pen about 4 feet wide, by 6 feet long by 5 feet high. 8 & 10 foot lumber, a pencil, a square, and a skill saw are all the tools you will need at first. Using corrugated roofing tin, close in all of one end, 3 feet of that end's sides from top to bottom, and all of the top from front to back. Now you have a bachelor pad or Playboy Mansion for each of your brood cocks. Put a good roost three feet from the ground and in the lee of the solid end about 18 inches from the solid back. It is a good idea to build these pens inside your run, walk, or chicken yard to make varmints cross as many fences as possible while making it easier on you to feed, water, and gather the eggs. Provide each rooster with from one to three lady friends. If line breeding a trap nest can be used to be sure which hen laid which egg so that you can keep up with which chick belongs to which hen and rooster. To do a good job of line breeding it will require at least 9 or 10 pens like this one.

With this many pens and brood cocks inbreeding will not usually be a problem. The reason for the record keeping is because if you were ever to get so lucky as to breed a pullet that laid one egg every day rain or shine for a whole year, wouldn't it be nice if you could breed some more just like her, or as near like her as possible. To breed 15 or so hens to one rooster use a chain link dog pen that is 6 feet high by 10 feet by 20 feet. Again provide protection from the weather and the Sun at one end. Shade cloth on the top will provide a dandy rain break as well as protection from the Sun. Provide each hen in every pen with a nest equipped with a hen trap door so that each hen must remain in her own nest, with her egg until you gather and mark the egg and only then do you release the hen.

The mats that paper mills use to lift the wet paper from the vats of pulp are almost the perfect rain break and shade cloth, that is if your local paper mill will let you have their castoffs. However they will catch and hold every flake of snow that falls.

 

[farmhand]

Listen to Donrae in post #4, she has it right.

Also to really improve any well established breed it may require thousands of hens and roosters just so you the breeder can come buy a few superior individuals to go into the brood pen.

Attempting to keep any breed only or just pure is IMHO impossible because the natural tendency for every species or breed is to return to the lowest common denominator if not actually go down hill.

I am not saying it will happen, but this seems to be where the heritage breed movement is headed. Nothing in nature is static, and when you stop going up the only way to go is down.

@chickengeorgeto
Thanks for the good advice and IMHO, more work than I'm willing to put into this hobby (and admit to my wife what I'm doing.

) Thinking I'm going back to my original plan of collecting lots of different colored eggs and hatching some chicks for the grand kids.

 

[chickengeorgeto]

Anything you like to do, you will do better.

 

[seventreesfarm]

This is some helpful information.

I'm working on olive-eggers and have a blue copper marans roo, an ameraucana roo, a cuckoo marans cockerel I want to use to add some barring. My hens are ameraucana, marans, and a lot of olive-eggers whose parentage I know for a couple of generations.

I want to fine tune my breeding set up, and wasn't sure if I should move roos to hens or hens to roos. So far I let everyone run together, then split flocks and wait 3 weeks to collect eggs. But this year I plan to get harsher with my culling, so really want to get detailed with my matches. I have trap nests, so that will help.