Langshan Thread!!!

[Chick77]

Here are some new pics of this year's pullets out of Shang. I'm very pleased with several of them and 2 or 3 of the cockerels. They were very suspicious of the camera so were not holding their tails up most of the time. I am planning on breeding Shang with a splash girl with a more pinched tail in hopes of getting some halfway decent blues and eventually some decent splashes.

your flock of Langshan are Beautiful!!

 

[rodriguezpoultry]

Sorry about the overload of pics but I wanted to share a few of my tightrope walking pullets. This was before we put tarps over the coop for the winter. These two big girls are the first Langshan that I have had who are "flighty". We rearranged pens and let them free range the yard during the day and now they want to roost in the mulberry tree at night. I have been climbing up a ladder to get them down because spraying them with water doesn't work. One night, I tried doing it alone with a rickety aluminum ladder and fell. I was fortunate and only ended up with a ladder imprint bruise across my bumm. We now have a heavy duty, locking ladder in place. It has been 3 weeks of doing this and they still persist on roosting in the tree.







And one more pic to show the difference between a black pullet from my previous breeding stock in comparison to Shang's pullets. The pullet in the foreground is much smaller and has a pinched tail. She has a nicely rounded breast, though.

Looking great!!! Love seeing the photos so please keep them coming!

I've found that 1 or 2 pullets seem flighty right up until about a year. Some never get calm while others go broody then realize I'm not going to murder them.

 

[PetRock]

I think these gals are looking good. Glad for the update and to see your flock in good health. Cockerel pictures?

Thank you! The cockerels are at the farm. I'll try to get some pics the next time I go there. You should see Linc and Shang right now. They are molting and look so funny without their tails. Shang has ended up being bigger than Linc. I have to decide who to put with whom when I separate them for breeding after the first of the year. I only had 2 chicks (a cockerel and a pullet) hatch from Linc and his two girls. I'm not sure if it was a fertility issue or whether they needed their fluff trimmed. I'll try to get pics of the youngsters to show you.

As far as flock health goes, it has been a rough fall in my chicken world. My Pita Pinta breeding flock has had what I'm guessing are mites. I never actually saw a single mite or any other pest but they started losing their feathers in not a molt kind of pattern. They lost them around their necks so they look like naked necks and on their backs. My cock Zorro lost his feathers in the same areas so it was something besides over breeding on the girls. I wormed them and treated them & their coop for mites several times. It looks like their feathers are starting to grow back which is a good thing!

With my Langshan, I have a different problem that I think that I mentioned before either here or on the Langshan FB page. I had one cockerel go lame and then before I took him out of the cockerel pen, the other boys wounded his side by scratching on him. (It is difficult to have my breeder flocks 20 min out in the country.) We put him out of his misery and sent him to Davis for a necropsy. He had no tumors but based on the history and some cellular evidence they diagnosed his condition as indicative of Merek's. 2 other cockerels in the pen each showed signs of lameness in one hock joint only. We processed those 2 and the affected hock joints were swollen which I read is not indicative of Merek's. Their internal organs all looked good. They were very tasty and made fantastic soup! This happened late September. Since then, I lost 1 pullet here in town who went lame but I didn't sent her in (should have) and we have lost 3 cockerels at the farm. Only 1 of those from the farm was a Langshan from my boy pen. The other 2 that died were free ranging on the 10 acre farm so who knows why they died. My friends are farmers not chicken breeders so they just bury the ones that die without thinking about sending them in to Davis. I've asked them to please let me know if anymore show signs of illness/lameness so we can cull them and send them to Davis. I would like to send one in before they get too bad and have other issues from being picked on. I was out there all day last Saturday and all of them look fine right now.

So, I guess now I just wait. I have so many young pullets (Langshan, Pita Pinta, and PP/Cream Legbar green egg layers) that have just started to lay or are almost at POL. I really hate to process girls but I don't want to sell them when there is a chance that they have Merek's. It is very discouraging.

 

[Dirt Farmer]

Thank you!  The cockerels are at the farm.  I'll try to get some pics the next time I go there.  You should see Linc and Shang right now.  They are molting and look so funny without their tails.  Shang has ended up being bigger than Linc.  I have to decide who to put with whom when I separate them for breeding after the first of the year.  I only had 2 chicks (a cockerel and a pullet) hatch from Linc and his two girls.  I'm not sure if it was a fertility issue or whether they needed their fluff trimmed.  I'll try to get pics of the youngsters to show you.

As far as flock health goes, it has been a rough fall in my chicken world.  My Pita Pinta breeding flock has had what I'm guessing are mites.  I never actually saw a single mite or any other pest but they started losing their feathers in not a molt kind of pattern.  They lost them around their necks so they look like naked necks and on their backs.  My cock Zorro lost his feathers in the same areas so it was something besides over breeding on the girls.  I wormed them and treated them & their coop for mites several times.  It looks like their feathers are starting to grow back which is a good thing!

With my Langshan, I have a different problem that I think that I mentioned before either here or on the Langshan FB page.  I had one cockerel go lame and then before I took him out of the cockerel pen, the other boys wounded his side by scratching on him.  (It is difficult to have my breeder flocks 20 min out in the country.)  We put him out of his misery and sent him to Davis for a necropsy.  He had no tumors but based on the history and some cellular evidence they diagnosed his condition as indicative of Merek's.  2 other cockerels in the pen each showed signs of lameness in one hock joint only.  We processed those 2 and the affected hock joints were swollen which I read is not indicative of Merek's.  Their internal organs all looked good.  They were very tasty and made fantastic soup!  This happened late September.  Since then, I lost 1 pullet here in town who went lame but I didn't sent her in (should have) and we have lost 3 cockerels at the farm.  Only 1 of those from the farm was a Langshan from my boy pen.  The other 2 that died were free ranging on the 10 acre farm so who knows why they died.  My friends are farmers not chicken breeders so they just bury the ones that die without thinking about sending them in to Davis.  I've asked them to please let me know if anymore show signs of illness/lameness so we can cull them and send them to Davis.  I would like to send one in before they get too bad and have other issues from being picked on.  I was out there all day last Saturday and all of them look fine right now.

So, I guess now I just wait.  I have so many young pullets (Langshan, Pita Pinta, and PP/Cream Legbar green egg layers) that have just started to lay or are almost at POL.  I really hate to process girls but I don't want to sell them when there is a chance that they have Merek's.  It is very discouraging.

Well the experts tell us that Marek's is very common. You can vaccinate chicks, and breed only resistant birds. That's what the commercial industry did. They licked it.

 

[rodriguezpoultry]

What you were dealing with, I'm not entirely sure it was Mareks. It happened mainly in the cockerels correct? Right at the hock? Did it look as though the birds were walking stilted then all of a sudden the hocks bowed in towards each other?

 

[PetRock]

What you were dealing with, I'm not entirely sure it was Mareks. It happened mainly in the cockerels correct? Right at the hock? Did it look as though the birds were walking stilted then all of a sudden the hocks bowed in towards each other?

I am hoping that it wasn't/isn't Merek's! Many of my young birds from my new breeders seem to be on the leggy side. They are huge birds with long legs. The first thing that I noticed with cockerel #1 was that he was sitting on his hocks quite a bit even while he ate. He still got up to walk around but staggered some. It seemed to be affecting both of his legs. I checked his feet to make sure that he didn't have a foot issue but they looked fine. Then the next time I was out at the farm, he was sitting there but got up to eat. I made the bad decision to leave him there instead of pulling him out. The 3rd time I saw him, he was down and the other boys had been scratching on him. I brought him back to town and kept him in isolation white I used vetericyn on his wound. He was eating a small amount but was very thin and just didn't seem to be getting better so we culled him and sent him in to UC Davis. The other two cockerels both started limping but only 1 leg was affected and after what happened with the first boy, I checked them over more thoroughly. It affected the left hock of both cockerels. One had a hock that turned in like ricketts and the other had a hock that turned out bow legged. We were processing a bunch of cockerels so, rather than let them deteriorate, we went ahead and processed them both. The left joint on both was enlarged and one of them had a build up of clear yellow liquid in the joint. Their internal organs looked normal. They both dressed out at over 4 lb and were delicious.

I have had two cases in my flock of what appeared to me to be the typical paralysis form of Merek's. They were both young Marans mix cockerels from two different breeders. The first one was 3 years ago. He lasted a long time because I was new to chickens and thought that I could nurse him back to health. The second one was a year after the first one and we culled as soon as he showed signs of paralysis. Then, I had a 2 yr old hen die of what I thought was egg laying problems. I sent her in to Davis and the necropsy came back positive for Merek's. She had all kinds of internal tumors. She was a hatchery bird who was vaccinated for Merek's. Since then, I have lost a couple more hatchery hens to what was diagnosed as fatty liver syndrome. My girls are over conditioned!

 

[BGMatt]

Marek's isn't a big deal, virtually everyone has one strain of the other on their property. For God's sake don't vaccinate if you ever want to get rid of it. As you saw with hatchery hen that had it, the vaccine does not protect them from getting it, just the symptoms, so it lets birds that would otherwise be taken by it survive to breed. If you breed from those that are naturally immune within a couple generations you will not have issues with it anymore.

 

[PetRock]

Marek's isn't a big deal, virtually everyone has one strain of the other on their property. For God's sake don't vaccinate if you ever want to get rid of it. As you saw with hatchery hen that had it, the vaccine does not protect them from getting it, just the symptoms, so it lets birds that would otherwise be taken by it survive to breed. If you breed from those that are naturally immune within a couple generations you will not have issues with it anymore.

If it is Merek's, the strain must not be a very virulent one or I assume that we would be losing more birds to it. Adding up the birds that I have here in town and the ones at the farm, we must have around 200 chickens and 75% of them are from this year's hatches. I do not vaccinate for Merek's. When I first started hatching chicks, I vaccinated them because my mentor vaccinated all of the chicks that she hatched. I decided to stop vaccinating after the vaccinated hatchery hen died of Merek's. In the last 2 years of hatching chicks, these are the first ones to have anything that looks like Merek's. We have processed most of the cockerels that hatched this year but that leaves me with lots of pullets. Several of them will join the breeding flocks but I had hoped to sell the culls. If you were in my position, how many years would you wait before selling birds? Is 2 years without a case good enough?

 

[BGMatt]

If it is Merek's, the strain must not be a very virulent one or I assume that we would be losing more birds to it.  Adding up the birds that I have here in town and the ones at the farm, we must have around 200 chickens and 75% of them are from this year's hatches.  I do not vaccinate for Merek's.  When I first started hatching chicks, I vaccinated them because my mentor vaccinated all of the chicks that she hatched.  I decided to stop vaccinating after the vaccinated hatchery hen died of Merek's.  In the last 2 years of hatching chicks, these are the first ones to have anything that looks like Merek's.   We have processed most of the cockerels that hatched this year but that leaves me with lots of pullets.  Several of them will join the breeding flocks but I had hoped to sell the culls.  If you were in my position, how many years would you wait before selling birds?  Is 2 years without a case good enough?

Was making more of a general statement. I wouldn't it let you stop from selling. 4-6 months is usually when Mareks will rear its head, so if you're overly concerned wait til they're over that. If you don't vaccinate, and the birds aren't affected by Mareks, then they're immune to it and can't carry it, so...why wait to sell?

As far as selling chicks and eggs, it shouldn't factor in to your decision to sell or not either, because there is no way of knowing for sure if your birds are immune to the Mareks someone else has. Even ten years down the road all you would know is that strain of birds is immune to the strain of the disease on your property.

Heck I've had it happen, shipped in birds from a guy that has never had an issue, they were affected here by a particular strain of ocular Mareks, something which I did not know was on this property because I never had a bird affected by it. It just happens that way sometimes. I believe an avian vet told me there are seven major strains of Mareks in the US and a couple dozen minor ones.

 

[PetRock]

Marek's isn't a big deal, virtually everyone has one strain of the other on their property. For God's sake don't vaccinate if you ever want to get rid of it. As you saw with hatchery hen that had it, the vaccine does not protect them from getting it, just the symptoms, so it lets birds that would otherwise be taken by it survive to breed. If you breed from those that are naturally immune within a couple generations you will not have issues with it anymore.

Whoops! Double post!