Plymouth Rock thread!

[Chickens Naturally]

Could someone tell me what line this Barred Rock Male came from?????????????

Notice his tail. Is it a good one???

I read your post last night about getting Barred Plymouth Rocks and wanting to cross four different strains into a line and then choosing the traits that you want or think you would like in a Plymouth Rock.
I have been fooling with White Rock Large fowl off and on for 24 years. I did not really want them but my childhood friend from the 60s shipped them to me anyway. They where fluffy and they were pretty and they had bunny tails and they had fluff in their rear ends and they would not hatch. So I kept working on feather quality and egg production to breed out the fluffy ness and in five years I had egg laying machines, tight feathered typey Plymouth Rocks and I breed the Cochin genes right out of them. Chicks hatched like pop corn and once and a while I would get a broody hen when the weather go hot down here in April or may. I have studied many years of Rhode Island Red Journals and Plymouth Rock Monthlies from 1912 to 1944 when they stopped printtting them. I have read lots of newsletters and journals for both dual purpose breeds and no one ever has wanted a broody strain of Rocks or Reds.
Why you are going backwards on the real traits of the Rock or a Red. If that's what you want for your goals go for it. But there are other chickens you can have to raise your baby chicks. I have Silkies and Buff Brahma bantams and large fowl Salmon Favolieors would work good to but to make a Rock or Red a Heritage type fowl broodiness will take away the traits you are trying to put breeding pressure on.
Now would I go out and buy four strains of chicks from four different breeders and cross them all up? no
I would go to a guy who all ready did it with three strains in North Carolina and get ten chicks from him.
Then I would raise me two great males three good females from the ten chicks and strain a line breeding program to my fancy or my mind's eye. His name is Jamey Duckworth. How do I know him.??He was the first person or Club Member I helped get going when I became the Secretary of the Plymouth Rock Fanciers Club of America. He uses the old fashion method called the Hogan method of culling.
It works very well for him and he has a fine strain of dual purpose Barred Plymouth Rocks and they will adapt very well to your climate. You don't want to get some from Calif and some from Wisconsin and some from Maine you want birds that have all ready adapted to your region that you live in. His would be perfect. Maybe I can save you five to ten years of work and $10,000 in feed prices on your hunt for a good line. Yes you can eat the culls but you also want to see progress in the goals that you want. If you don't go about it correctly with barred rocks you will be like hundreds who have tried before you. You can count the good breeders on one hand every decade for the past 50 years. Not a easy breed or color pattern to tackle that's why they are hard to locate good ones. I mean good ones. Not the so so 91 to 92 point barred that have black and white feathers. The ones at the feed store that I see are breed for one purpose and that is egg production and that is fine. I bet there are 10,000 of them alive right now in the USA but the old fashion Barred Rocks pictures above maybe 500 to 800 this time of the year. We have been pushing them hard for the past three years and more folks have them than ever.
Hope this helps you. Please get some and try your hand at them and if interested I can locate Jamie for you.

Hi Robert. I’m not sure if you were addressing me or not, but I’ll bite because I’m very interested in what you’re saying here. The picture here was a post by Speckledhen and I replied to it. I was throwing some ideas I had out there to get feedback on. I was under the impression that occasional broodiness was something desired in Heritage strains, but I may be completely wrong there. What you’re saying makes perfect sense, egg production and the tendency toward overly broodiness would seem counterproductive.
Also I was under the impression that a lot of the Heritage strains were having issues with fertility/hatchability which may not be the case either and that is the only reason I was asking about or wondering if there was a need for a line focusing on utility first. It sounds like I may have jumped to some conclusions there.
At any rate, I may be very appreciative if you could point me toward Mr. Duckworth. A strain from North Carolina already acclimated to my climate/area sounds like a good start.
I have a long way to go; I have to learn about the SOP before I can cull effectively, hehe. I may not be ready to jump into it right away as I’m just getting my feet wet thinking I would like to breed Plymouth Rocks, but I do believe the Barred Rock is the one I will most likely want to breed. I would definitely appreciate the contact information for the future. I learn pretty quickly though and I can get a lil obsessive too, hehe, so the future may be six months.
I’ll be looking into what utility traits as well as type are most desirable in Rocks, but I think you’ve already steered me in some good directions.
Thank you very much for the information!

 

[Yard full o' rocks]

Could someone tell me what line this Barred Rock Male came from?????????????

Notice his tail. Is it a good one???

I read your post last night about getting Barred Plymouth Rocks and wanting to cross four different strains into a line and then choosing the traits that you want or think you would like in a Plymouth Rock.
I have been fooling with White Rock Large fowl off and on for 24 years. I did not really want them but my childhood friend from the 60s shipped them to me anyway. They where fluffy and they were pretty and they had bunny tails and they had fluff in their rear ends and they would not hatch. So I kept working on feather quality and egg production to breed out the fluffy ness and in five years I had egg laying machines, tight feathered typey Plymouth Rocks and I breed the Cochin genes right out of them. Chicks hatched like pop corn and once and a while I would get a broody hen when the weather go hot down here in April or may. I have studied many years of Rhode Island Red Journals and Plymouth Rock Monthlies from 1912 to 1944 when they stopped printtting them. I have read lots of newsletters and journals for both dual purpose breeds and no one ever has wanted a broody strain of Rocks or Reds.
Why you are going backwards on the real traits of the Rock or a Red. If that's what you want for your goals go for it. But there are other chickens you can have to raise your baby chicks. I have Silkies and Buff Brahma bantams and large fowl Salmon Favolieors would work good to but to make a Rock or Red a Heritage type fowl broodiness will take away the traits you are trying to put breeding pressure on.
Now would I go out and buy four strains of chicks from four different breeders and cross them all up? no
I would go to a guy who all ready did it with three strains in North Carolina and get ten chicks from him.
Then I would raise me two great males three good females from the ten chicks and strain a line breeding program to my fancy or my mind's eye. His name is Jamey Duckworth. How do I know him.??He was the first person or Club Member I helped get going when I became the Secretary of the Plymouth Rock Fanciers Club of America. He uses the old fashion method called the Hogan method of culling.
It works very well for him and he has a fine strain of dual purpose Barred Plymouth Rocks and they will adapt very well to your climate. You don't want to get some from Calif and some from Wisconsin and some from Maine you want birds that have all ready adapted to your region that you live in. His would be perfect. Maybe I can save you five to ten years of work and $10,000 in feed prices on your hunt for a good line. Yes you can eat the culls but you also want to see progress in the goals that you want. If you don't go about it correctly with barred rocks you will be like hundreds who have tried before you. You can count the good breeders on one hand every decade for the past 50 years. Not a easy breed or color pattern to tackle that's why they are hard to locate good ones. I mean good ones. Not the so so 91 to 92 point barred that have black and white feathers. The ones at the feed store that I see are breed for one purpose and that is egg production and that is fine. I bet there are 10,000 of them alive right now in the USA but the old fashion Barred Rocks pictures above maybe 500 to 800 this time of the year. We have been pushing them hard for the past three years and more folks have them than ever.
Hope this helps you. Please get some and try your hand at them and if interested I can locate Jamie for you.

Morning Bob

This is a Stukel Line male and I actually had this exact male for a period of time. SpeckledHen (Cynthia) raised him originally and she gifted him to me when she cut back on some birds. He was amazing

Unfortunately he was bitten by a copperhead and didn't survive the bite

 

[TherryChicken]

 

[speckledhen]

Rex surely was amazing, Scott, wasn't he? The tail he was developing, even as a youngster, was in my humble opinion, just awesome. He took ages to fill out and grow into his legs (yellow legs, I might add, that so many are lacking in some), as most of the Stukel males tend to do, but the barring was nothing short of spectacular. I have the hens who hatched with him from the same line and one of his daughters with one of those hens.
I hope to have more of these but have to wait until some of my very elderly hens, who are still laying, pass on. On our Air Force pension, we just cannot feed too many of them at the same time. They are mine and my husband's absolute favorites.

 

[TNBEARCHICK]

I hope Danny is still breeding the LF silver penciled; I had heard he was getting out of LF and only breeding the bantams, which was why he sold his last LF SPR to Chery Cohen. Cheryl is no longer in the country, and I'm not sure why her website is still active. I know that she sold all of her stock before she moved. I spoke with the woman at Diefly to offer assistance after she purchased her SPR from Cheryl, and she told me that she had not kept the lines separate once she got them from Cheryl. Very nice lady, hope she's still working on them!!

Regarding hatchery versus H-bred birds; I have both on my farm, also. I do not believe in using light to force laying in the off season, and so I do purchase a few hatchery-bred rocks each spring as they lay through the winter for me. My H-bred birds do not. I don't see it as a bad thing, both have their purpose, and we should definitely not look down on someone who has hatchery stock.

I agree, I started out with basically mutts but it has progressed to an obsession.

 

[Robert Blosl]

Good Mourning well this is a male line that has males who's tails do fill out nicely. When I saw this picture it reminded me of some bard rocks a trio that was brought in to Pensacola Poultry Show that I showed at about four years ago. They came direct out of the yards of Marvin's and he also has vey nice white Rock strain. These birds are breed by Marvin in Arizona and he got them from Glen Holgelson a old breeder from Arizona who had them at least 20 years. So they have been breed line breed that is for about 50 years. The sources tell me they came from Ralph Sturgeon. This tail if you seen some of the old E B Thompson line pictures from the 1920s has that look. So one of the best finished tails I have seen in the last three years. I hope one day the Frank Reese Males that Jeremy has in Nebraska will have tails like these. This would be a good line to get and my partner in White Plymouth Rocks Mr. Weaver in Tenn has this line as well.

Yes I was writing about you and your idea about four different lines and the broodiness factor. If you want barred Rocks to look like this guy broodiness breeding pressure will put you in the reverse gear. Its ok to have a hen go broody such as these dual purpose breeds will do and they will some times in the South when it gets real hot not much you can do about it. I had a white rock hen my best I ever raised who lived 8 years who layed like a machine go broody thee times. I just put call duck eggs under her and she was the best incubator to hatch them I ever had.

I will work on Jamie Duckworth for you it would be a great experience to make a Saturday road trip to his house and see his birds get you some good breeding stock but more than anything get him to be your mentor. This is priceless stuff to get help from someone who has say five years expertise and he is a master of the Hogan method of culling which will save you years of work once you learn this method of culling dual purpose birds like our Rocks.

Thanks for the pictures of this male. Does he have females to be breed to him? bob

I just read he is dead. God what a shame. Please keep this picture and try to breed and raisie some to look like him. He is one of the best barred rocks to live in the last ten years.

 

[PortmanChicks]

These are my male and female rocks. They are about 10-13 weeks. I think he is a pretty handsome boy!

 

[weavers rocks]

here is a stukel male i raised this year .

 

[weavers rocks]

here is a side view of him verrrrrrrrrrry slow to develop .

 

[dreamofglory]

Hi there i am just starting to breed chickens this year. I only have Plymouth rocks and all I want I believe in doing one thing very well. I have six varieties.