Ranger Grow-Out Journals

[Jared77]

These birds are a hybrid of 4 parenting birds, and breeding may produce most recent father or mother offspring?????
Some info I got has the bird parenting in some code fashion.......... If anyone knows this stuff, I can send the link.

Im curious to see the link Pig Farmer please post it up.

As far as stabilizing them goes its not impossible it will just take some work. The problem your going to run into is hatching enough chicks and raising them to see how they turn out to get enough chicks to serve as breeding stock because they have all the traits you want and actually bred true to the FR or darn close. The rest are culls obviously. But if 5% of the hatch is a recreation of the FR and you hatch 100 eggs thats 5 breedable stock to work up from. Who knows you might get 80% its impossible to say. But thats the one thing to be aware of is getting enough stock either by volume of chicks hatched or by hitting it lucky with a solid breeding that is true to the standard you want to work towards.​

 

[Mrs. Mucket]

How are everyone else's keeper FRs doing? I lost another FR today...a pullet. She was bleeding at the vent and an egg or something was partially protruding, so I guess it was either a prolapse or an egg laying issue. They are 7 months old, and one cockerel died several weeks ago of unknown causes. I still have one cockerel and five pullets--all appear healthy and we're hoping to hatch some chicks in the spring.

 

[TimG]

Mrs. Mucket :

How are everyone else's keeper FRs doing? I lost another FR today...a pullet. She was bleeding at the vent and an egg or something was partially protruding, so I guess it was either a prolapse or an egg laying issue. They are 7 months old, and one cockerel died several weeks ago of unknown causes. I still have one cockerel and five pullets--all appear healthy and we're hoping to hatch some chicks in the spring.

I have one cockerel and three pullets. They are about nine months old. I lost a few birds around five or six months, but have been fine since then though one does sound like she is breathing heavy at times. I think only one of the pullets is laying, I never have more than one egg in a day, but she's produces nearly an egg a day. I believe in the last 21 days she has produced 17 eggs. 15 of those are in the incubator (not all started at the same time). I hope to have chicks before the new year.

I've been considering processing the four that are left later this month if I have a successful hatch. But, I find myself unexcited about doing the deed (and my regular processor is done for the year) so they might have a home for the winter.​

 

[Jared77]

How big/meaty is your productive layer?

 

[Mrs. Mucket]

Quote:
Jared, I think you were actually asking Tim, but here's a weight too...my dead pullet was 11.5# and she was one of the smaller ones. My identified jumbo egg layer has to be at least a couple pounds heavier (she is the biggest pullet), and we are guessing that the roo must be 18-20#. He's about the size of a hen turkey we raised for Thanksgiving. One of these days I will take a scale down and weigh the Rangers. They are so much heftier than my layers, even the Orpingtons.

Tim, I look forward to hearing about your hatch! I think you are the first one here to reproduce them, right?

 

[TimG]

I don't know if I am first...and I haven't actually hatched any yet.

Mine are not laying jumbo eggs. When I was weighing them they were all 1.8-2.2 oz. The ones in the incubator are a bit bigger, but nothing approaching jumbo.

I haven't weighed my pullets in a while, but expect they are 9-10 pounds. The cockerel is a bit bigger, but not close to Mrs. Mucket's 18-20 lbs, I'd guess 11-12 lbs.

 

[Jared77]

Nice thank you. Please keep us posted I'm watching this closely.

 

[TimG]

No chicks. They're now about 6 days overdue. The three eggs that I have opened have shown no development.

I just cracked a recently collected Freedom Ranger egg and found a bull's-eye.

I was using a borrowed still air incubator. I'm far from confident that had the temperature correct.

I'll be trying again, this time with my homemade incubator that has a fan in it.

(The reason I used the borrowed incubator is that I was staggering incubation starts and wanted to use one for incubation until the final few days when I transferred them to another with increased humidity and no egg turning for hatching.)

 

[KatyTheChickenLady]

I ws just going to ask you how it was going. Bummer no chicks

is the layer still laying? and how is the heavy breather or did you butcher?

 

[TimG]

The layer is still laying, about five eggs every six days. The heavy breather is still breathing heavy though appears to be in no distress otherwise. I have to look carefully to figure out which the heavy breathing is coming from.