Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[MrsNorthie]

Do we think that since Mow and Sylph are mature hens, and have had experience with a rooster (Henry), they would do any necessary training with Glais?

I don’t remember how old Glais is and whether his brain has returned to his body yet.

Our older hens were not afraid to smack an over eager cockerel, then the learned, "If I squeal, Spud and Squeak come to my rescue!" LOL

 

[BlindLemonChicken]

But I do see how, in a perfect setting, just sitting back and letting things happen makes a lot of sense.

And it’s less stressful too!

 

[fuzzi]

Our older hens were not afraid to smack an over eager cockerel, then the learned, "If I squeal, Spud and Squeak come to my rescue!" LOL

Zaccheus was one of five cockerels hatched in April 2024. After I culled his sire, Samuel, Zack was raised/trained by the hens. He was not allowed to roost with them, he got good at hiding and dodging. But as he grew older, the hens started tolerating him. And then accepted him as their leader. He's respectful of me as well.

 

[MrsNorthie]

We broke ground on Goldie's "permanent" coop is under construction! Goldie was supervising but Gracie, Al and FlufferNutter where directly assisting, making sure that I was protected from any nasty bugs as I crawled around on the ground filling post holes. They are always willing to pitch in.

 

[MrsNorthie]

Zaccheus was one of five cockerels hatched in April 2024. After I culled his sire, Samuel, Zack was raised/trained by the hens. He was not allowed to roost with them, he got good at hiding and dodging. But as he grew older, the hens started tolerating him. And then accepted him as their leader. He's respectful of me as well.

It is so peaceful with the right boys and some sassy girls.

 

[Vulpes vulpes]

From my perspective, if I am paying for a rare breed I am, by my financial support, contributing to its continued survival. I feel no guilt at doing whatever I want with the birds. If I didn’t buy the chicks, they would get no support from me at all.

It would be a different matter if I planned to sell purebred chicks.

I agree with that, which is why I was planning on going through with it anyway. Just some small part of me thinks "this person who's incredibly passionate about this breed is trusting them to me" and I feel a pang of guilt. Still, it's not like I'm going and corrupting their flock, lol.

A huge problem with rescuing a species or sub-species from near-extinction is that we generally wait too long. When there are few individuals left to restart the breed, we are looking at a genetic bottleneck: where after a natural disaster or some other event, there are very few individuals left to breed from.

Unless these individuals are scattered around the world, the chances are that they are closely related to one another (inbred), and using them as breeding stock increases the likelihood of concentrating lethal and other harmful genetic defects in their offspring.

That's part of what I love about the SYNBREED and AVIANDIV projects. It removes some of the guesswork on which populations still have a good genetic outlook. Polymorphism and heterozygosity are two of our best metrics for how inbred a population is. For example, from that study, it appears that the Icelandic landrace still has a lot of genetic diversity despite almost going extinct. Maybe it's a direct result of new breeds being introduced, or maybe the original landrace was polymorphic enough to bear the bottleneck better than most. Or maybe both.

If we want to maintain their specific genetic contribution to chickendom, a strong argument can be made for cross-breeding them with other breeds (subspecies), rather than trying to keep the line “pure,” which just continues to weaken the bloodline.

@Perris ‘s breeding program with the aim of increasing genetic diversity is far more important than trying to preserve unique individuals of a traditional but fading breed, sad as it is to say.

I'm in agreement there. My future plans are similar (and @Perris and others' experiences have been a treasure trove of information). I was originally planning on having one group of "pure" Icelandics and one group of Icelandic mutts to experiment with genetics, now I'm considering throwing purity to the wind and making a bunch of supermutts

 

[Perris]

Do we think that since Mow and Sylph are mature hens, and have had experience with a rooster (Henry), they would do any necessary training with Glais?

I don’t remember how old Glais is and whether his brain has returned to his body yet.

They will surely give him plenty to think about . I expect him to think he's quids in: two females all to himself, instead of being the youngest of a relatively long line of males soon-to-be competing for female attention Hopefully he'll attempt the bum-bump rather than the neck grab when he does try to act the part (there are both types here he could have modelled himself on). His dad is the former, but I can't imagine he knows which one is his dad, any more than they know who their chicks are (and which is why all the roos are good with all the chicks in a communal breeding situation).

He is 18 1/2 weeks old now, and his brain hasn't ever left his body; I'm beginning to wonder if it will, and if what we call the jerk phase is actually fallout from unnatural keeping conditions. I have developed the suspicion that the presence of multiple mature males here is responsible for all the cockerels' good behaviour this year, along with the rest of the social-behavioural training he's had since his broody (who was Oxwich) drifted apart from him btw. I think we might have the idea that the mature hens knock cockerels into shape because most people don't keep any or enough roos. What I've seen this year is a lot of cockerels observing interactions between adult roos, and, as a result I think, keeping their heads (and crows) down, and growing their tails very slowly.

The hierarchy among the mature roos is very obvious whenever one of them wants to exercise his rights, which is not often, but unmissable (that is, of course, the point, so the flock knows who's whose boss). No cockerel with an ounce of nous is going to invite that on his head as long as he can avoid it. And as long as he doesn't compete with the mature males, that long he can live in harmony with the flock, or so it seems here, in 2025.

 

[Perris]

I’m thinking of @Perris ‘s and @No Coop No Problem ’s breeding experiments

just sitting back and letting things happen

I think the latter almost perfectly describes the former in my case

If a hen with a secret nest here ever managed to get the clutch to hatch, and not suffer its predation before that point (and several have tried and failed thus), we would even have chicks from eggs that I did not select.

For your ecology topic presentation, how do you define

uber-specialized characteristics

of (presumably modern) chicken breeds?

 

[BDutch]

A bit late, but just want to say Im very pleased and exited too, to read Shad and Perris git in contact over choosing a cockerel! !

I missed a few days again. And I think I know now why I didn’t get any update warnings. I was reading in the thread and stopped/skipped, bc I needed to do something else. Didn’t read up to the newest page.

so it brings the destruction of male chicks forward to just before hatch, instead of just after?

"The technology works by analysing light spectra to determine a chick’s gender based on its feather colour"

At what point does the foetus have feathers sufficiently developed to determine their colour? It's covered in down when it hatches. This is hardly what I'd call a big step forward in humane treatment of male chicks in the poultry industry. Just another minor marketing tweek.

In the Netherlands and Germany there a several industrial hatcheries that sex the eggs halfway the breeding process. They get a little liquid out of the egg with a thin needle. The minuscule drop of egg-fluid comes into a tube with liquid that reacts and changes in colour. A different colour for males than the females. A numbering system with coordinates makes it possible to take the male eggs out.

I have seen a documentary on TV about the hatchery that developed this new technique and how they made this work.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

I think the latter almost perfectly describes the former in my case

If a hen with a secret nest here ever managed to get the clutch to hatch, and not suffer its predation before that point (and several have tried and failed thus), we would even have chicks from eggs that I did not select.

For your ecology topic presentation, how do you define

uber-specialized characteristics

of (presumably modern) chicken breeds?

These are characteristics of modern-day chickens that have been bred for high egg productivity, high meat productivity, or a combination of both. These characteristics are great for the farmers, especially when chickens are confined to a highly restricted environment, but not so much for free ranging.

Meat birds are too heavy and weak to run to safety, and daily layers are either unlikely to go broody (thus not maintaining and increasing flock numbers) or vulnerable to predation while on the nest if they do.

^^^ These in contrast to their red jungle fowl ancestry, with few clutches a year with just several eggs, canny about their environment and alert to predators.

As it turns out, there isn’t much peer-reviewed research on experimental hybridization for free ranging layers, more of a “which breeds do best?” approach. And there’s a bit more info about meat birds, but I’m pretty sure I would start crying while discussing Frankenchickens and age at slaughter. So I’m tilting more toward predation issues in free ranging in general.