Spiral/clan breeding questions

[LaurenRitz]

I have a breeding project going. I am planning on spiral/clan breeding and eventually hope to have 4 coops but currently have 2. Well, 3 if you count the flock at my sister's house.

But officially 2.

Once I have crosses, the old hens will be given away or sold, so only mixed birds remain. I notice in reading about clan breeding that everyone seems to move the cockerel, leaving the pullets in their "home" clan.

I am thinking about moving the pullets instead. I hope that moving the pullets will create less disruption in the coops.

Is there a specific reason, other than tradition, to move the cockerels?

 

[NatJ]

I have a breeding project going. I am planning on spiral/clan breeding and eventually hope to have 4 coops but currently have 2. Well, 3 if you count the flock at my sister's house.

But officially 2.

Once I have crosses, the old hens will be given away or sold, so only mixed birds remain. I notice in reading about clan breeding that everyone seems to move the cockerel, leaving the pullets in their "home" clan.

I am thinking about moving the pullets instead. I hope that moving the pullets will create less disruption in the coops.

Is there a specific reason, other than tradition, to move the cockerels?

Moving the cockerels vs. the pullets: I think it is just a way to describe which ones get paired up for the next generation. It does not matter which birds get physically moved to another coop, so long as they are grouped properly.

Descriptions of spiral mating usually talk about labeling each clan (A, B, C or Red, Blue, Green, or something like that.) Pullets belong to the clan of their mother, cockerels mate with females from a different clan than the one that produced them. That has to do with recordkeeping and how you think of them, not with which birds you pick up and carry to a different pen.

For actually moving them to a different pen, what is easy and what is disruptive will depend on how you do things, and that can be very different from one person to another.

Some people might have the eggs hatched under a hen in her home coop, raised in the flock, and then move some into other coops in time for the next breeding season.

For some other people, it might go like this:
--hatch eggs in incubator
--move chicks into brooder
--move chicks from brooder into growout pen
--move young adults from growout pen into breeding pens
In this example, every bird is moved several times, and none of them really "stay" anywhere. The different clans might be raised in different brooders and growout pens, or they might be marked with toe-punching or legbands and all raised together until they are split up into breeding pens.

Of course those are just two examples, and many people do things differently yet. You can certainly do things in any way that works for you and your chickens.