The Buckeye Thread

[CanadianBuckeye]

That is a good deal. You better watch out with that incubator. It tends to get addictive to the point that a person will come close to buying store bought eggs to eat because there is not enough eggs for the incubator.
Trust me because I built a 200ish egg incubator last spring and it would take 14 days to fill. My results were poor as there were way too many hens to one roo (20 to 1). I would toss about 5 -6 dozen eggs out due to being clear on day 18.


Those broodies are WAY better and cheaper at raising chicks.

Stryker it's true, I look at my eggs differently now- I feel a twinge of guilt now and then when we eat the eggs. I wonder what could have been. I'm getting in some hatching eggs from far away next year, and I expect only a 25% hatch rate so I'm ordering 4 dozen eggs from each of my sources in the hopes I'll end up with 6 pullets and 6 roosters :-/ if they will send that many, but of course it's rarely 50-50 and usually there's an excess of males.
Only 50% of the Cornish hatching eggs were fertile last year, and those were hand delivered- so that's why I got the large capacity incubator. And, I have too many roosters for my hens, 2 roosters and 12 hens...........
and then there's custom hatching for others! Maybe the incubator will pay for itself.

 

[CanadianBuckeye]

Cushions! Cushions are everywhere. How tough is that to breed out? Are cushions generally highly variable within a line, or if a couple have them in a line they all will...... can this be selected out? Or does fresh "blood" need to be brought in?

 

[Minniechickmama]

I think if you have a consistent line that shows excessive fluffiness or cushion, it is inherent to the line.
To fix it, yes, bring in tighter feathered females.

 

[CanadianBuckeye]

Thanks MCM Ill look for those and crossbreed the two lines then. Hopefully they will nick and get the best of both halves, not the worst!

 

[Minniechickmama]

Chances are that you may get some better and some worse.

 

[CanadianBuckeye]

Chances are that you may get some better and some worse.

You're right! Even though it seems obvious now I don't know why but it never occurred to me that this is what will likely happen no matter what cross I make. I guess I knew it in theory, vaguely in the back of my mind, but I've never focused on that point till now. (Insert light bulb here).
So would a good breeding plan be.........select a rooster and hen that hopefully compliment each other's faults, make the cross, if more are better than the parents, select the best chicks for future breeding,
But if worse, don't do it again, and don't select any chicks from that |"worse" cross if the majority of the chicks are poor, even if some are better than the parents.
Or would it be OK to pick better chicks (than their parents) for further breeding, no matter how many of their siblings in the cross are poor?

 

[Minniechickmama]

Don't confuse yourself with looking at all birds as potential show type birds. The goal of any breeding should be to reproduce the parents quality at minimum, but really to improve on the next generation to be better than the parents. However, if a parent has something to reinforce a good trait on a son or daughter, then don't think you should just keep scrapping the old. You should always look at pairings in a way that takes the strengths of both parents and compare it to the other and find if they do compliment. If they both share the same bad qualities, then you are going to reinforce it or make it worse by breeding it together again. Example, two birds with bad combs (because it is a simple trait to pick out) are bred together, you may luck out and get some throwbacks to an earlier generation that had a correct comb, but you would more likely see most or all of you birds to have combs as bad or worse than their parents. One a Buckeye, a big, wonky comb is hard to ignore. I could keep giving examples, but I think that one is pretty good to start with. So, if you have one parent with a good comb and another who's comb is say, oversized, some will have one end and others will have the other end of the distance between the good and the bad. But you never look at just one trait, you still need to look at the whole package and what each bird is bringing to the pairing.
I hope that isn't just mud for you. I think you are picking up on this stuff very well, CB.

Just knowing and doing are two very different beasts where this is all concerned.

 

[stryker]

Sooooo, Canadian Buckeye all you need to do now is match your birds and then fill the incubator every 22 days from February to November. Then choose the best 10 birds that you hatched throughout the season. I would do that if I could afford the feed bill. I currently have 15 chicks and they are eating almost a bag of feed a week. I could not imagine what the feed bill for over 500 chicks would be.

 

[Minniechickmama]

I CAN tell you that, and it isn't pretty!! LOL!!

 

[CanadianBuckeye]

Yikes!!!!! Stryker

but you're right may as well run a full incubator as a half empty one ;-)
MCM- I hope you're nice and close to the feed mill, you are obviously their best customer!