forklift
Hatching
- Aug 14, 2015
- 5
- 0
- 7
just some good egg laying, hopefully pretty ones like silkies, or RIR, Id love another black Jersey Giant as ours got taken by a raccoon
Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
I am sorry you had to loose one that wayjust some good egg laying, hopefully pretty ones like silkies, or RIR, Id love another black Jersey Giant as ours got taken by a raccoon
just some good egg laying, hopefully pretty ones like silkies, or RIR, Id love another black Jersey Giant as ours got taken by a raccoon
So my surgery is now scheduled for the 26th. It will be 9 months after my injury and in all that time I have not given birth to anything! I have eggs everywhere that need hatching so it looks like I am going to have to sell some eggs this year. I have ducks on nests and my Silkies are on nests but we have not left eggs for the Orpingtons yet because I was afraid they could be too related to take a chance hatching brother to sister, even though most of the hens laying now are not sisters to our two roosters.
I hatched Barnevelders from someone else's flock a few years back and I was getting deformed chicks, some with their intestines outside their body. The owner did not admit that her rooster was related to a couple of her hens until I brought up the hatching issues. It is too heartbreaking to hatch birds that have to be killed when they are intact enough to make it out of the shell but not healthy enough to survive. Then there could have been ones with genetic defects that were not obvious from the outside.
With splash roosters over black,blue, and splash hens I will only have blue and splash chicks this year. I sold off most of the black chicks and many of the blue chicks last year but I did not always have groups of four or more to sell together so we raised more than we wanted plus I was told we needed a business license to sell birds from our hobby so I did not list them very often. The goal this year is to keep splash chicks but we don't really need more blues since the majority of our hens are blue. The majority of the pullets we have sold were blue so we still have black pullets that will only hatch out blue chicks and they are the least likely to be related to our splash roosters but with blue to blue breeding anything is likely. I will need to switch back to a blue rooster once we get our fill of splash chicks but for now we only have 3 splash pullets that I may have to separate once they are laying so we don't get dilute splashes.
I am not sure if I should go ahead and hatch now while there are so few hens that could be sisters to the roosters or if I should wait until we thin down the flock to eliminate the possibility completely. If we hatch the biggest eggs and eat the pullet eggs, that should be safe but I am not in a position to raise chicks when I will be having surgery on the 26th. I should be on my feet 3 weeks following surgery so we can start hatching once I for sure have it done (it has been delayed several times since my original March 15th date).
If there is a chance of genetic defects, I would rather deal with the consequences myself than to sell hatching eggs that could possibly be too related. It is hard enough dealing with people who don't already have successful hatches to know what they are doing so I am hesitant to throw another factor in the mix. I would prefer to have some test hatches of my own before I sell hatching eggs so I know fertility and hatchability is good but there are never any guarantees of success once the eggs leave my care.
Should I sell fertile eggs and leave it up to the individual if they want to take the risk or should I refridgerate the eggs and sell them at a far lower price for eating? I don't like selling eggs at all due to the risk of salmonella if they are not cooked properly but most people at least know the dangers of eating raw eggs these days. We feed birds year round and now is the time to recover some of our feed costs but I am not sure if it is worth it to sell eggs. I have learned the hard way that people can start untrue rumors and ignorant people will believe the lies because they get caught up in the emotional appeal of the liar. I think most people are good people but it only takes one or two bad apples to ruin the barrel.
You're far too worried about breeding related birds together. The hatch defects you mentioned from that other line were more likely to be caused by temperature or humidity issues during incubation. You're more likely to get unknown defects from a total outcross.
For others that might not understand or worry about something like that, here's a great article recently published by the American Bantam Association on the topic.
http://bantamclub.com/aba/index.php/articles/165-breeding-from-unrelated-parents
The thing about the defects is that they were so obvious and only in that breed and it happened over repeated hatches. I had a bunch of chicks hatching at the same time that did not have defects so it was clearly the Barnevelders. I even had multiple clutches of Marans from the same person hatching out just fine along with other eggs from other bird owners. When I have had temperature spikes in my incubators from extended hot weather not allowing them to stay cool enough, I had hatching issues that I believe were temperature related because it was the only time eggs from my own flock had such hatching issues but I do believe the defects I was seeing in the Barnevelders were genetic due to inbreeding. Unless there is something about Barnevelders in general that makes them prone to hatching with their intestines on the outside. Sure, I could disinfect the intestines, push them into the body cavity, treat for infection, and hope all goes well but I did not think it was a good idea to keep them alive if it was a genetic defect.
My roosters are fine breeding upline to our two year old hens (only one of which can be the mother), it is only a small number of the pullets from last year's hatches that could possibly be sisters (although all are at least half sisters). Because he is splash and most of the pullets left are black, that makes it a bit less likely they are siblings but I can't rule it out with blue to blue breeding). Some of the older pullets are starting to lay (I always thought they became hens at that point but I guess it is at a year old and I do not know hatch dates for every pullet to know when they become hens using that definition) so there is a very small chance that they could potentially be sisters to the roosters. The odds are small but that drop in the bucket is there. The original plan was to keep using the blue rooster over his daughters but because the code that originally allowed roosters has changed and these splash roosters are grandfathered in because they hatched before roosters were banned, we decided to keep them instead. It sounds like keeping our pullets is not going to be the enormous problem I thought it would be either so maybe we don't have to clear out our youngest layers. I prefer to have the option of keeping our favorites once they are completely filled out, which takes 18 months for Heritage English Orpingtons.
If brother to sister breeding can happen one generation without ill effects, then I suppose there is no harm in hatching our Orpington eggs and selling hatching eggs under these circumstances. I would want to disclose it to anyone hatching our eggs but in the end it may not effect their hatches at all. The reason we started our own flock of Orpingtons is so we could breed for quality instead of hatching eggs from someone else's flock and hoping for the best. I never set out to be a "breeder" but I do want to hatch high quality birds and I was frustrated with the "oops, must not have been an Orpington egg" situations that happened too frequently for me to hatch unknown eggs.
Inexperience probably plays a larger role in hatching issues and there is nothing I can do about that. My responsibility is in providing a quality product, which is easier to manage when I hatch the chicks and even easier to manage when I also raise them to maturity. I don't want to be blamed for circumstances beyond my control so I try to screen people to make sure they know what they are doing but really there is not much I can do to make someone successful if they are still learning through trial and error. We all experience failures from time to time but then we learn to correct any errors we make due to inexperience.
Matt, I really appreciate it when experienced people can share their expertise and backing an opinion with published material always adds credibility. Our ducks are an endangered breed from a small gene pool so while staying in that pool we do work hard to diversify the genetics as much as possible. I tend to think about how inbreeding has destroyed dog breeds and I would not want to pull out recessive traits that could undermine the quality of breeding stock. Most people who have chickens just want eggs to eat and any mutt hen will lay an egg but I feel invested in hatching quality bloodlines and preserving Heritage breeds.
Another thing I recently learned about chicken terminology: standard and large fowl are the same thing. I have called our Easter Eggers standard sized and our Orpingtons large fowl, which is correct but in my mind they were two different size classifications. Now I know large fowl are distinguished from bantams only and that they are classified according to their weight class. I have raised chickens for over a quarter of a century and I am still learning new things thanks to the internet.