Currently, I have 6 chickens that are 14 weeks old (4 cockerels and 2 pullets of various breeds) I also have 18 younger chicks mostly 6 weeks old. Pretty soon I will have to get rid of roosters because even though I want to I can't keep them all. My question is which roosters will be the best to keep for breeding purposes later on. I'm mostly looking to breed for egg laying, personality, and "prettiness". Sex-linking would be a nice bonus.
I have already decided I am definitely keeping my buff orp roo so I can keep one or two other roos...mayyybe 3 others and see how that goes having 4 roos. I'll list out all the breeds that I currently have.
Roos:
-Buff orp Depends on quality as with all of them. Might be good, might not be
-Black australorp Probably wouldn't keep him for same reason as the Black Aus.Orp. hen/s
-RIR (He seems to be starting to get aggressive) If you want friendly birds, best to kill or cull him
-Partridge rock Probably a good one to keep if his nature and quality allows
-Golden campine (started crowing at 3 weeks...may be a loud roo) Probably no use for layer capacity
-Silver-gray dorking Probably a good bet to get nice patterning in the offspring
-Light brahma (I'm assuming at least 1 of my 5 will be a boy but its still too early to tell) Debatable, depends
Hens:
-Barred rock If you don't like barring, probably best to be rid of her or not breed her, it can be very dominant
-Black australorp Generally strong traits for black offspring, can end up filling your flock with mostly solid black
-Buff brahma Depends on quality, possibly very slow growers and crap layers with leg issues, possibly not
-Light brahma As above, it depends on quality
-Silver spangled hamburg Might put a lot of random blotching into your chooks
-Welsummer (I believe) Photo would help
-Salmon faverolle I think the Salmon color is usually a hard one to preserve, and the beard gene is partially lethal
-Delaware (I think) Photo would help
-Partridge rock Possibly a good one for penciling or similar
So what 2-3 roos would be the best to keep for my girls? Depends on what you think beauty in poultry looks like, depends on genetics, and would take some more figuring out to truly get you to where you want to go.
Can you list the sources you got those birds from? I.e. breeder, hatchery, feed store... This matters quite a lot, it will directly impact what results you get. There's a number of ways one can 'recreate' a breed visually, but that doesn't mean they will breed as expected or produce actual quality.
You can't expect breeding quality from most hatcheries, sorry, you'll generally get birds best used then culled, never bred. If you're deeply attached to a faulty individual, it's easy enough to not breed them, but if all your specimens of a given breed are very faulty, you can just obtain better ones for breeding purposes.
Some percentage of chooks (from pretty much any background) will be riddled with genetic faults and will suffer later in life. I strongly suggest you keep a record, a livestock/poultry journal, recording anything and everything you think pertinent, preferably with photos, so you can trace problems back to source when they show up years down the track and thus be able to eliminate them (and the entire family line if necessary).
For an example, a breeder gave me Silkies with early onset leukosis, and a different breeder gave me Black Australorps with late onset leukosis. The B. Aus. Orps took around 3 years to show they had this, and of course, in the meanwhile I produced some nice offspring from them that the family made into pets. Hard situation to manage.
Another breeder gave me a Silkie cross who-knows-what with multiple genetic faults which are all quite dominant including skewed leg scaling (common trait to also get from purebreds, but thankfully easily visually identifiable even in just-hatched offspring) --- which I'm still breeding out as it causes genetic spraddling.
The combination of the bird with skewed leg scaling, and another line entirely (Pekin mixes) from yet another breeder produced leukosis too, and overshot beaks.
Obviously, as those examples show, you're not necessarily safe just because you're outbreeding; I strongly recommend you make test breedings (and test in-breedings as well) to find out what sort of deleterious genetics each bird has, male or female; inbreed them for one generation minimum and see what rears its ugly head, and be as ruthless as you can in culling it out. It only gets worse the longer you wait, generations down the track it becomes a huge and unhappy task if you take a soft stance on it to begin with; particularly when dealing with pets and otherwise great animals.
Guaranteed, at least some of your birds are carrying genetic faults, of varying degrees of severity, and some won't show until they're a few years old.
The birds you're not sure of you possibly should test breed, like the Delaware and Welsummer, but if at all possible, please post pictures so any conformation/genetic faults can be eliminated before breeding. Some of that stuff will haunt you for years; I'm still eradicating some of that from my flock.
Anyway --- onto your actual question!
When you say 'prettiness' you're referring to something completely subjective. Where others see beauty, I see ugliness, and vice versa. It's intensely personal.
Can you list the traits you think are attractive, and the ones that are not? Something like...
Beak color
Eye color
Leg color/s
Feather color/s
Feather patterns
Crest/no crest
Comb type
Ear tufts/no ear tufts
Earlobe color/s (I like turquoise, green or blue myself)
Bearded/unbearded
Feather-legged/clean-legged
Long tailed/short tailed (like Pekin tail versus Leghorn tail)
Rounded/streamlined (like Buff Orp versus Leghorn)
etc...
Once you're sure of what you want to see, it's a simple(-ish) matter of finding out which traits are dominant, and then selecting for them.
What genetics behave as dominant or recessive can fluctuate in different combinations, nothing is necessarily guaranteed to be dominant or recessive 100% of the time.
Another thing to consider is that multiple genetics can be responsible for every color, pattern, type... So you can create black or white many different ways.
I don't like barring, myself, and in my experience it's been pretty dominant, so I absolutely do not breed barred birds. If you don't like barring, but prefer partridge or duckwing patterns or lacing, then your Barred Rock has to go (or not be bred), same for your Campine most likely.
Once you know what color genetics are dominant, you'll know what birds to breed to what birds for a given color inheritance, though it won't be guaranteed, just a good bet. Black and white can be pretty dominant colors, so while breeding for patterning you may need to do some careful planning or it can be obscured under solid black/white even though it's still there.
Going by your choices I think you like chooks with size, patterning, and probably the bigger body type, no? (We know you want layer capacity, so that's a given). You'll probably need to keep a journal to maintain decent egg production qualities, otherwise you may end up inadvertently breeding it to a low standard while selecting for other traits. It can be hard to ascertain where you're heading without multi-generational records to spot the trends.
Since not all serious faults will be apparent, I would really recommend you do not cull any animals you breed under about three years old at the very minimum, otherwise you risk not finding faults that will emerge when you try to keep them longer.
You may want to breed for dual purpose qualities, like both laying capacity and meatiness; it sure helps when you're culling out unwanted ones to eat, like surplus males, later on... Also, if you only breed for layer traits, you'll end up steering towards slim, leghorn type bodies, not big fluffy things, generally.)
You're on your way to making complete 'mongrels' or 'mutts', though, so while they will be pretty for the most part, you won't reliably breed for type for a long time, years, if you're just going to cross breeds then make quarterbreds and just gradually descend though the generations like so until you have complete mutts.
This will give you a great crash course in what genetics dominate and under what circumstances, but I'd recommend reading up on genetics so you can spend less time making errors you'll end up culling and potentially wasting what would have been the ideal birds for you just because they didn't look like it. Appearances are often deceiving.
Phenotype is not reliably indicative of phenotype, to ensure this shows correctly you'd need to get Apple Cider Vinegar (organic, with the 'mother' in it) into at least one of their water sources as a staple, because lack of potassium causes interference with genetic inheritance, and a normal diet doesn't have sufficient potassium. ACV will provide that and will cause your chooks to be hatched with their true colors and patterns. Otherwise, it's a guessing game.
I'd supplement with kelp too, just approximately a pinch per bird per day (you can do pre-mixes with it, as in mix your own in bulk, but it should be raw kelp so not the sort you get in pellets which are cooked).
Sufficient iodine will not only give them great and robust health, preventing a huge amount of future disease, but will also ensure they breed as true as possible. Otherwise, all bets are off and there's so much more error. You can get pure white birds which are actually black, and only putting them on kelp for a year will show you that, so best to start early as possible. Also, iodine deficiency is endemic all over the world even when it's supplemented like with iodized salt, and the effect is cumulative and generational, so the more generations you feed kelp, the better and better the offspring will be. Also, it provides a calming influence through settling their nutritional needs, because lack of sufficient nutrition seems to trigger some kind of depopulation instinct. Drought does the same. That said I make no excuses for vicious birds, I cull them all as behavior is very strongly heritable. If you want great personalities, don't tolerate and propagate psychopaths.
I don't know if you're familiar with these, but they're very handy and educational:
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Hope this helps. Best wishes.
