White Cornish: Building a Quality, Sustainable Flock for Meat and More.....

[KoopOnTruckin]

Congrats on the NPIP testing, you're now "official"!

 

[TabITSWD]

They look great. Healthy. Wide. Alert. Really white - do the white cornish tend to get yellowed before they are due a molt?

Fat Daddy, do you put your birds on light to start the breeding season or let them adjust their hormones naturally?

 

[Fat Daddy]

They look great. Healthy. Wide. Alert. Really white - do the white cornish tend to get yellowed before they are due a molt?

Fat Daddy, do you put your birds on light to start the breeding season or let them adjust their hormones naturally?

Thank you. The birds with a dominant white gene tend to yellow. A recessive white gene bird does not.... The tough part is figuring out who carries what! mine show yellowish or dark stains because they hang around under the roost and their pen mates "Bomb" them from above!
I always let the hens start naturally. But from this point forward I will have my roosters on lights two weeks before I expect the first eggs of spring. The roosters aren't up to speed as early as the hens, making the first few weeks fertility questionable. I did this last year and it worked great. I neglected it this year and I'm paying the price now....

 

[TabITSWD]

Good to know, I did not know that about dominant white! It explains a lot in my yard. I have some Bresse hens and some of them yellow and some of them do not - ironically I crossbred them with dark cornish to see what type of meat cross I might get. The hens that yellowed produced white offspring the the hens that did not produced all manners of wild looking colors.

Also good to know about putting roosters on light. I did not know there was a benefit for them but if you think about mother nature, it makes sense. )

 

[Fat Daddy]

I have some Bresse hens and some of them yellow and some of them do not - ironically I crossbred them with dark cornish to see what type of meat cross I might get.

Did your original Bresse by chance come from Robby at James Marie Farm? He has some of the best Iv seen. Last time I spoke with him he was working on a cross with them and white Cornish... He works a lot with a professor at LSU and produces some awesome birds....

 

[TabITSWD]

No, they didn't, I wish I knew him. I too would love to try that cross of BressexWhite Cornish. The birds of mine that came out white are nice, very large, and stocky but they have some odd combs. A bonus is that they can be gender identified early because only the females develop the very blue legs. They will never have the form of a cornish but they are still a decent table bird.

Mine are from Alchemist Farm and Greenfire. I suspect there is some of the "California Poulet Bleu" blood in the AF pen because those are the hens that produce non white offspring and don't yellow so much in the sun. I will probably cull them, I'm not a fan of unstable genetics, its hard enough to get past the F2 generation without random features showing up willy nilly.

Does James Marie farm sell to the public? I've just hatched some new Bresse from another farm but I really try to start with the best birds in the first place.

 

[Fat Daddy]

I candled the second set of test eggs today... 12 show good growth at 6 days. 100% of
Pen " B " eggs are fertile. Most of the girls are on line now. I got 9 eggs from 12 girls today. It's been rainy since Friday. My little farm and all pens are very muddy. As I was collecting from pen "C", the one with the replacement rooster, I noticed that all four hens have lots of muddy foot prints on all their backs! It seems they have accepted him as their rooster... As a friend says. "They act as if he smells like cookies"... that's exactly how they treat him... Iv been setting the test eggs every Monday.... Ill set this week's eggs tomorrow too. There are 40 as of now, it's been a good week! It think it's safe to say breeding season is here!

 

[Fat Daddy]

Yesterday was hatch day for the first group of fertility test eggs set this year.... I set 18 eggs. At 7 days 12 were clear, 2 were blood rings and four showed normal development. The last of those four hatched this morning. One from pen "A" and three from pen "B".... We had talked about recessive / dominate white gene birds earlier. It's commonly held that chicks hatched silver or gray/black are showing recessive gene... yellow chicks dominate gene.... chicks that hatch already white, tend to have Cornish X in their recent heritage.... 2 of the chicks from pen "B" are grayish silver... I really like to see these!

 

[TabITSWD]

Yesterday was hatch day for the first group of fertility test eggs set this year.... I set 18 eggs. At 7 days 12 were clear, 2 were blood rings and four showed normal development. The last of those four hatched this morning. One from pen "A" and three from pen "B".... We had talked about recessive / dominate white gene birds earlier. It's commonly held that chicks hatched silver or gray/black are showing recessive gene... yellow chicks dominate gene.... chicks that hatch already white, tend to have Cornish X in their recent heritage.... 2 of the chicks from pen "B" are grayish silver... I really like to see these!

Congrats on the first group of new arrivals!

It doesn't surprise me that there are both dominant white and recessive white in the modern white cornish genotype.

Ok, so this "...chicks that hatch already white, tend to have Cornish X in their recent heritage...", what do you mean?
Are you suggesting that some flocks of white cornish are only so because they are being backcrossed to get white cornish from Cornish X?

 

[Fat Daddy]

Yes exactly.... Many try to produce whites, by covering cornishX with a dark Cornish .... They will throw a percentage of white chicks. Breed two of these white chicks and the off-spring will be white.... The "type" will be off most of the time thou. There are several ways to produce a false white Cornish.... White Cornish, and Cornish that are white, are not always the same bird.... Most true white Cornish are white covering black... Most commonly the false whites come from breeding two "sports" from WLR. Birds that come from WLR, but show a high percentage of white feather as adults. These offspring usually feather out white, but sometimes show a "rusty bleed" of color on the shoulders on a percentage of off-spring cockerels. This is because the birds are dominant white, covering red, It usually does not show till the birds hit their last molt. It's actually rare for the pullets of these to show any red at all thou. I have seen yellow chicks hatch from two dark Cornish parents, that feather out pure white.... The only visible tell was a rusty red freckle in the chicks that faded with every molt till the adult was pure white.... They always ended up pure white. Bred together, their off spring will be the same as the parent......