Mary Allen
There are various methods of breeding breed poultry. Place and time often determine the choice of the respective practice.
Arguably the most common breeding method is to give a rooster a few hens, collect the eggs, and hatch or have a number hatch from them. The young animals are then brought to the pre-assessment in autumn, the most beautiful ones are presented at an exhibition and young animals are produced again the following year with the highest-rated cock and the best hens. After a few years, a new tap is bought and the cycle starts all over again.
Those who breed in this way are often somewhat disrespectfully referred to as propagators. But if you don’t have the opportunity to breed with several breeding lines, you have no other choice – or do you? If you are only breeding with one strain, you should never take a stranger’s rooster into breeding to freshen up the blood. With every non-blood animal, unwanted characteristics come back into breeding, even if the animal was highly valued. If you’re unlucky, you’re back to square one with breeding.
Fall Nests Ensure Identification
Therefore blood replenishment should only be done with hens. However, this requires that the eggs of the new hens are also known, labeled, hatched separately, and then marked. But that’s not so easy when you’re away from home all day. The best option for this is still the Fallnest. When the hen goes into the nest, a flap falls down and the hen has to stay in the nest so that she can be removed and the ring number written on the laid egg. However, the fallen nest would have to be checked several times a day, because the hen shouldn’t be locked in all day. That would even be forbidden from an animal welfare point of view. During this time she could neither eat nor drink, which is why she would stop laying eggs very quickly. Because without food there are no eggs.
Each hen lays an egg that is typical for her in terms of size, shape, or color. So the nest drop check could be started early by placing the nest in the stall, but only positioning it at the weekend so that the flap falls when the hen enters. So you would know the eggs of every hen after two to three weekends, as long as you don’t breed with a large strain. Once egg collection begins, drop nest inspection would be unnecessary because the eggs could be matched to the individual hen.
Misuse the Rabbit Hutch
Another way to collect the eggs separately would be to use a partition in the barn. In this case, the drop nest has an exit at the back through which the hen can get into her separate compartment, where food and water are available. However, this method is only suitable for two hens, unless the coop can be divided into several compartments.
If empty rabbit hutches are available, these can replace the fallen nest. In the evening, when it is dark, the hens are taken out of the chicken coop and placed in the rabbit hutch, which is furnished with feed and water. When returning from work, the hen can be removed from the hutch and the ring number written on the egg. Then the hen is placed back with the rooster in her original chicken coop, where the rooster usually kicks her immediately. After dark, you fetch the next hens and put them back in the rabbit hutch.
A hen always stays with the rooster. For example, if you breed with one rooster and four hens, one hen stays with the rooster all day every fourth day. This method worked very well for the author, the fertilization rate of the eggs was always over 90 percent. Instead of an empty rabbit hutch, display boxes or other containers can also be used.
Another method that is less recommended from an animal welfare point of view is to keep the hens individually at all times and to give the rooster to a hen every day and thus rotate them. Breeding in this way also promises a good fertilization rate. However, since the hens are always kept individually and only have a rooster for the company every few days, this method should be avoided whenever possible.
A Studbook is a Must
It is a good idea to make a list for each breeding line. The collected eggs are weighed and entered into the list. This is how you kill two birds with one stone: You not only find out whether the eggs have reached the required minimum weight, you also get an important indication of the laying performance of the hens. Hardly any attention has been paid to egg production in recent decades. It goes without saying that the marked eggs hatch in separate compartments and must be marked immediately after hatching.
Whichever method is chosen: without a studbook, none of this is of any use. You can create one yourself, for example with the spreadsheet program Excel. However, there is also special software for little money in which all the information is already prepared. Even the inbreeding and ancestral loss coefficients are calculated automatically. And if you want to do it perfectly, you can take photos of your breeding animals and add them to the software. Even a family tree with photos can be printed out, which amazes buyers of animals.
Breeding pedigree poultry in this way is quite complex – but much more exciting than pure propagation, where you don’t get any information about the lineage and performance.